Revival

Helping the Gulf Coast communities recover, the Seabees attended school board meetings, USNS Comfort opened its doors to local doctors

By DAVID W. MUNNS, Assistant Editor

Fate brought them together years ago and now they seemed a perfect match. Much of the Gulf Coast was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and the Navy Seabees stationed at the Construction Battalion Center (CBC), Gulfport, Miss. — near the center of Katrina’s path — were specially trained for disaster relief and recovery.

Seabees have been in Gulfport for more than 60 years and frequently had taken part in the region’s civic affairs. But the need was never greater than when Katrina ravaged the coast, wiping out entire communities.

After Katrina roared by, the 1,300 Seabees at Gulfport were deployed throughout the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts, opening up roads for emergency vehicles, repairing water mains and bringing water pumping stations back online. They helped create a shelter and food distribution center in D’Iberville, Miss., built a tent city in Pass Christian, Miss., and brought Gulfport’s sewer system back to life.

Gulfport Mayor Malcolm Jones told JO1 Dennis Herring, of Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 1, the Seabees had “done a great job. They’ve been very helpful here. I’m pleased with this.”

But neither Jones nor Navy personnel involved in rescue-and-relief efforts mentioned that the Seabees were hurting, too. More than 500 Seabee families associated with the Gulfport CBC lost their homes in the hurricane. The Seabees worked for weeks helping to restore the communities along the coast knowing that their homes, cars, possessions and family mementos were washed away by the storm.

Navy Capt. George E. Eichert, commander of the 22nd Naval Construction Regiment, told Seapower: “It makes you proud because they basically ignored their own personal hurt and went out in the community and did the right thing.”

It was a story repeated many times along the coast in the weeks after the storm. Capt. Bruce Jones, commander of Coast Guard Air Station, New Orleans, and Capt. David Callahan, commander of the Coast Guard Aviation Training Center, Mobile, Ala., said in a Sept. 11 report to other service commanders that hundreds of Coast Guard people worked “in horrendous conditions and with amazing displays of bravery and perseverance. Many of these shipmates lost everything in the flooding. Their stories remain to be told.”

One shipmate was Lt. Craig O’Brien, the pilot of a rescue helicopter, who, with his crew, rescued many from the rooftops of New Orleans and then flew downriver to the towns of Baras, Violet and Empire. They hoisted people between tree lines and power lines, pulled them from balconies and chopped through roofs to rescue many who had fled to their attics and were trapped as the waters rose. Their copter was an HH-65B, which flies under stiff restrictions because of its faulty engines.

“One hiccup and you’ll be flying on the wrong side of dead man’s curve,” he said.

O’Brien remembers the woman they yanked from New Orleans’ central business district “who went into shock in the back of the helo” and began screaming. Her two children — ages 7 and 10 — were calm despite the dangers and their mother’s condition: “the toughest kids we’ve ever seen,” he said.

O’Brien and his crew kept food and water in their copter for the victims, and candy “to put a smile on the faces” of the children they pulled to safety.

He rescued people only one block from his own home in a New Orleans neighborhood that was under 6 feet of water. O’Brien’s home was built on 3-foot pilings and was not totally destroyed. But the first floor is covered in mold and will require major renovation. His Jeep Wrangler is probably a total loss.

Two days after Katrina struck, Coast Guard Warrant Officer Michael Augustine made the first mortgage payment on his new home in Slidell, La., which had just been destroyed in the storm. But his chief concern immediately after Katrina was the father and two children, ages 4 and 6, waving at him from a residential rooftop in the suburbs of New Orleans as Augustine steered the helicopter toward them.

They had orders to rescue women and children first. So they pulled the children up and left the father behind. But Augustine and his crew quickly changed their priorities. “It was going to be days before evacuations ended, and we knew families were going to get separated if we didn’t get whole families off of the rooftops” together, Augustine said.

Marine Staff Sgt. Jerod Murphy was one of the more fortunate victims of Katrina. His home at the Seabee base in Gulfport was relatively unscathed, though his prized motorcycle was damaged and his car may need a paint job. On the day Katrina slammed into the coast, Murphy’s wife and four children were in North Carolina “looking for a place to sleep.” They are still there, though Murphy is back in his home waiting to learn if surveyors will find mold in his walls, forcing him out once again.

After Katrina passed over and the storm surge had receded, Murphy assembled a team to man the two amphibious assault vehicles (AAVs) at the base, and promptly left to search for victims amid winds still blowing at 80 mph. Working a 72-hour shift, his team pulled about 130 people out of the area in waters 9-12 feet deep.

Overall, the sea services deployed thousands of people, dozens of ships and aircraft, and special equipment such as amphibious assault vehicles and inflatable boats to assist in rescue-and-relief efforts after the storm struck. Some were redeployed to deal with the after-effects of Hurricane Rita that hit Texas and Louisiana several weeks later.

As the need for military relief forces on the Gulf Coast began to subside, the services began to tally the damage and displacement suffered by military families in the region. Navy Rear Adm. Robert Passmore, commander of Task Force Navy Family, estimates that 22,000 Navy families — 88,000 people including retirees, civilian employees, reservists and their dependents — were affected by the storm. Some have “severe needs” for medical care, housing or counseling, he said.

The task force was created to “be sure every family has a plan for getting back to normal,” and to link families with Navy organizations and outside assistance agencies that provide a range of services such as pastoral counseling, housing, legal aid and assistance with pets, Passmore said. Some owners of the temporary housing provided Navy families “do not accept pets,” so the task force makes other arrangements.

Approximately 600 Marine Forces Reserve families were evacuated from the New Orleans area, said Capt. Christopher Logan, a Marine public affairs officer. They are receiving assistance from Family Service Centers and Marine Corps commands.

Rear Adm. Stephen Rochon, director of Coast Guard personnel management, said approximately 7,950 of the service’s people, including retirees, dependents and members of the Coast Guard auxiliary, were affected by the storm.

“Many lost everything,” he said. Others evacuated and returned to find that their homes were not habitable. Some families still are separated and costs on the Gulf Coast are rising.

“One enlisted person returned to his apartment to find a note from his landlord saying that rent would be $1,600 per month. His rent prior to Katrina was $800,” Rochon said.

A native of New Orleans, Rochon recently led a Coast Guard assessment team to several locations in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and said he is finding ways to meet the needs of Coast Guard people for housing and emergency relief for ancillary costs such as travel home by their dependents. The trip was “heart-wrenching and heart-warming,” he said. Despite the hardships, “the overwhelming number” of Coast Guard active-duty people in the region want to extend their tours.

While helping their own recover, the services are focusing on long-term assistance to communities in the Gulf Coast. Seabees saw early on that one of the principal ways to help the towns and cities bounce back was to open the local schools. Approaching county and state governments, they proposed to work in the schools, making temporary repairs to broken windows, leaking roofs and cleaning up wreckage in the schoolyards.

“We basically needed to button the buildings up, make them safe, make them clean and make sure they had power and plumbing” so children could return to schools in the six southernmost Mississippi counties, Eichert said. School officials in the area initially estimated schools would not be open until Jan. 1, but Seabees and others prodded them to reschedule. All of the schools in the area now are open.

Eichert and his colleagues attended school board meetings to help address the complex issues this task entailed. They had to bring back the teachers, keeping the academic pace flowing and find ways to maintain a work force of bus drivers and maintenance crews despite the interruption to the school year.

Six weeks after the storm, Seabees were focusing their efforts on building tent communities that can house up to 2,000 people using two-by-fours and tent canvas so residents can return.

“We’re not independent here; we’re doing what the local community wants us to do,” Eichert said. “How the community evolves over the next few years is going to be an interesting story. It’s a disaster. It’s a catastrophe. But when you get to rebuild, it’s also an opportunity.”

The Navy and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals formed a partnership enabling New Orleans physicians to treat patients aboard the hospital ship USNS Comfort, which had moored at Naval Support Activity, New Orleans. The unusual agreement was intended to provide hospital support to local residents after some of its medical facilities, including the large Charity and University hospitals, were closed because of the storm.

Meanwhile, the services are repairing facilities that were severely damaged by the storm. Coast Guard Air Station, New Orleans, lost most of its berthing and shops spaces when the winds of Katrina peeled back the hangar roof. In early October, demolition trucks were rolling in to disassemble the roof.

“It’s slowly getting back to normal,” Augustine said. “I keep telling my guys, ‘these little things are victories for us.’ This is the first step to an end.”

The base’s sports field has been converted to a makeshift trailer park, nicknamed Camp Katrina, with more than 40 trailers housing Coast Guardsmen, Navy Reservists and a Marine Corps safety team. Augustine said many of them still are without their families who remain in refuge, scattered across the country.

Coast Guard Aviation Training Center, Mobile, lost its power, communications and operations spaces in the storm, said Callahan, the center commander. Nonetheless, the facility became a center of rescue operations immediately afterward, providing support to 37 Coast Guard helicopters and 1,900 Coast Guard men and women who conducted rescue operations “around the clock,” he said.

As a training command, the center had a large number of temporary quarters on hand, but dozens of pilots, flight mechanics and rescue swimmers slept on cots “jammed into every corner of the base,” he said.

Though much of their relief work in the region is done, many who took part came away with indelible memories of their nights and days on the Gulf Coast, when lives were on the line.

O’Brien said he witnessed “the best of humanity” as his helicopter put a rescue swimmer down to hoist people off their rooftop, only to see the victims below point to an elderly couple two houses away that needed help even more.

Murphy, the Marine staff sergeant, remembers the moment he received a “status red” report, meaning someone on the ground was on the verge of death. He and his crew raced to the location they were given, but “when we pulled up, we were 30 seconds too late.” The team pulled the man to the side of the road and covered him in a body bag.

“But no more than five seconds later, a woman of about 30 with a 5-month-old infant came out of the rubble 50 yards away from us. We were able to load them up and evacuate them.” The experience revitalized the team, he said.

AST3 Matthew Novellino, a rescue swimmer from Coast Guard Station Clearwater, Fla., will remember his days on the coast as a challenging indoctrination. He had just qualified as a rescue swimmer and pulled 17 people to safety on his first hoist.

Callahan recalls the sight of rescue swimmers walking across his base with Sawzalls, the Dewalt reciprocating saw kits, dangling from their waists — a lesson learned after they found so many trapped in attics on their first day of operations. An officer at the base, Cmdr. Brad Bean, quickly dispatched a team to the local Home Depot that bought every ax and Sawzall on the shelves.

But perhaps Callahan’s favorite memory is from his first flight over the site of Gulfport’s Coast Guard station. It was gone, except for a concrete pad and steps leading to nowhere. But someone had attached the Coast Guard ensign to a nearby light pole. It was right where the station had been, flying in the wind.