Katrina, Part III: What I Felt

I have seen in this past week more literally overwhelming destruction – and more humbling nobility of spirit – than ever before in my life. I have felt more encouraged and affirmed than I can remember being in a long time. By the end of the week it felt like a badge of honor, a mark of distinction, to be able to call myself a human.

It began at the Coast Guard operation in Alexandria, Louisiana. The person in charge there, in certainly the biggest assignment of his life, and one for which he couldn’t possibly be adequately prepared, had been working 20 hours a day for a week, and we civilians had shown up uninvited, offering to help with our amphibious vehicle (called a DUKW, pronounced “duck”). Yet he was as courteous and gracious as he could be. He showed us around the facility, introduced us to someone who could figure out how to plug us in, and bragged on his people, who had also been working 20 hour shifts, and who were also gracious and attentive and helpful. He told us about a girl in the Coast Guard in New Orleans who had just the previous week obtained whatever licensing or credentials are required to do aerial rescues from a helicopter. He said a typical Coast Guard helicopter pilot may do 20 aerial rescues in a career, and this girl had done 70 in her first week after qualifying. So before we got close enough to see the first sign of wind or flood damage, my heart began to swell with admiration for all of the rescue and relief workers.

The sun was rising on Saturday morning as we entered the city of New Orleans, a major port and renowned tourist attraction, a city of a half-million people, the home of the Superdome and the New Orleans Saints NFL football team and the French Quarter and Mardi Gras – the city where the party never stops. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the temperature was perfect, the roads were clear.

And the great city was empty, abandoned, desolate. We passed mile after mile of highways, homes, shopping centers, hotels, offices, churches and franchised fast-food places without people or traffic. I have seen a great city skyline standing black against a black sky. There was nobody. That was the single eeriest experience of my life. It was like being in some sort of post-apocalyptic movie. I felt the emptiness, the abandonment, the smallness and the weakness and the transience of the greatest human achievements. I felt what hell would be like for me – alone in a world that was built for relationships.

As we roamed the desolate city, I felt the perspective of the looter. No one else was around. No one seemed to own anything or be in charge of anything or responsible for anything or able to provide anything or to care about anything at that location. It was like being the only person left alive after a world-ending nuclear war. The whole material remnant of the “developed” world is now just your unexplored urban jungle for hunting and gathering, which is what you are reduced to in a place that is, for the moment at least, too primitive even for agriculture, much less manufacturing. I could see the signs on the small shops that said things like “We shoot looters” and identify with the person determined to protect at any cost what was left of his property, but for the first time in my life, I could at least imagine what the world looked like to the looter, too.

One of the most remarkable emotional experiences was just the spirit of the workers. We must have seen agencies from 20 states represented. We saw every possible law enforcement and military agency from every possible level of government, as well as countless private organizations like us. It could have been a bureaucratic nightmare, but every leader we encountered, no matter how harried and overworked, was kind and willing to help and be helped. Every one of them offered to share their food and drink (but not their gasoline), and looked for ways to keep structure and coordination intact while still incorporating unexpected offers of help. Every one of them was working as hard as they could to make it work and get the job done. One Louisiana Parks & Wildlife leader snapped dismissively at us when we pulled up and tried to ask a question, but I spoke to him affirmingly and encouragingly and sympathetically for no more than two minutes before he was nearly in tears, talking about the challenges that he faced, offering us food and drink and a place to park our duck. That was probably the first moment in our adventure when I actually felt useful and valuable. I couldn’t captain the boat and I wasn’t a mechanic, but I could reflect to people their own value in a way that made it possible for them to work with us.

We found people at the Crossroads Church of the Nazarene like all the other workers. Their brand new building had sustained damage, but the pastor and a group of Red Cross volunteers formed a bucket brigade-style line and helped us unload 217 cases of Similac like it was a party.

I came close to feeling something less than admiration for the actual people we were trying to help, which is never a good thing. People who don’t want to leave stinking, flooded homes in an abandoned neighborhood without utilities are not apparently normal people. Most of them seemed to be kind of marginal in some way. They were physically sick and weak and frail, or they were a little mentally deficient, or they were just emotionally unstable. They seemed to be totally out of touch with reality. We tended to be in a hurry, trying to reach as many people as possible before sundown. The National Guardsmen and professional Search and Rescue people who directed us were allowing one bag per person and no pets. I’ll never forget the little old lady who came to the boat, and then remembered that she had forgotten her Bible, so we waited for her to go back into her house for her Bible and come back to the boat.

When we picked up one group of 25, they were actively engaged in their situation. They didn’t seem disconnected at all. When Herb asked for a head count, one man immediately jumped up and counted for us. Another told him some of what he needed to know about what was under water, that we were going through or over. Another wrote our names down on a pad for the book she hopes to write someday, and to pray for us. They helped each other sort out their bags when they left the boat for the big helicopters. One chatted with me about where I was from, and about relatives he has in this area.

They were people, like me. For all their differences of accent, skin color and lifestyle, we were linked by an extraordinary circumstance, and I felt what it means to talk about our “fellow men”. We were part of the same extended family, and when push came to shove, we would help each other. In the commonest of people is the spark of the divine. In people for whom it would be easy in other circumstances to feel contempt or incomprehension there is something admirable and likable and akin to our own family and heroes.

I had one emotional experience that I can’t imagine anyone could ever understand who hasn’t been there. We had only experienced the emptiness and desolation of the evacuated New Orleans for two days. For only two days had we had to drive 70 miles to Baton Rouge each day for gasoline and a restaurant and a place to sleep. But when a Domino’s Pizza place opened up on Monday morning, it was like seeing a loved one’s eyes flutter and open when you had thought they were dead. It was shocking and exciting. The only drinks they had were two-liter bottles, and they only had four available toppings: pepperoni, pineapple, jalepeno and olives, so I ordered a two-liter coke and a large thin crust pepperoni, pineapple, jalepeno and olive pizza, and it was very heaven. It wasn’t so much the food that was wonderful, as just the ability to order something, and hear the cash register and sense hope for a returning normality. And then a man walked in and announced to the crowd of customers and employees that a service station down the road at such and such a location actually had gasoline for sale! This crowd of normal, simple people were a victorious community in that moment. Domino’s Pizza, which was never anything special to me until then, will henceforth always represent to me the indomitable human spirit, and the determination to rebuild what is destroyed, and to revive what is mortally wounded, and to regain normality that catastrophe has stolen. Civilization is not normal. It is a phenomenal pinnacle to which humanity claws its way by superhuman effort, and which it maintains at heroic cost. With the help of my own overactive imagination, in a mere two days, I caught a glimpse of that truth.

The most impacting emotion of the whole week, though was an odd mixture of humility and pride. I don’t have any military or governmental affiliation that makes me “official”. I don’t have any practical trade skills that makes me “essential”. I was just tagging along at the last moment, doing whatever I could, lowering and raising a ladder, handing out or loading and unloading boxes of water or formula, rolling a flat tire out of the way. I can’t imagine anyone who had the opportunity that presented itself to me, choosing differently than I chose. But for a week, I was treated like a hero.

Driving down the road with a load of baby formula, we were passed on the left by a white pickup truck from the maintenance department of some local school district, and the driver gave us a thumbs up sign as he passed us. A few minutes later a woman in a sedan passed us on the right, made eye contact with us, and mouthed the words “thank you.” We would stop for gas or a meal in Baton Rouge and someone would hear us talking to each other, or see something on our truck that suggested what we were doing, and – male and female, young and old – they would come up to us, and their eyes would water and their bottom lip would quiver, and they would say with a thick, choked voice “thank you for everything you’re doing. This is our home. You are our heroes.” And we would get to say: “You’re welcome. You’re worth it. Everyone’s just doing what they can.”

We were looking for a way to reduce the number of trips we would need to make to Baton Rouge to get gas, so we asked a customer at a gas pump who had 3 5-gallon gas cans tied on top of her car, where she got them or if she knew where we could get some. She said we’d probably have to go all the way to Lafayette, another hour and a half past Baton Rouge. A couple of minutes later she came back to us and asked us where we were heading. We said we were doing relief work in New Orleans. She said: “My home was destroyed, and you’re going there to help. You take my gas cans. And thank you.” Of course, she refused payment for them.

I have never lived before in a culture of such sincere mutual admiration and gratitude. Surely that’s what the church is supposed to be like, and what heaven will be like. People who were providing us with food and shelter and a shower were thanking us as we were thanking them. The National Guardsman who guided us on the boat, who made it possible for us to do anything useful at all, thank us as we thanked him, for making it possible. And every night that we went back to the Baton Rouge church, we’d find a mint or a piece of candy on “our” bed, with a thank you note – sometimes a printed one from an adult, but usually one written in crayon by a child from a local Christian school. The one I saved and brought home with me is written in red crayon. In a childish scrawl it says:

“Thank you. Thank you so much for coming down here you are so brave. You are risking everything for us and I want to thank you. You will be in my prayes. You will always be blessed by God. I hope you get enough food and rest. Sense you have treated us so well here is a treat for you.

Ryan
Victory Academy” -- and at the bottom it had a cherry-flavored Jolly Rancher candy taped to the note.

I came away from this week feeling grateful for a God who is bigger than the big storm, and grateful that he has made us in his own image, and allowed me the companionship of creatures who are only a little lower than the angels.

Brad Mercer
September 10, 2005

Katrina, Part II: What We Saw

From September 3 through September 8 we were in the area affected by Hurricane Katrina. The first indication that we were approaching something unusual was just the convention center in Alexandria that had been turned into a makeshift Coast Guard command center.

The next thing, that I first noticed probably somewhere in the Alexandria area, although maybe as far north as Shreveport, was the convoys of charter buses heading down to New Orleans to pick up evacuees. We’d see 20 charter buses in a single convoy, and just convoy after convoy of them. Then we started seeing large convoys of military vehicles. We also started noticing smaller convoys of 3 or 4 vehicles from non-military agencies like Parks & Wildlife vehicles, state police from various states, local police from outside Louisiana, county sheriffs and local fire departments and emergency medical technicians and ambulances from all over the country.

I’ve seen a great city still standing but – at least the part we were in – dark and empty.

Then the day of search and rescue began, and emergency vehicles with flashing red and blue lights could be safely ignored because those were the only vehicles there were, and we were all going to the same place. Traffic signals could be safely ignored, because if there was one other vehicle approaching an intersection, no distractions existed to keep us from noticing it a long way off. We turned on the radio and there was no music. There was only talk and news about the hurricane, and New Orleans radio announcers were announcing from Baton Rouge.

Along the gulf coast from the west side of New Orleans to the east side of Biloxi I have seen rows of billboards twisted like the wire twist ties on loaves of bread. By the way, if you’re ever in the market to build a billboard, the ones with big round steel poles seem to hold up a little better than the ones that are supported with steel I-beams. Not much stands up to 150 MPH winds, though. I’ve seen piles of construction debris that used to be buildings, buildings so thoroughly demolished that I couldn’t tell what they used to be.

I’ve seen truckloads of water sitting abandoned at a bottling plant near the Superdome, the trucks themselves apparently washed away from their plant by the storm. I’ve seen small shops emptied, apparently by looters. I’ve seen a hand painted note on the plywood covering the windows of a small shop, saying: “We kill looters” and another sign on a different shop saying “You loot, we shoot.” And I believed them, and at the time, it seemed reasonable. I’ve also seen people casually picking up things that didn’t belong to them and walking off with them, sometimes things that belonged to their rescuers and that would be used to help their neighbors that would be rescued next, but they stole them, and at the time, that seemed reasonable, too.

I saw neighborhoods standing in water up to the window sills, where the shops were all closed and the houses had no electricity or running water, and they’d been like that for a week, and the people sat on their front porches and smiled and waved at us as we went by, assuring us that they were fine and had no desire to leave. They waded waste deep through a toxic water mixed with oil and gasoline and garbage and the strong smell of rotting corpses, but they acted like they weren’t in need, and declined rescue. Is there a sermon illustration in there somewhere?

I’ve discovered that when you’re using an interstate highway onramp as a boat ramp, it’s surprisingly difficult to tell what’s under water. It’s not obvious where the actual streets are. You have to look consciously at the buildings, overpasses, streetlights and so forth to deliberately guess where the streets are. And still, you come unexpectedly upon sudden, deep holes, and you can’t picture in your mind what normal city thing is under the water there. Once, in water that the duck could still drive, rather than boat, through, the back right corner, where I was, suddenly dropped so far that I thought one of our recently rescued victims might fall out of the duck, if the whole vehicle didn’t tip over. It seemed like a sidewalk ought to be there, and it might be something normal and obvious, but I couldn’t think what that hole could be.

I’ve seen giant cargo or tanker ships in the Mississippi River pushed up at a 45 degree angle against the shore. I’ve seen big, fancy yachts tossed completely out of the marina and set down, apparently undamaged, in parking lots and out on the shoulder of the nearby freeway. I’ve seen a marina where boats were tossed together like a child’s toy box. Growing up in tornado alley, I’m used to seeing the relatively narrow swath of utter destruction that a tornado can cause. But this week, I rode through that kind of destruction for hours. Between New Orleans and Biloxi is a forest that now looks like a game of Pickup Sticks. The limbs are stripped bare, and big, strong, healthy trees are snapped near the base like dry twigs.

At Crossroads Church of the Nazarene, east of Biloxi, their brand new building has had the steeple ripped off the roof, and all their parking lot light poles are bent at odd angles or lying on the ground.

And I’ve seen a Domino’s Pizza place on Business Highway 90 in Westwego, Louisiana, be the first business in that area to reopen after the hurricane, and it was good. I’ve seen new life in a dead city, and it was good.

Brad Mercer
September 10, 2005

Katrina, Part I: What We Did

I learned on Thursday afternoon, September 1, 2005, from Herb Parsons, my old college roommate, that he and an associate were taking an amphibious vehicle called a duck (actually DUKW) to New Orleans to do search and rescue. Although Herb had originally understood that we were going at the request of Homeland Security, it turned out that we were going uninvited, at the initiative of the owner of the duck.

I got up at 7am on Friday, September 2, got a few last minute things taken care of, and met Herb at the boat at 10:30am. We were expecting a tractor trailer that would haul the duck. It finally arrived at 4:30pm. While we waited, mechanics continued to double check the duck, and we loaded relief supplies on the duck. We left at 5:30pm. Herb, his associate Max Miller and I rode in Max’s pickup truck, which was hauling Max’s fishing boat, just in case we needed it.

Max is in the Coast Guard Auxiliary, and teaches boating safety under the auspices of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He has a Texas Parks and Wildlife insignia on the doors of his pickup truck. Checkpoints on the outskirts of New Orleans served to keep all but essential personnel out. We hoped Max’s connections to the Coast Guard or Texas Parks and Wildlife would get us in.

We drove from Dallas to Alexandria, where the Coast Guard had set up a command center to coordinate their efforts in New Orleans. The “Incident Commander” I think they called him, graciously directed us to a Lt. Commander, who hooked us up with a Lt. Commander in New Orleans, who we were told was working in St. Bernard Parish at a ferry landing, evacuating people.

When we got to New Orleans, at 6am on Saturday, I’d been up for 23 hours. We wanted to hook up with the Lt. Commander and figure out where we were going to be, what we were going to be doing, and who we were going to be doing it with, before unloading the duck and letting the truck driver go. Our problem was that, although the duck could go anywhere, the tractor-trailer rig that was hauling it, and the pickup truck we were in, couldn’t. In addition, we weren’t familiar with the city, and cell phones weren’t working. So we spent a good bit of time trying to find the ferry landing. This was the only point at which I waded bare-legged in rubber “water socks” through the toxic flood waters. I was trying to see how deep a flooded section of I-10 was, to decide whether the tractor-trailer and pickup could drive through it. When it got up above my knees, we decided the pickup, at least, couldn’t do it, and turned around to find a different route. We finally found a different ferry landing guarded by Coast Guardsmen, who told us the Lt. Commander was at FEMA’s command center, and told us where that was. At FEMA, we unloaded the duck and said goodbye to the truck driver. The Lt. Commander directed us to a staging area that was being managed by someone from Louisiana Parks and Wildlife. On the way we stopped at a shopping center parking lot where the Salvation Army was serving hot meals to area residents, and distributed our relief supplies. At the Parks and Wildlife staging area we found a K9 Search & Rescue Unit who told us they were going out with a National Guardsman to a flooded neighborhood near the French Quarter, and they needed an amphibious vehicle like ours. Finally, at 7pm on Saturday, 36 hours after I got out of my own bed at home, we unrolled our sleeping bags and slept on the duck, under the Louisiana sky.

We got up at 6am Sunday morning, drove the duck to, I believe, the Elysian Fields onramp of Interstate Highway 10, which was the staging area for the search and rescue efforts. The three of us, three members of the K9 team, and a National Guardsmen used the onramp as a boat dock and drove off into the neighborhood, sometimes driving on more or less dry streets, and sometimes boating through deeply flooded streets, to houses that the guardsman was directing us with a two-way radio and a GPS unit. We’d go to houses that had people no one else could get to. Other units were doing the same thing we were doing, but with pickup trucks, hummers and motorized rubber rafts. When the water got too shallow or deep for them, they’d radio the position, and we’d pick the people up.

The first trip out made the whole trip look like it might have been a waste of time. We picked up one person who needed to be on a transport helicopter that was waiting for us, so we had to head back to the freeway with just him, then had a flat on the way. We fixed the flat and went back out again, but we were afraid it would be a short adventure if we rescued one person and had one flat each time. By the end of the day, though, we had rescued 67 people in five trips, and didn’t have another flat. It was nightfall by the time we were done. Some of those 67 people were eager to come with us, and some had to be talked into it. Many people didn’t want to go with us. They just waved us on and said they were fine. Some asked when the next boat was coming.

The trip that felt most like we were really rescuing people was the last trip. We picked up 25 people who had congregated at an elementary school. Each person was allowed to bring one bag with them. Men in the group handed bags and toddlers to me from the side of the duck. I sat them all down, lowered the ladder on the back of the boat, and then helped the people up, some of whom were old or sick. Then we received a report of an old lady trapped in an attic 18 blocks away. We apologized to the 25 people we had, knowing they were tired, some of them sick, all of them eager to get back to the freeway where big helicopters would take them to the New Orleans airport, from where busses would take them to refugee centers in other cities and states. They emphatically agreed, though, that we had to go look for the old lady in the attic. We had two different adjoining addresses for her. One of the K9 guys was a former fireman, so he waded through the toxic waste water (in chest waders) to the two houses and broke into them, but didn’t find any evidence of a live person in an attic. We couldn’t know whether she was already gone, or dead, or we had a bad address. When we got back to the freeway and unloaded our passengers, one of them tried to steal a trauma bag that belonged to the K9 unit, but he put it down and apologized when I stopped him. The others had all been wonderful, though. They were caring and considerate of each other, of us, and of the unknown old lady.

Before we loaded up and left the staging area, we saw a couple of body bags with bodies in them, lying on the shoulder of the highway, around where we were all sitting. We asked around and were assured that the bodies were people who had been brought in by other groups, and not anyone we had brought in.

At some point during the day, Herb called his wife, who called around for us and found that the Baton Rouge First Church of the Nazarene had 160 mattresses in their gym, and could offer us a bed, a hot meal and a shower, all of which sounded wonderful after substituting wet wipes for a bath and power bars for a meal. Military MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) had been readily available at the staging area, but I never felt like I had time to eat one, and besides, I felt a little guilty eating them, for some reason.

We slept well at the church and headed back out the next morning, Monday, to a new staging area that I think was at exit 2B on Interstate 610. We first went to the wrong end of 610, and then on our way around to the right end, the duck started running hot and rough and the oil pressure dropped to zero, and it started knocking really badly. I had left my cell phone in Dallas so my wife could take work calls for me, since I’d heard that phone service was intermittent or non-existent in New Orleans. Herb had forgotten his that morning, so we wound up having to borrow a phone from some sort of cop or military person who was directing relief vehicles at an intersection. Max wasn’t with us. He was off getting the duck flat fixed. We didn’t have his phone number, so we had to call Herb’s wife Gini, who got hold of Max and told him where we were stranded, and he came and got us. After a few calls from his cell phone, we eventually decided that we weren’t going to be able to fix the duck, so we had to decide whether to go home or find another mission. We eventually wound up arranging to have a truck come pick the duck up to haul it back home to the Dallas-Fort Worth area and left it parked at a nearby fire station, and headed back to the church in Baton Rouge, 70 miles away.

At the church, a relief organization called CitiHope had deposited a large load of relief supplies, and was working on finding places to deliver them where they were needed. On Tuesday we decided to drive the pickup and fishing boat/trailer loaded with relief supplies to a low rent apartment complex near a marina in hard hit Slidell, on the east side of New Orleans. Herb had a boat docked there, and had been in contact with someone at the marina. He had heard that 25 people had been killed at the apartment complex, and that 42 others were still living there in the damaged buildings without power or running water. We loaded up in Baton Rouge, drove to Slidell, unloaded the supplies at the apartment complex, visited with the people for a while, Herb checked out his boat, and we headed back to Baton Rouge.

On Wednesday, the trucker arrived for the duck and we killed most of the day in New Orleans waiting around for him. We eventually got the duck loaded and headed back to Baton Rouge, where we decided to find a Cajun restaurant. The city had doubled in population over the preceding few days, between evacuees and relief workers, so what should have been 30-40 minutes of driving wound up being three hours, and that pretty much wrapped up Wednesday.

By Thursday morning, Gini had been in contact with Herb again and let him know that Crossroads Church of the Nazarene in Gautier, Mississippi was serving as a staging area for the American Red Cross and Nazarene Disaster Response, and that they needed baby formula, baby food, and medical supplies. CitiHope had baby formula, so we took 217 cases of it to Gautier from Baton Rouge. We got back to the Baton Rouge church by early afternoon, tossed our bags in the back of the pickup, and headed home.

Of course, every time we entered or left New Orleans or a staging area or command center, we felt like we had to hold our breath as we went through the check points, because we weren’t part of a government agency, but we always got through, usually just because they saw Max’s Parks and Wildlife insignia on his truck. Herb’s electric bill for his boat slip served as his proof of residency to get us into the Marina and apartment complex in Slidell.

I got home at 1:30am on Friday, September 09, 2005, got up from bed at 8:30 and spent all day today trying to get caught up on my regular job. I’m tired, still trying to get reoriented as to time and space, which didn’t seem to matter in New Orleans, still strangely exhilarated, a little sore, with a badly sunburned bottom lip, but otherwise, none the worse for wear.

It’s my intention to write two more pieces on our Katrina adventure, one on what we saw and one on what I felt. I expect those to be more interesting than this one – at least to me. But, I’m too tired and sleepy to write them tonight.

Brad Mercer
Friday, September 09, 2005