Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  “It wasn’t all fun. There was also the dark side,” Jeff Vajda reminds him.

  “There was a gentleman we took off a roof, and the rescue swimmer asked if there was anyone else, and he said no, and as we’re flying away he says, well, his wife and daughter and grandmother were still in the house. We kind of look at him and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell us this at the time?’ He says, ‘I wanted to make sure I was OK.’ So we worked our way back and found the place. The hole he’d cut in the roof wasn’t large enough to get them out, so the swimmer had to break through a window on the side of the house and cut his leg up pretty badly. After we evacuated them, we had to take him to the hospital to get stitches.

  “Then we had these two men on a roof with three women, and they had two large black duffel bags and wanted us to take them, and when we said we’re only taking people, not their belongings, they became aggressive. They tried to pay our swimmer. We hoisted the biggest guy but thought maybe he was going to try and take control of the aircraft, so we kept the basket outside. The other guy then became extremely aggressive, and I was thinking, ‘How do you use the helicopter as a weapon? Can I use the downdraft to blow this guy off the roof into the water?’ But when our swimmer held his own, the guy signaled for his friend in the basket to come back down, and we got our guy back and left them there.”

  “There was this multilevel parking garage with a hundred-plus people,” Lance now recounts, “and some were sitting and others were lying in the corner. We later realized these were the dead people lying off to one side. We lowered our swimmer down to assess, and as he was coming down on the hook all of a sudden a mob was forming below him, and we aborted the hoist. The next morning an Air Force 60 with multiple parajumpers landed on the roof and got control of the situation and helped these people. Turns out they had given up and were just getting high, waiting there to die.”

  • • •

  S

  wimmer Tim Kessell from Elizabeth City, North Carolina, recalls a similar moment. He found himself alone with a crowd of survivors on the roof of the New Orleans Days Inn. “One guy said, ‘I have five bullets I’m going to put in you if you don’t put me in the next basket.’ I told him, ‘I can’t put you in a basket with a weapon, sir.’ He went away, and we got two more swimmers put down with me. After that we always flew with another guy.”

  Another time Kessell had to wade back and forth a quarter mile through filthy chest-deep floodwaters stinking of natural gas to evacuate boatloads of old folks in wheelchairs from an elementary school to a Shell gas station where there was a dry patch of ground to bring in a helicopter. At one point he noticed a dead body floating inside a car. On his third trip he stepped into a pothole and sank above his head.

  “Back at Air Station Mobile they set up these fifty-five-gallon drums of disinfectant with antibacterial solution, and we’d just dunk ourselves in them and then take a hose to shower off. It was nasty.”

  Friday, September 2, 2005

  “On Friday, an Air Force parajumper came in, and he had this backpack sprouting antennas, and he was in touch with everyone.” Chief Warrant Officer David Lewald recalls the scene back at the Algiers ferry landing. “So soon, he had helicopters coming in on the levee three at a time and bouncing onto our LZ, and this was great because by then people were getting tireder and hungrier and it was close to hell. We lost two dozen people [who died], most of them on that day, mostly diabetics and drug addicts. We didn’t have medicine, we didn’t have insulin or methadone, and all we could do is cool them down and get them on a helicopter.

  “Around 3:00 A.M. this warehouse explodes across the river, and I’m thinking, ‘This is the warehouse where we have our people’ [the refugees from Chalmette]. I lost my cool and wanted to get everyone on the water. My senior chief talked me down and said, ‘It’s not our warehouse, just let it burn.’

  “Until then I’d felt like ‘This is America, we’ll figure it out.’ Now it was like ‘Where is everyone? Are we the only ones here?’ ”

  About that time the Spencer, a 270-foot Medium Endurance Cutter from Boston, came upriver from where it had been patrolling in the Straits of Florida. Lewald was piped aboard and taken to the Combat Information Center for a briefing. “It’s air-conditioned, like forty degrees, and I’m stinking and shivering, and the commander is smiling and says, ‘So what can I do for you?’ So I got some engineering help for the 41s and let them moor up and let their crews get four-hour naps in this nice air-conditioning. This was also the first time in days I could communicate with the chain of command in Alexandria.”

  By then the chief warrant officer, along with his boat team, had helped evacuate 6,600 people across the river. Friday evening, after helping the Spencer’s officers establish an evacuation route to the Convention Center, where ten thousand more storm refugees were stranded, Lewald was relieved as the city’s on-scene commander. “My boss says to me, ‘What do you want to do next?’ and I say, ‘I want to regain my anonymity.’ ”

  Shortly thereafter the Pamlico and the Clamp headed south to the badly damaged Coast Guard station in Venice to help replace buoys and other aids to navigation that had been blown away by the storm and to reopen the Mississippi River to commercial traffic. On the way the Clamp caught fire again.

  Saturday, September 3, and the aftermath

  “Saturday they finally started getting things together,” Lt. Jason Dorval recalls of the broader government effort. “They evacuated the Convention Center and the Superdome and divided the parking lot into six landing zones with forward air controllers. We’d fly people to New Orleans International Airport and see all these commercial and military jets like C-141s landing, and we’d taxi up to the terminal, and they’d pull out luggage carts and people would climb onto them, and they’d drive them into the terminal, screen them, and fly them out to Houston and Dallas. By then it was like an air show with some 250 or 300 military helicopters from every service flying over New Orleans.”

  D

  avid Lewald’s house in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, was badly damaged but not destroyed. Thirty percent of the Coast Guard men and women in District 8 lost their homes to Katrina, even as they continued helping others. Along the Mississippi-Alabama coastline, where whole neighborhoods and communities were reduced to piles of kindling, empty lots, and brick foundations, Gulfport became the major “Recovery Base.” A convoy of Coast Guard reservists with five tractor-trailer trucks and three buses traveled twenty hours from Ohio to relieve local Coasties so they could begin rebuilding their station, their homes, and their lives and help their neighbors mourn.

  “After the first couple of weeks we were mostly finding bodies,” Jessica Guidroz recounts. “We’d go into areas that hadn’t been checked and tie up our boats and walk around, search houses, but mostly just find victims, not anyone alive. It was pretty sad stuff.”

  I ask her about her own situation. “I was about to move from this town house, so I had all my stuff in boxes downstairs, and we got three or four feet of water. So I moved into my new place with three crusty Coast Guard uniforms and my kitten that had survived, and it was the easiest move I ever done.”

  B

  y the time I arrive to do some environmental reporting, New Orleans has become a Woodstock for first responders, emptied of its residents but occupied by some thirty thousand troops, reporters, relief workers, and contractors from every part of the country and the world: New York firemen, Louisville sheriffs, Utah National Guardsmen, San Diego customs agents, Japanese TV crews, angry local cops.

  The Big Easy has literally lost its color. It’s sepia-toned, all mud brown, russet, and gray, and the smell I often encounter is not that of dead bodies but of a dead city: like dried cow pies and mildew with a strong chemical aftertaste. I take pictures of the brown waterline that indicates how high the floodwaters rose and runs across tens of thousands of homes, schools, banks, supermarkets, video stores, churches, and other ruined buildings, including the main sewage plant, that will have
to be torn down. I share empty debris-strewn streets and freeways with abandoned cars and boats and with big Army trucks and Humvees full of red-bereted 82nd Airborne troops, their M-4 rifles at the ready. I cross paths with animal rescue crews, police patrols, utility crews from New York and Pennsylvania, and body recovery search teams (including Coasties) with K-9 dogs using orange spray paint to mark the doors of still-unexamined buildings, writing the date and adding a zero for no bodies or numbers where bodies have been found.

  I travel the demographically and geographically altered landscape of the bayou, Mississippi and Alabama, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s now replaced by the Flood Bowl of 2005.

  I ride with Deputy Sheriff Ken Harvey along the west bank in Plaquemines Parish, where towns of several thousand like Empire and Buras have washed away forever. In what’s left of Port Sulphur, the sheriff’s deputies are living in converted shipping containers. Where the road’s cut by water, we drive up on the eroded levee and keep going. The world’s turned upside down, with big shrimp boats on the land and houses in the water and a truck propped up in a tree and a semi pinned under a house. Still another flooded house has a speedboat jutting through its picture window. We stop and stare in awe at a 250-foot barge tossed atop the levee like a bath toy on a tub rim.

  Approaching the Empire Bridge, I note that the white church facing north toward us is still intact and suggest that’s a hopeful sign. “It used to face the road,” he points out.

  Later, in Biloxi, I stop by an 8,000-ton, 600-foot-long casino barge that the storm drove half a mile across Beach Drive. Somewhere underneath its barnacle-encrusted black hull is a historic mansion. Another casino barge has gouged a hole halfway up the stately six-story yellow brick yacht club before coming to rest next to it.

  In Waveland, Mississippi, I drive over twisted railroad tracks, where the eye of the storm passed, into neighborhoods of jagged wooden debris. A middle-aged couple is trying to clear the drive to the lot where their half-million-dollar home once stood. A surfboard leans against one of the live oaks that seem to have fared better than the houses in between.

  “Are you an adjuster?” the woman asks.

  “No, a reporter.”

  “Good, because we don’t like adjusters. Nationwide was not on our side.”

  “At least you’ve got your surfboard,” I tell her husband, John.

  “Oh, that’s not my surfboard.” He grins, pointing around. “And that’s not my boat, and that’s not my Corvette [buried to its hood in the rubble], and that’s not our roof. We think it might belong to the house at the end of the street.”

  On the narrow west end of Dauphin Island, Alabama, I walk with Dauphin Island Sea Lab director George Crozier through an apocalyptic scene of some two hundred broken and vanished stilt houses, downed power lines, flooded roads, buried cars, shallow quicksand, and a massive oil rig, Ocean Warwick, that has grounded in the surf after floating loose for sixty miles. It’s one of more than 180 rigs damaged, destroyed, or set adrift by the storm.

  We’re being sandblasted by the leading edge of Hurricane Rita as George, one of the nation’s leading authorities on coastal processes, tells me about climate change and how warming seas will lead to higher flood tides and more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes like Katrina and Rita. “What happened to Florida in ’04 and Louisiana in ’05 is no longer the exception,” he explains. “It’s the new rule.”

  B

  etween human-induced climate change, increasingly crowded coastlines, and loss of wetlands that act as storm barriers, are we ready for the new coastal reality we’ve helped create? I wonder. While prevention is key—changing our approaches to wetlands protection, coastal development, and energy choices—our ability to respond and adapt is also going to be vital.

  In its February 2006 report A Failure of Initiative, the U.S. House Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina stated: “We are left scratching our heads at the range of inefficiency and ineffectiveness that characterized government behavior right before and after this storm. But passivity did the most damage. The failure of initiative cost lives, prolonged suffering, and left all Americans justifiably concerned our government is no better prepared to protect its people than it was before 9/11.”

  By contrast, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in July 2006 stated, “Of the estimated 60,000 people needing to be rescued from rooftops and flooded homes, over 33,500 were saved by the Coast Guard . . . Underpinning these efforts were the agency’s operational principles that promote leadership, accountability, and enable personnel to take responsibility and action.”

  At the height of its response, the Coast Guard had thirty cutters, sixty-two aircraft, and 111 small boats operating in New Orleans and the Gulf along with over five thousand people. They saved more people in a week than they had in the previous six years. They also got the job done without a single casualty or major accident.

  In the days, weeks, months, and now years following the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history, the Coast Guard has helped reopen the Mississippi River to shipping, upgraded sea buoys and other aids to navigation, restored offshore oil production, and cleaned up or mitigated some 8.1 million gallons of spilled oil, more than two-thirds of an Exxon Valdez.

  “When I joined I was just going to do my four years, but I realized I absolutely love this job and got to participate in something that was a positive moment in Coast Guard history,” says Petty Officer Jessica Guidroz. “And if this ever happens again I want to be the one to help again, not to be in front of the TV watching it.”

  So how do you train people like Jessica Guidroz, Jason Dorval, David Lewald, Shay Williams, and Keola Marfil to take the initiative and act autonomously while standardizing their ability to work as a team? Surprisingly, the process often starts with a group of tired, bus-weary teenagers.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Boot and the Factory

  Sometimes I take them down to the beach with the company colors and make them

  taste the saltwater, and that’s the best.

  —PETTY OFFICER DAVE KNAPP, RECRUIT TRAINING CENTER, CAPE MAY, NEW JERSEY

  Scientiae Cedit Mare (The Sea Yields to Knowledge)

  —MOTTO OF THE U.S. COAST GUARD ACADEMY, NEW LONDON, CONNECTICUT

  The Boot

  Two buses from Philadelphia wind their way through the small towns and hazy salt marshes and along the tidal bays of South Jersey. Fall colors darken with the autumn sunset as V-formations of Canada geese fly honking overhead. The buses pull through the streets of Cape May, a tourist-friendly beach town closing in on itself for the winter. They turn left off Pittsburgh Avenue toward the fisherman’s memorial and the red and white water tower with blue letters reading coast guard. They slow down to maneuver around the cement security barricades at the gate before being waved onto the 450-acre training center campus and boat station that juts between the harbor and the sea. With its one- to three-story pebbled concrete structures and wide quads, it resembles a community college with a not very well-endowed building fund. It is in fact the common ground shared by every enlisted man and woman of the United States Coast Guard. The young men and women on board the buses hardly notice, their nerves are jangling so badly at this point.

  Soon the buses pull up in front of Sexton Hall, and company COs in Smokey the Bear hats come aboard and loudly instruct them they have fifteen seconds to vacate the bus and form up on a series of yellow triangles that have been painted on the street between their transport and the yellow curb. They will shortly be marched inside, where they will be fed box meals and issued T-shirts, sweatpants, and running shoes and be placed in squad bays (living areas), where they will spend several days before being assigned to training companies, all the time being loudly directed, with “a sense of urgency,” about what to do. They will have their hair cut—buzz cuts for men, no more than two inches on the neck by cutting or pinning for women—and they will be given a wide range of medical
and dental shots and extractions (wisdom teeth out).

  Watching the weekly Tuesday night processing is Master Chief Stephen Dykema, a seventeen-year Coast Guard veteran, tall, and thin as a blade. As battalion commander, he’ll have very little direct contact with the recruits during their eight weeks of training. “If a recruit gets to my level it’s a serious issue,” he explains.

  In the late ’90s, Dykema served as a company commander (CC) after attending Cape May’s in-house CC school. Among the skill sets they teach is how to shout without going hoarse. They practice at the far end of the property by the firing range, away from where the recruits might see them.

  “Yelling wasn’t me,” Dykema recalls. “I wanted out but found that this was a small part of the job. So I learned to find my command voice. We have a CC here, Petty Officer Butler, she’s about five foot two, but she found her . . .”

  “Ability to intimidate?” I suggest.

  “Her command presence,” he responds with a thin, barracuda-like grin.

  Among the recruits Dykema commanded was Nathan Bruckenthal, the first and so far only Coastie to die in combat in Iraq. “Last year we had a welter-weight boxing champ join up. He accidentally killed his sparring partner and decided to come here. Some people used to join after seeing the Coast Guard on Baywatch. Post 9/11 we saw a lot of patriotic motivation. There’s still a ripple effect of that. I expect we’ll now see a lot of recruits wanting to be swimmers.”

  The Guardian, a film starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher as Coast Guard aviation survival technicians, or rescue swimmers, had recently come out. The night of its red carpet premiere in Washington, DC, I spotted a teenage girl skipping down the sidewalk in front of the Uptown Theater talking excitedly into her cell phone. “Ginny! I touched Ashton Kushner, I touched him!”