Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  “Like many search and rescues we’re going out without enough information,” Shay gripes to me, nevertheless grabbing the chopper before another pilot gets to. I walk out on the flight line with him as he pulls safety tags and does a preflight check around an underpowered HH-65B Dolphin that looks like a big orange waterbug (or small plastic helicopter). A mechanic and copilot join him. So does a rescue swimmer, pedaling up on a big tricycle with his black gear bag in the rear basket, including wetsuit, fins, helmet, dive mask, etc. Early on the swimmers also started carrying fire axes to break through rooftops where people were trapped in their attics.

  Standardization of training and language among the pilots who fly the helicopters, the mechanics who maintain them, run the hoists, and direct the pilots during a rescue, and the swimmers who deploy on a cable hook or by jumping into the water is now so advanced that crews are being mixed and matched as needed.

  They begin revving up the helicopter’s engines as the blue-helmeted copilot makes a quick call on his cell phone. “Hey, I’m getting launched out. Love you. ’Bye.” A moment later they’re airborne, being tracked by an Air Force AWACS plane circling over the Gulf of Mexico.

  O

  n the other side of the air station, twenty-one-year-old Rescue Swimmer Keola Marfil of Hawaii is playing catch with two hounds a young woman Coastie has just rescued. He joined the service at a high school job fair in Kona after they landed a Dolphin on the playing field, he tells me. He’d grown up bodyboarding and paddling an outrigger and already knew he wanted to be a rescue swimmer. His first assignment was at Humboldt Bay in Northern California, where the ocean’s a lot colder than in Hawaii. “The first time I went in the water with only my board shorts I almost died.” He grins. “Nice jump, buddy,” he compliments one of the dogs.

  Keola has light brown eyes, short brown hair, a creased brow, and bulging leg and calf muscles that Popeye the Sailor Man would envy. He flew out of Mobile during the first days of the surge.

  “I was involved in about a hundred and forty rescues,” he says. “A lot of rooftops on the first day, more balconies on the second. It was nonstop. We were just hoisting and fueling. It was surreal, like something you’d see in a movie.”

  I ask him if he had to get in the water at all.

  “I only had to go in the water one time. There was this elderly man and his son, and we had to get him to the yard next to his house to get some clearance from the trees and power lines, so I got on the roof next door and jumped over to their balcony.”

  “You jumped from the next-door roof?”

  “It was only about six feet, and I still had a line on to the hook, but his was a gated house, so his son and I walked him into the yard through this chest-high water. There was lots of stuff in the water, and it was warm, and I’m glad I only went in once. We lowered the basket, and there were still power lines all over the place. These pilots are pretty skilled. You realize these people you’re helping have nothing left but they’re still smiling at you, and that’s the appreciation.”

  Keola, like many Coasties, has a talent for improvisation. “We carried axes to break through doors and roofs and windows, but I didn’t have one, and I had to break through this locked sliding glass door three stories up in this apartment to get to three people on the next balcony over. I tried this piece of wood, but that didn’t work, so then I found this aluminum crutch and used it to smash through and get them across the hallway so I could hoist them.”

  O

  n Tuesday, August 30, Rescue Swimmer Joel Sayers landed on a steeply sloped roof to rescue an elderly woman from the floodwaters. She pointed to a small opening in the roof that she’d squeezed through. Her husband was still trapped inside the broiling attic. Unable to widen the hole with the helicopter’s rescue ax (a hatchet, really), he tied a bright piece of cloth around a vent pipe and convinced the wife they had to leave. After touching down at an improvised landing zone where he was able to borrow a fireman’s ax, they returned to the neighborhood, found the flagged house, and lowered Sayers back onto the roof, where he chopped away at the hole till it was large enough to bring the man out. One of his crewmates videotaped Sayers, and a fifteen-second clip of his roof-chopping heroics aired nationally on TV that night.

  On another roof, where a dozen people had been waiting too long, some guy came up behind Sayers and smashed a bottle over his head. Luckily he was wearing his helmet. He immediately grabbed the biggest guy on the roof and said, “If anyone does that again we’re out of here.” The bigger man established order, and Sayers was able to get everyone safely off the roof. Sayers, Jason Dorval, and Shay Williams would be among thirty Coast Guard aviators to win Distinguished Flying Crosses for their Katrina rescue work.

  Wednesday, August 31, 2005

  “I don’t want to take anything away from the aviators. They did a great job, and they’re also very good at getting their story out,” Pamlico CO David Lewald notes wryly. The fact that helicopters have video cameras attached to their hoists and are often back on land with dramatic rescue footage in time for airing on the evening news has been an occasional source of irritation for the Coast Guard’s boat crews.

  Beginning Wednesday morning, Lewald and his crews began moving people from the Chalmette slip in flooded St. Bernard Parish to the Algiers ferry landing in Jefferson Parish (despite objections from the Jefferson sheriff). They used their patrol boats, ferries, tugboats, and barges to transport flood survivors, stripping life jackets from a large ferry that had been tossed up on the levee and giving them to evacuees taking the three- to four-mile river trip on an open barge. Meanwhile, the air temperature never dropped below one hundred degrees.

  Three of the Clamp’s crew, Jeffrey Worth, Chris Schwarz, and Blake Lena, were EMTs and, along with a volunteer nurse, set up a triage station that began treating victims of hypothermia (from extended water immersion), diabetes, broken bones, heart attacks, and gunshot wounds. They used smoke flares to bring in Coast Guard and National Guard medevac helicopters to a parking lot LZ (landing zone) they marked out with orange construction paint.

  That evening, after they’d helped some two thousand people across the river and onto school buses to get them out of the area, there were still 120 evacuees left waiting on the Algiers side. Fearing for their safety, the Clamp’s crew hot-wired and commandeered two abandoned buses, one of which they discovered contained an unattended paraplegic and someone in a coma. Eventually they found everyone refuge and medical care for the two who needed it and returned to the buoy tender.

  “They came back pretty shaken,” Lewald recalls. “One of them said he saw what he thought was the beginning of a rape. The bad guys owned the night. We backed off the riverbank and set up a watch. We lit up the area with a searchlight, and if a vehicle approached, like a stolen police car, we’d talk on the loud-hailer—give a martial-law-type speech—basically telling them don’t fuck with us.”

  In the morning one of the buses had been stolen and the other one trashed.

  The Coasties began frisking the evacuees and setting up amnesty barrels for contraband. Drugs and alcohol got tossed in the river. Guns they initially handed over to the New Orleans police until they noticed one of the cops taking the guns from his patrol car trunk and handing them out to his buddies. After that, confiscated weapons were locked in the Clamp and eventually transported to Texas (like coals to Newcastle).

  J

  essica Guidroz and two of her stationmates spent Wednesday in an 18-foot jet boat cruising the flooded streets of the Lakeview section of the city, knocking on roofs and attic windows looking for survivors. At one point their depth finder read thirteen feet. “We’d keep looking over the front of our boat. We ran over some cars and stop signs and just hoped we wouldn’t put a hole in the bottom.”

  Eventually they gathered ten people, among them a woman in a walker, a man in a cast, a nine-year-old child, an elderly man who didn’t want to leave his third-floor apartment above the water, and a very old woman who
se son had floated her out of their home in a small catamaran. They got them to Ochsner Hospital, which was full and would only take the old woman, who was in critical condition. The others they had to drop off at I-10.

  By then their station boats had started evacuating twenty-five hundred people from higher ground at the University of New Orleans, taking them three miles to the base, loading them onto cattle trucks, and driving them to the Interstate 10 drop off. The Jefferson sheriff didn’t want Orleans Parish people (predominantly black and poor) brought into his mostly white suburban parish, but the Coasties once again ignored him, doing what they felt was right and necessary.

  I

  n another part of town Jason Dorval, concerned about the slow pace of basket hoists, touched his HH-60 down on the roof of a two-story hospital between two air-conditioning units. He kept the Jayhawk’s rotors turning so the full weight of the helicopter never came to rest on the roof, and that way he was able to evacuate twelve people at a time, ducking them under the churning blades.

  “If there was ever a Coast Guard war zone, that would be downtown New Orleans those first nights,” he says. “The first two days we were the only people you could find down there. The third day the DOD [Department of Defense] started flying and the airspace started getting congested. That Wednesday they got a forward air controller into the cloverleaf and cut down the light posts so we could set more helicopters on the grass. Then they told us to clear out a two-mile radius because people were shooting at helicopters, but we ignored that. It’s a combat helicopter [the Jayhawk is a variation on the Army Black Hawk] designed to take small-arms fire. There were still a lot of people in there, so we just kept working, just kept hoisting.”

  C

  oast Guard Rescue Swimmer Sara Faulkner did fifty rescues that Wednesday, including twenty-five off a second-story apartment balcony. Mechanic Doug Nash from North Carolina, who was flying with her, recalls, “The building’s roof was ripped off, and we swung her into that balcony railing. It was tricky ’cause you’re also dealing with debris and blowing rooftops. She was swinging on the cable and came up and physically handed me a three-year-old child by the arm.”

  I

  n the first days of disaster, the Coast Guard divided the city into four sectors.

  They had a lieutenant commander running more than fifty shallow-water skiffs, known as punts, out of Zephyr Field. Home to the New Orleans AAA baseball team, it was a predesignated FEMA disaster center, though when the Coast Guard arrived FEMA was nowhere to be seen. Disaster Area Response Teams (DARTs) brought the 16-foot flat-bottomed punts in from Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other “Inland Coast Guard” stations that protect America’s rivers and waterways.

  They began moving through the northern part of the city, including the Central Business District, with Louisiana Wildlife rangers guiding them. When one of the midwestern crews steered nervously away from what they thought was an approaching alligator, the rangers laughed. It was a three-foot plastic toy alligator, soon adopted as their mascot, Zephyr. However, sightings of live alligators, snakes, and at least one bull shark were reported from other parts of the flooded city.

  Launched from bridges and highway ramps, Coast Guard punts helped rescue some six thousand people from the floodwaters. Also brought into the city were three ice boats from the Great Lakes, small flat-bottomed vessels driven by aircraft-type propellers, normally used for winter rescues on top of the ice but now put to work navigating flooded streets.

  The air station, the second sector, covered the city and the river. Syndicated editorial cartoonist John Sherffius was so inspired seeing their work on TV he penned an image of an HH-65 lifting a man in a basket, replacing the rotor blades with a halo and labeling it “New Orleans’ Saints.”

  Small Boat Station New Orleans on the lakefront became the third sector, designated Forward Operating Base New Orleans, while the Pamlico flotilla that was holding the fort at the Algiers ferry landing became the fourth.

  Thursday, September 1, 2005

  On Thursday, two big Marine CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters from the assault ship Bataan landed on their parking lot LZ. The giant seventy-two-foot rotor blades threw up rocks and litter that smashed a yellow school bus’s windows and cut David Lewald’s scalp with a piece of flying glass. “This was the biggest helicopter I’d ever seen,” he recalls. “The ramp drops down and this guy gets out, about six-eight with a head like a globe, and we walk away from the helicopter, and he says, ‘I can take fifty people at a time, but don’t keep us waiting,’ and I say ‘Pets, too?’ and he says, ‘Yeah, but they count as a person.’

  “Diabetes is a real poor people’s problem, and we had these obese elderly people in wheelchairs. It was real hard to get them on the buses, so we put them onto these helicopters along with other sick people and the bigger animals in kennels. We must have moved a thousand people that way. That was the only day we didn’t have lines waiting for the buses in the heat.”

  T

  hat same day, Jessica Guidroz was put in charge of eight 23- and 25-foot boats with instructions to evacuate the people at the University of New Orleans. “We were moving people for the next five to seven days,” she recalls.

  Unfortunately, the I-10 exchange where most of them were being dropped off had become a pungent, trash-strewn refugee camp where crowds of angry, frustrated people were forced to sleep on the ground and forage for shade, food, water, and a place to relieve themselves. The helicopters landing on the overpass would take only the dying and the infants.

  “We had no place to dock at UNO,” she recounts. “You have this seawall and these very slippery [algae-covered] steps, so we’d push up the bow and load people one by one. We’d have crewmembers get off first and form people into lines and search them for weapons and walk them to the seawall. Then our eight boat drivers would push back in, and the crew would help people over the bows and into the boats. It was hot and miserable, but we’d adapt and overcome. We had all different races, classes, single moms, dads, everyone boarding those boats.

  “There was this one lady who got on the boat with two or three kids and an infant in her arms without a diaper change in who knows how long, because that diaper stunk up the whole boat, and she was reluctant to hand the baby over to me. This other woman, who must have been on drugs or something, was trying to claw her way over the lady and was knocking the baby out of her arms, and I screamed at her to hold on a moment, and we finally got them out of there safely.

  “Later I’m watching a CNN report from the Astrodome [evacuation center] in Houston, and there’s that first lady and she’s showered and her baby is in a clean diaper. Until then I wasn’t sure if we weren’t just shuffling people from one bad situation to another, and now I can see where these people are actually getting help, that we’re helping them, and I probably did, I got a little emotional [and cried] at that point.”

  She and her shipmates worked sixteen-hour days under the din of helicopters dropping sandbags into the breach at the nearby Seventeenth Street floodwall. Their station rapidly expanded as the “original eight” enlisted personnel from Tuesday were joined by newer arrivals, including sixty armed Maritime Safety and Security Team members living in RVs, trailers, and tents erected by Coast Guard civil engineers.

  E

  ven as the Coast Guard was surging into the region, it was also taking care of its own. Early on CGIS, the Coast Guard Investigative Service, sent some twenty agents to search for more than 130 missing Coasties. Within four days they were all accounted for. Some had gone to stay with or search for relatives; others had reported to different units and were working the storm outside the chain of command. CGIS was able to track them using credit card data, interviews, and ingenuity. One agent got a cell phone out of a flooded house and went through its speed dial till he found the relative the missing man was staying with.

  CGIS agents also helped secure Coast Guard facilities from looters, including an armory on the west bank
of the Mississippi where millions of rounds of ammunition were stored. They helped provide security for rescue crews and later for Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, when he was named principal federal official (PFO) in charge of rescue and recovery. “Mostly we prevented him from being mobbed by fans and people wanting to hug him or put him in a lip-lock,” CGIS Assistant Director Marty Martinez says, grinning at the memory.

  They also worked with Hurricane Assistance Teams that spread out across the region in SUVs carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to help displaced Coast Guard families secure motel rooms, food, medicine, toiletries, and other essentials. The M-16-toting agents would sleep with the satchels full of cash between their knees at night.

  Through it all, of course, the orange helicopters kept flying.

  • • •

  I

  was too low on fuel to make it back to the air station and had to stop at the New Orleans airport,” pilot Lance Kerr recalls. “I landed by the fuel truck ahead of this line of contract helicopters. This one guy had a huge helicopter and was waiting in a folding chair with his legs up on its ramp, and I go up to him and say, ‘How much fuel do you take?’ It’s like six hundred gallons, and I say, ‘We’re going to fuel up first,’ He’s like, ‘No way, dude,’ and I say, ‘Yes we are, because we have something you don’t and you have something we don’t.’ ‘Like what?’ he asks. ‘We have a hoist and you have a chair.’ His crew laughed, and we finished filling up our hundred gallons and took off.”