that much of the Coast Guard’s local resources had been deployed to St. Bernard Parish where the destruction was more severe.
Joe recalled that the efforts of the crews from Engine 35 immediately after Katrina’s passing were nothing short of amazing. Joe’s team was closest to the lake. The firefighters from Engine 35 came into the Lakeview area from City Park at Filmore Avenue rescuing people after 3:00 p.m. Also arriving to help out in the Lakeview neighborhood searches were Capt. Richard Smith and Operator Joe Francis of Engine 13’s crew.
When Capt. Jamie Lampard of E-35 arrived at Filmore Avenue at the Orleans Canal, he said there were people calling for help as far as he could see. E-35’s crew had no boats when they arrived at that location. They had to find boats in the neighborhood. On Monday evening, they brought about 90 people back to the levee at the Orleans Canal where the water on the City Park side had not started to rise yet. They called for RTA buses to bring the people out, but the buses never came. “All our crews stayed out until it was too dark to see.”
Joe was grateful for Engine 35’s activities in their area because it was highly populated and between the crews, they were able to get a lot of people out of harm’s way. Joe recalled the great work of Engine 35’s crew with men such as Capt. Al Schmolke, Capt. Jamie Lampard, Operator Scott Schmitt and Firefighter Charlie Howley.
Folks from Engine 1 and other uptown stations heard Joe and Capt. Hellmers on the radio on the day of the storm had also come to their area to assist. Some of these firefighters included Capt. Jerry Wiltz, Capt. Dave Hebert and Operator Chuck Dalferes. At the crack of dawn on Wednesday, they got into their boats and headed over to Delgado.
While on their way, Case and Hellmers came across a large group of civilian boaters. They stopped the civilians and asked them what they were doing. The civilian boaters were eager to help. Some were enlisted to go to Delgado. Others were sent with a Firefighter guide to an apartment complex at Robert E. Lee and Paris Avenue, where it was reported that there was a large group of elderly people. The rest were given assignments to search streets and areas that had not been searched yet.
On the way to Delgado, they arrived at the railroad underpass where there were train tracks crossing Canal Blvd. The water had risen as far as the tracks, and the tracks were dry. With all of the manpower available, they immediately began dragging boats over the railroad tracks. Capt. Richard Smith of E-13 led a group of about 10 civilian boats to Delgado. At this time, because of all the civilians helping out with the rescues, they decided to make the dry tracks a staging area.
Firefighter Charlie Howley arrived on one of the boats from Delgado. Joe had worked closely with Charlie when they were assigned to Engine 4. Firefighter Howley joined the operation and coordinated some of the Cajun Navy to evacuate the remaining people at Delgado. He additionally coordinated the transfer of several boatloads of civilians from the St. Bernard Housing complex and from the Orleans Avenue Pumping station to the FEMA staging area on I-10 near the 17th Street Canal. He then joined Joe’s crew for the remainder of the day at the staging area atop the train tracks. There were still areas that need to be searched on both sides of the tracks, so they enlisted the aid of the civilians to complete the searches.
The dry tracks area became the staging area for transferring boats from one side to the other. Joe, Firefighter Lee Beba, and Operator Stanley Harris occupied the tracks and spent their time lifting boats over to the other side. Many civilian volunteers were drafted to help the firefighters at the tracks as well.
Since they had searched on the lake side of the tracks, they enlisted civilians to search the other side. Joe recalled that Capt. Case and Capt. Hellmers were in a boat and went back through the neighborhoods to find as many boats as possible, as they knew there would be lot of people coming over.
Joe sent Firefighter King to the other side of the train tracks, along with a large number of civilians. Before long, Joe could see a lot of the Fire Department people coming up in boats.
He said, “It was a beautiful sight! I looked behind me and saw what looked like hundreds of boats.” The armada was being referred to as the ‘The Cajun Navy,’ a name that Douglas Brinkley popularized in his bestselling book about the storm The Great Deluge.
The Cajun Navy represented hundreds of boats and volunteers coming from all over southern Louisiana. The entity was born on Tuesday, August 30, when State Senator Nick Gautreaux initiated a public request during the 5:00 news on Lafayette’s KATC and KLFY television stations. Gautreaux’s request was for every able-bodied citizen with a boat to show up at the Acadiana Mall on Johnston Street in Lafayette, Louisiana by 5 a.m., Wednesday morning and drive to New Orleans to help rescue stranded flood victims. When Gautreaux arrived at the Acadiana Mall in the early hours of Wednesday morning, the Mall parking lot was filled with boats and trucks of all shapes and sizes, with hundreds of people willing to help rescue their fellow Louisiana citizens.
Later on Wednesday, many of the civilian armada had been stuck on the other side of the overpass trying to get through the FEMA paperwork. They had to sign all kinds of papers following the FEMA bureaucracy and were frustrated because they wanted to get out and start helping people. They said they were held up for several hours and were thrilled to death to finally get out of there and begin assisting in the operations. They set up an area where people were deployed on both sides of the train tracks to assist in moving the boats back and forth across the tracks.
The communication generators had flooded on Monday, thus communications were a problem. At the dispatch center, the water had risen so high that all the generators were dead, and transmissions were not possible.
The only accessible communications was Channel F on their radios. It was being used by all the first responders. Channel F worked as a type of walkie-talkie and had weaker signal strength than their regular channels. It was generally used as a redundant fall-back channel in the event that the communication towers were lost or Dispatch went down. Joe recalled that they would sporadically pick up transmissions from across the city but typically, the range was limited to a mile or two. Joe was not able to communicate with the men at Lindy Boggs, which is about one-and-a-half miles from the tracks.
At this time, parts of the city were experiencing flood depths of up to 20 feet. There were 11hospitals in New Orleans. Most were flooded and without electricity. Conditions were chaotic.
Capt. Mike Donaldson was on one of the boats coming from Delgado. He had just arrived at Delgado after walking from Lindy Boggs and he saw the conditions there. He notified the firefighters at the staging area that 15 people were immediately in danger of losing their lives and that a rescue operation needed to be organized.
“Firefighter Gabe King had been sent to Lindy Boggs when we first arrived at the train tracks just after dawn, and civilian crews were sent in with Capt. Mike Donaldson and Firefighter Reginald Kelly.” Captain Gerry Aitken and Firefighter Barret Williams were at Lindy Boggs, as it was their staging area for Engine 26 during the storm. Captain Aitken had scouted out an area about a block away from the hospital next to the U.S. Post Office, on Jefferson Davis Parkway, for helicopter evacuations to begin. There was a high patch of dry ground that was used as a landing zone right next to Bayou St. John. The hospital was about a mile-and-a-half from the staging area on the tracks. The crew on the tracks recalled that they had heard later that Firefighter Capt. Aitken had a crew on the site of the hospital and that the scene was horrific.
Lindy Boggs was caring for 120 patients when Katrina struck. Many of the patients’ and employees’ families also sought refuge at the hospital. When the levees failed and the water rose, the occupants found themselves stranded at the facility. Many of the critical patients were recovering from organ transplants and as such were at great risk because with no power, cardiac monitoring and mechanical ventilation systems were non-functional. The firefighters and hospital staff were desperately trying to keep critically ill patients
