We were activated for Katrina emergency relief on Labor Day weekend. We got underway in four days, 20 hours and 2 minutes, which is pretty quick.

The training ships are used as labs while they’re here at the Maine Maritime Academy, so we had a lot of the ship taken apart, and we had to get it back together. We had 10 permanent crew, and we had to hire 35 to sail the ship. They had to get all those people coming in on a holiday weekend. We ordered enough stores to feed 300 people for 60 days, as well as linens and blankets and pillows. It was quite an undertaking for us.

[The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) asked the Maritime Administration (MARAD)] if they could supply some sort of sea-going vessels that would have about 1,000 beds, and MARAD looked at most of the commercial ships as having only 30-40 beds. They then looked at the training ships, which have large amounts of berthing space because of the students we carry.

Coming out of Boston, we looked at the weather and Hurricane Ophelia was sitting down off Florida, and it sat there for four or five days. We did an end run. We went out toward Bermuda and then went south from there and sneaked through the Bahamas behind Ophelia. We took about a week getting down there. We arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi on the night of Sept. 16. And, of course, the river was still closed because there were no lights, no buoys. We went up the river the morning of the 17th.

My first impression was the huge mass of damage. I’ve been up and down the Mississippi many times, and I was there in 1965 after the hurricane and saw all the ships that got blown out of Avondale shipyard.

Until we really arrived down there, we really didn’t know exactly what our mission was going to be. It kept changing. At one point, they said we were going to be housing refinery workers. Another time, we were told we’d be housing oil cleanup people. When we arrived down there, they said we were directly under the control of the port of New Orleans. We were there to house people that were trying to get the port operational.

I think we might have had 27 people the first night and the second night up to about 80. And then we started talking to some of the Coast Guard and National Guard people, and they said they had a heck of a lot of people living in parking lots with no showers, no air conditioning and they’re eating [ready-to-eat meals]. They asked if we could house them. We said, “Sure.”

We were able to house 275 people, including crew. We had emergency operations center people, FEMA employees, Homeland Security staff members, a lot of Coast Guard people. We even had a chaplains’ service. They were all rotating in and out.

Our experience shows that you can do disaster relief in the perimeter and in the river systems of the United States via the water. It’s a very good way to do it. It worked well in New Orleans with road and rail infrastructure that was not damaged. And then you think about what could happen in San Francisco or Los Angeles area with an earthquake. Out there, the infrastructure of roads and railroads would be destroyed, so the only way you could help people would be by water.