BY MICHAEL G. BROWN
I got home from my Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans on Friday evening, September 9, 2005, after a 14-day deployment. I made it home, miraculously in good health and away from that stinking cesspool, just in time for the body recoveries to begin. At the same time, I felt productive and proud of all of the good the US&R teams had accomplished in helping to rescue hundreds of live flood victims.
I said “helping” rescue hundreds of flood victims; since the program’s origin (circa 1989), federal US&R employees have been restricted from obtaining waterborne rescue craft and the associated training. Water rescue of any kind (swift, surf, dive, and ice) was deemed not to be within the scope of FEMA US&R operations. Fair enough in theory-I don’t suppose we can do everything at every event. But for a compassionate human being, it is impossible to stand around and watch someone suffer. In New Orleans, the first boats that became available to us were those of local “convergent volunteers” motoring around the flooded neighborhoods.
Also, to clarify for the millionth time, the flooding associated with Hurricane Katrina was not a swiftwater rescue problem: The water was stagnant, not swift; and most evacuees simply needed to be moved from a place surrounded by a cola-colored liquid that might loosely be described as water. In many cases, even using the word rescue would be a stretch.
To put it in perspective, hurricane damage, at its most basic, is classified either as a water or a wind event, rarely both. Hurricanes Andrew and Hugo were largely wind events; Hurricanes Floyd and Katrina were largely water events.
Floyd hit North Carolina and Virginia in 1999 like a huge water balloon. Most people were packing up and heading home when all of that water came rolling out of the hills and literally flushed hundreds of people (and about a million hogs) out of their homes. FEMA US&R assets were staged in the gym at the United States Marine Corps’ Camp Lejuene in North Carolina when word got out locally that the only “available” rescue teams were there. The camp switchboard operator became a 911 dispatcher and was soon issuing requests for the rescue of dozens of people trapped on their rooftops in rising waters.
It was this series of events that led to the first bona-fide FEMA US&R live rescues [involving Pennsylvania Task Force 1 (PA TF-1)] since the inception of the program. US&R specialists faced a tough decision: stand by and watch people drown, or fetch a boat and bring them to safety. Hurricane Floyd was a precursor to Katrina with one notable exception: Floyd affected mostly rural eastern North Carolina and sub-Tidewater Virginia; Katrina largely affected urban New Orleans and rural Mississippi before it moved into the Northeast.
DEPLOYMENT
Incident Support Team (IST) Blue was on call for August as the incident management and support mechanism for all activated US&R task forces in New Orleans. I was chief of Rescue Operations (deputy), meaning that I was the first field incident officer, coordinating our field operations in New Orleans. We had with us Tennessee’s TF-1 (Type III, 30 members), Missouri’s TF-1 (Type III, 30 members), and Texas’ TF-1 (Type I, 80 members). By the time rescue operations transitioned into recovery operations, more than 1,000 US&R rescuers had been dispatched into Louisiana and Mississippi. For the first time in history, all 28 federal US&R teams were activated.
 1. Photo courtesy of FEMA. Photos by author, unless otherwise noted. |
Our prepositioned US&R assets waited the arrival of Katrina in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; a state police escort led us into New Orleans at about 2300 hours on the same day the storm rolled through, on Monday, August 29. We went to work at first light Tuesday morning while the wind was still blowing. After consulting with the local sheriff, our initial response was to establish a forward staging area on the I-610 Bridge eastbound to give the evacuees a dry place to go and to receive some limited medical care from our medical component (photo 1). Amazingly, Louisiana bayou locals already had dozens of air boats and bass boats in the water and were bringing evacuees by the hundreds to the interstate (photo 2). At about 10 a.m., I had established operational command at the I-10/I-610 split where the highway overpasses submerged into the flood waters. This was in no way operational command for all of New Orleans; it was just a place we could get to by car and start helping people out of the water.
 Photo 2 |
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 Photo 3 |
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We put our rescue specialists in flotation vests in each of the locals’ boats and sent them off to the neighborhoods to search for victims. Our mission was a little different from simply picking up the obvious victims standing on their roofs or floating around on a piece of wood like the shipwreck survivor; lots of locals were doing that. Instead, US&R rescuers focused on getting to people who were entrapped in their houses. We used forcible entry tools and techniques to breach holes in roofs to extricate exhausted and dehydrated people. Sometimes, we could hear people banging inside of their houses; at other times, we could see an arm sticking out of a vent opening in the gable roof. Our teams were very productive and aggressive in actually rescuing dozens of home-trapped flood victims. FEMA and our nation should be proud of the fact that US&R teams made the difference in the life or death of some hundreds of citizens of New Orleans (photos 3, 4).
 Photo 4 |
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LIMITED RESOURCES OVERWHELMED
Over the next few days, several factors became overwhelming. There were far too many victims coming out of the water for us to handle. As a result, as soon as they were brought to the relative safety of the I-610 bridge, for the most part, they were on their own. Joe Don Warren of TX TF-1 offered assistance to a blind evacuee (photo 5). There was no transportation, no food or water (other than the rations our rescue teams had for themselves, which lasted only a couple of hours), and there was no one to receive and organize the thousands of evacuees (photos 6, 7).
 Photo 5. Joe Don Warren of TX TF-1 assists a blind evacuee. |
Continuity of care is a mainstay of rescuer pride, meaning that as soon as you rescue someone, you stay with that person or transfer the individual to a medical asset of equal or higher expertise-you never abandon a patient. In this case, for the first time in our lives, we were forced to abandon people as soon as we got them to dry land. Not abandoning them meant that hundreds of people that were trapped in houses or in swirling dark waters would be left behind to die.
 Photo 6. Photo courtesy of FEMA. |
In one personally troubling instance, a girl about 12 years old was handed off to me in the rush. A US&R rescue specialist had rescued her from the attic of a flooded house. She left behind her drowned mother, her only known kin. Overwhelmed with command activities, I placed her in the passenger seat of the Chevy Suburban that was my command vehicle and told her someone would be with her shortly. I squeezed her hand and told her she was going to be okay, that she was safe now. I looked in on her several times over the hour it took me to find someone who could bond with her and get her out of this waterborne hell. She was in complete emotional shock and could only stare forward; she couldn’t even cry.
 Photo 7. Photo courtesy of FEMA. |
Some 90 minutes after the girl arrived, I found a female K-9 dog handler from the Texas task force, who took her to their bus and comforted her while awaiting someone from the Red Cross to pick her up. I never heard any more about what happened to that girl.
MEDICAL TREATMENT
 Photo 8 |
Although some of the more critical patients received medical treatment from US&R doctors and paramedics in the staging area, the US&R medical component is designed to provide medical attention primarily for team members. The humanitarian medical service we were forced to provide severely stripped us of our own on-scene medical capability. In many cases, US&R medical members simply procured a private vehicle and transported patients to a hospital by themselves. This was some of the most intense medical work, civilian combat, I’ve ever witnessed. Again, FEMA should be proud of the work the US&R doctors and paramedics did those first few days on I-610 (photos 8, 9).
 Photo 9 |
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Local responders. Local resources were almost completely absent. As best as we could ascertain, the fire department and the police department were obliterated by the hurricane. On day 2 on I-610, we finally met with New Orleans (LA) Fire Department Captain Richard Smith, who looked like he personally crawled up out of the swamp. His firefighters were homeless and were staging up on a railroad embankment a couple of miles farther into the water from our command post. They had effected literally hundreds of rescues on their own and were staying until the job was done. We loaded up his little flat-bottomed boat with meals ready to eat (MREs) and water and off he went to help sustain his brave group.
I later saw him several times with a contingent of local firefighters who were assigned to US&R teams to provide local directions and information. It was easy to see Smith’s faith and determination through the fog of all of this commotion. One look in his eyes, and I was humbled by his heroism and personally reenergized to get back to the job.
Most of the local firefighters and policemen we met had lost all of their personal belongings and, in some cases, their entire families. This phenomenon is unique and horrific. When we serve our country as public safety personnel, or even in the military during combat overseas, usually our families are safe and accounted for. Katrina even took that one dignity from many of our brother and sister public servants. These heroes worked continuous shifts helping people in the community, since they had no place left to go and worked tirelessly as a sort of emotional control-the only way they had to keep it together. The respect and admiration I have for them is immense and beyond my capability to articulate.
US&R team safety. When the sun went down, I ordered our rescue specialists out of the water. I could not afford to lose even one of them to the black, toxic waters. The boat operations in the day were bad enough: overloaded with evacuees, constantly running into submerged objects (traffic lights, light standards, street signs, power lines, all submerged in the flood). To have a rescuer under my command get sucked into the fetid waters in the dark would be unacceptable. This reasoning forced us to leave hundreds of people abandoned on the levees of New Orleans with no way to walk to safety. We gave them the last of our food and water and headed in for some rehab. The rescuer we kept alive tonight would be there to rescue many more victims tomorrow. For most of us, it was the first time we had ever left someone behind in our lives. The notion made me sick.
Helicopter transport. On our third day of operations, we were at I-10 in East New Orleans. It was a productive day of rescue with hundreds of evacuations and dozens of bonafide technical extrications. It was also our first effective use of military helicopters in removing evacuees. The Tom-Tom Company, a portable GPS manufacturer, had sent over some of its units for use. I suction-cupped one of them to my windshield, and it gave me an instant and accurate latitude and longitude. As our rescuers brought people out of the flooded neighborhoods, I simply radioed our Base of Operations (BoO) the lat/long, and shortly a chopper would land right on the interstate in front of my vehicle. We would hot load as many people into the chopper, as it would safely hold (photo 10).
 Photo 10 |
We went through this evolution hundreds of times during that first nine days. As we moved along the elevated interstates into new neighborhoods, we would establish an entirely new operational environment: vehicle staging, ramps for launching boats and crews, medical, command and rehab tents, and repeater towers. In fact, we became experts at prepping the interstate for helicopter evacuation. Pull over three light stanchions on each side of the highway with cable or ropes; paint a big “H” in the middle of the road; and bam, there’s our own little airport.
Truck transport difficulties. We borrowed three 2½ -ton trucks from the National Guard, which were extremely helpful in moving evacuees from deep water to a place of relative safety on the interstate. As the sun was going down one day, two of these trucks ended up loaded with evacuees. Since the helicopters were no longer flying, we were forced to bring them back to the western side of town where our US&R assets were staged (photo 11). Operations instructed us to take them to the Louis Armstrong Airport and drop them off. As this was occurring, Ed Vasquez (forward operations officer) and I went to get some quick chow. While examining the mysterious substance that was our dinner, I got a call from one of the truck drivers, saying they were being refused entry into the airport receiving center. Under threat of arrest, and at shotgun point from several deputies, I radioed them to return to our BoO at Zephyr Field, the New Orleans Saints practice facility. I would meet them and the evacuees at the security entrance.
 Photo 11 |
On arrival, I informed the security officers at the gate of the impending arrival of the trucks and the evacuees. The head deputy was very agitated anyway. While screaming in my face, he told us that, on arrival, the evacuees would not be allowed into the BoO, or into the airport. They would follow a police escort out to I-10 at Causeway Boulevard and drop them off in the dark-no food, no water, no guidance. Dump them off, and then the trucks and our US&R specialists (firefighters with commercial driver’s licenses) were free to return to the BoO. The trucks contained 37 evacuees, of which 10 were in wheelchairs, eight used walkers, and 10 were infirm for some other reason. The rest were tired, dirty, hungry, and confused.
I called for any available US&R assets monitoring the radio to come to the front gate in vans to help us offload the evacuees wherever we ended up. Vasquez and Dr. Mike Olinger, IST medical leader, were along to help me figure out the mess. We agreed that abandoning the sick and infirm evacuees on the interstate was unacceptable, so we developed a quick stall tactic to calm down the now furiously spitting deputy. I bargained for a five-minute reprieve to get help for my drivers to unload the evacuees. The deputy allowed me the time and gave me a disgusted look as I tried my intermittently working cell phone to call the number I had for the airport.
I spoke with Dr. Somebody with National Disaster Medical System (NDMS), who advised me the evacuees would now be accepted at the airport and he would send someone there to make sure they got through security. With seconds left, our little convoy did another U-turn and headed to the airport. En route, I explained to the US&R team members in the trucks and the vans by radio that Plan A was to get the evacuees into the airport safely. If the sheriff’s deputies were completely out of control and prepared to arrest or even shoot us for bringing them in, Plan B would be to abandon the trucks at the airport entrance, pile the US&R drivers into the vans, and we would hastily retreat to our BoO. The worst of situations soon got worse.
The gate guard let us through the outer gate with the help from NDMS personnel. However, a checkpoint half a mile into the airport complex got us into big trouble. The undersheriff was controlling a contingent of about 20 heavily armed, sleep-deprived guards with thousand-yard stares. On seeing our little caravan with the 37 evacuees, he went absolutely bonkers with anger. One of his men accosted the front truck driver for challenging his authority by making a second attempt to get the evacuees into the airport. I have so much respect for the US&R driver (from Colorado’s TF-1) for keeping his cool while the officer screamed and spit and pointed his finger in his face. He was called every profanity I ever heard (considerable), and he was threatened with arrest and bodily harm by the deputy.
The undersheriff told me with vengeance that he recognized me from somewhere (our initial staging at Sam’s Club on Airline Boulevard Tuesday morning, when he seemed like a nice and professional guy). He said FEMA was always trying to pull some “stunt” over on him, referring to our always trying to find somewhere safe to stash our rescued evacuees.
After he threatened at the top of his lungs to arrest me (or worse), I backed off, letting Vasquez and Olinger take some abuse for a while. Some moments later, the NDMS people somehow wore down the sheriff’s last good nerve. He allowed us to proceed to the airport lobby and drop off our evacuees. This predicament seemed like the bottom of the bottom. I knew things could not be any worse. I was wrong. We descended into hell. We were about to realize from what the sheriff’s deputies had been “protecting” us.
CHAOS AT THE AIRPORT
As our little caravan with its cargo of disabled evacuees rounded the curve toward the lobby of the airport, the road looked like Max Yasgur’s farm after Woodstock. Trash was inches deep-water bottles, bandages, personal items, rubber gloves, and medical debris cracked and popped under our tires as we rolled up to the doors. Hundreds of people were sitting or lying around on the sidewalks-a small bag and a half bottle of water were maybe their only material possessions. At the entrance, there was no one to meet and guide us and our human cargo into the lobby. Most of the US&R rescue specialists on our team were standing idly, mouths agape at the carnage surrounding us. There appeared to be no organization, and whoever must have been trying to organize was completely overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people needing aid. I had to stir our people’s attention to start unloading our evacuees. I was in a hurry to get my rescue specialists out of this nightmare and back to the BoO where they belonged.
Olinger and I walked into the lobby to see what was behind the discontent at the entrance. It was a sight and smell I will never forget. Literally stepping over sick and dying people to get inside, we found thousands of evacuees. The larger part of the group seemed to be in an acre-wide, yellow-tape crowd control mechanism, a plastic makeshift version of the crowd control lanes at Disney World. It seemed once evacuees (usually in family groups) entered the lines, it might take days for them to exit. The lines were not moving; people were sitting sometimes in their own blood, feces, and urine. I could not swear that the line did not loop around somewhere and reenter at the start in an impossible-to-survive endless loop. Outside the crowd control mechanism, almost every square inch of floor space was covered with exhausted, dirty, and dehydrated people in every phase of health and hygiene from miserable to dead.
I was reminded of the scene from Gone with the Wind when the camera pans left, overlooking a train station yard after Sherman burned Atlanta. As far as you could see were people in ultimate poverty and distress. It suddenly hit me in the face like a load of bricks: We had provided an extreme disservice to the rescued evacuees for whom we fought so hard to get into the airport. We took them from their sodden but familiar infrastructure under the assumption that we could certainly provide them with some marginally better place to spend the night; instead, we dropped them off into a modern, filthy hell on earth.
Katrina provided me these two new experiences, which I have never experienced in 30 years as a fire and rescue responder: the first time I’ve ever left someone in need behind and the first time I’ve rescued someone and taken them from a place of relative safety (their flood-soaked home) to a place that was worse-the airport. Events like these cause your mind to cavitate with doubt; but in hindsight, even the airport was a little better than dropping the evacuees off on the interstate at night. All of the US&R personnel were safely returned to the BoO for some rest and preparation for another day’s work.
Large-scale disasters bring out some of the most convoluted logic I have ever witnessed. As if the job is not hard enough, as rescuers, our hands were constantly being tied by one new local policy or the other:
1 Unless you see/hear someone in a building/house, do not force entry; it may be misconstrued as vandalism or looting. Hundreds of houses had to be searched and researched as the marking system continued to morph.
2 We are trained to use a certain marking system for searching our structures. This system was changed repeatedly for various reasons-one of them: The locals will start to understand the markings.
3 We were ordered not to give out our rations and water to suffering people. The thought, I suppose, was they will never leave (evacuate) as long as we’re feeding them. I’m pretty sure that rule got violated a lot.
4 Any evacuee removed by vehicle had to be dropped off on the interstate. Any evacuees removed by helicopter could go to the airport and (after control was regained) save themselves the indignity of waiting around for a helicopter or a bus to take them to the airport!
New Orleans, it turns out, is built inside of a sort of bathtub. Keeping it dry is entirely dependent on the activation of pumps and the levee system that holds back Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
When a water event such as Hurricane Katrina dumps massive amounts of water into the bathtub and winds topple power lines, the pumps won’t run and the water fills up the tub. The storm surge rises, water overflows the levees, the levees breach, and more water floods in (photo 12).
 Photo 12 |
Then 200,000 people who did not or could not evacuate were stuck in the muck. The muck was a putrid chemical composition of almost every nasty thing that usually stays out of sight and out of mind, mostly because of gravity. Water that drains away dirt and bacteria usually flows away. Sewage flushes and goes away. Dirt at least settles to the ground. Petroleum-fuels stay in their pipes and tanks until pumped away.
In a flood, all of this is combined to become a toxic brew, a septic tank that people have to try to live in until found and evacuated by someone in a vehicle or boat that could make it through the muck. Katrina did not cause 1,000 people to die in New Orleans; mankind did. Katrina was just a Category 3 storm when it hit. Weeks later, Rita, an almost identical storm, hit just to the west of Katrina’s path and did not do near the damage because the cities hit by Rita were not built below sea level.
Every once in awhile, Mother Nature sends a wakeup call. In this case at least, Katrina flushed out into the open New Orleans’ impoverished and infirm. Surely, every social stratum was affected by the flood. In New Orleans, the poor, mostly black, people and the infirm floated into the awareness of the public. On a normal day, they would be mostly forgotten or dismissed under the marketing glitter enticing visitors into the city. Katrina was the ultimate societal reality check: This country does not handle our impoverished people very well, and the final fatality count will be our scorecard for how well we did as a country. With the technology and wealth this country possesses, even one fatality is too many from the storm that knocked and should have found no one home.
MICHAEL G. BROWN, battalion chief, retired from the Virginia Beach (VA) Fire Department in 2003. He remains an active member of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue program, serving as VA-TF-2 leader and rescue operations chief of IST Blue. Brown was the first operational federal rescue commander in the field in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. He is a program manager with AMTI, which supports the global war on terror (GWOT).
WHY DIDN’T THEY EVACUATE?
Why didn’t New Orleans residents evacuate? Several factors may have caused them to stay:
- A socially induced lack of independent thinking resulting in reliance on the government to provide for them;
- A confidence that the government-devised levee and pump system would protect them from storms;
- In past flooding, the city usually dried out pretty quickly after floods;
- They simply could not afford to pay for transport to a place of refuge;
- There was no available public transportation in their neighborhoods to evacuate them; bus drivers aren’t likely to want to work for $12.00 an hour with an impending Category 5 hurricane on the horizon; and
- In past emergencies, there had been multiple evacuation orders where no evacuation was needed.
