again, proving beyond a reasonable doubt who's corner the left wing propaganda machine is in
there's one big difference between the refugee like camps created under Bush and Obama, Bush didn't bring about Katrina while Obama is responsible for today's border quagmire by advocating an easy path to amnesty and failing to secure the borders. He is literally encouraging them to crash the concert and rush the stage, that can't end well.
libtards espouse, condone and support one clusterfuck followed by another, they're that fucking ridiculous. Their double standards and inconsistencies and their unyielding distortion of the truth is flat out disgusting to watch.
there's one big difference between the refugee like camps created under Bush and Obama, Bush didn't bring about Katrina while Obama is responsible for today's border quagmire by advocating an easy path to amnesty and failing to secure the borders. He is literally encouraging them to crash the concert and rush the stage, that can't end well.
libtards espouse, condone and support one clusterfuck followed by another, they're that fucking ridiculous. Their double standards and inconsistencies and their unyielding distortion of the truth is flat out disgusting to watch.
WASHINGTON, August 28, 2015 — Forecasters said the hurricane would be bad, but no one expected a Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina hit the American Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, causing initial destruction from Texas to Florida. It wreaked such damage over such a large area that it changed the way the U.S. government responds to disasters.
According to the National Hurricane Center Katrina was directly responsible for around 1,200 deaths, making it the third most deadly hurricane in American history. It caused $108 billion in property damage, making it the costliest hurricane to strike the U.S.
DoD personnel were in the middle of rescue and recovery efforts for weeks and months after the storm hit.
More than 60,000 members of the U.S. military forces were on the ground, first saving, then sustaining lives.
An Enormous Effort
It was an enormous effort with 18,000 active duty service members joining 43,000 National Guardsmen that focused on Katrina relief operations.
And they were needed. When Katrina hit, it caused a storm surge that inundated whole coastlines, according to National Hurricane Center Service measurements. The storm had sustained winds of more than 120 mph. Portions of Louisiana and Mississippi received 15 inches of rain.
Katrina knocked out power and the communications grid crashed. Bridges, underpasses and roads were all closed. Flooding forced relief personnel to detour for miles.
Huge Storm
The size of the storm caused its own set of problems. The storm surge in Mobile Bay -- fully 70 miles east of where Katrina hit land -- was still between 12 and 16 feet. Hurricane force winds lashed the Florida Panhandle.
Typically, hurricanes lose force quickly once striking land. Not Katrina. Tornadoes and rain lashed inland areas up into Georgia. Hurricane Katrina affected over 93,000 square miles of the United States, an area almost as large as Great Britain and left an estimated five million people without power, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Levees protecting the city of New Orleans weren’t high enough with the storm surge overtopping some of the protective berms, and breaching others. At a U.S. Senate hearing after the storm, Army Corps of Engineers officials said there were 55 breaches in the levee system protecting the city.
New Orleans Residents Experience the Storm
New Orleans officials estimated that 80 percent of the population evacuated, but that still left between 50,000 and 60,000 people who were hunkering down in their homes or in “last-chance” shelters like the Superdome. The levee failures flooded about 80 percent of the city. Some 26,000 people who had taken refuge in the Superdome were surrounded by water.
The city also sustained wind damage. The Hyatt Hotel in downtown New Orleans had almost every window blown out on the north side of the building.
The Mississippi coast was devastated. Pass Christian, a pretty town along the Gulf Coast, disappeared. The storm surge and winds scoured the town leaving nothing but concrete slabs where brick homes once stood. The surge picked up whole section of a bridge that carried Route 90 and deposited the huge concrete structure 200 to 300 meters inland. Strangely, the other two lanes of the bridge remained in place. More than 80 percent of the structures in Pass Christian were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, according to local officials who had set up a headquarters in a relatively unscathed gas station.
In Biloxi the surge picked up freight train cars full of chicken and the winds broke them apart. For weeks, the smell was something to behold.
Seabees based in Gulfport, Mississippi, began work with their base essentially underwater.
Rescue Efforts Commence
U.S. Coast Guard and National Guard personnel moved in as soon as conditions allowed. Coast Guardsmen were the first on the scene with any kind of organization. Coast Guard helicopters skittered across the city rescuing people from rooftops, from flooded streets and providing the eyes for those following in their wake. The Coast Guard helicopters were soon followed by Coast Guard boats. The airport in Mobile became the world’s largest Coast Guard base with choppers from around the service flying missions. Overall, Coast Guard personnel rescued 33,544 people during Katrina operations, according to their records. For its response, the Coast Guard received the Presidential Unit Citation.
National Guardsmen tried to move into the city even as the winds were blowing and the rain was falling. Fallen trees and flooded roads stalled their progress, said Guardsmen. Many of the Guardsmen had lost their homes, yet they were heading out to help others. There was confusion about what powers Guardsmen had and who they reported to.
In New Orleans order had broken down. Shortly after the hurricane passed looting began and reports out of the city mentioned everything from murder to rape to carjackings. Later investigations found the reports were exaggerated, but it was no exaggeration that the city was in dire straits.
Multi-Service Effort
National Guard forces entering the city conducted humanitarian, search-and-rescue, evacuation and security missions, officials reported. While Coast Guard, Air Force and Army helicopters sought out those trapped in attics or roofs, National Guardsmen and police conducted house-to-house searches. The doors marked with an X and information in the various quadrants saying who searched the house, what was found and when the search was conducted, soon became a familiar sign.
The Guardsmen were soon joined by active-duty soldiers and Marines.
Navy and Coast Guard vessels sailed up the Mississippi River to lend the help their crews and facilities could provide. In time, 28 ships -- 21 Navy and seven Coast Guard -- were stationed in the affected region.
Coordinating the DoD effort was Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, who commanded Joint Task Force Katrina. Honore, a Louisiana native, became a legend for his gruff, no nonsense approach. “He got things done,” then-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said of Honore.
Getting Back to Normal
The Army Corps of Engineers set about mending the breached levees and getting the pumping stations that usually kept the below-sea-level city dry working again. It was October before the floodwaters were pumped out.
There are still signs of Katrina in New Orleans and along the coast. Then-President George W. Bush said recovery would take years, and he was right. A decade on, the area is still rebuilding. New, deeper levees were emplaced, new water control apparatus erected. Some areas were elevated, while others were cleared. It remains a work in progress.
Katrina has served as a warning against complacency, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said. It is an example of why people should take evacuation orders seriously and be prepared for emergencies.
The loss of life and the damage from Katrina was so severe, that the National Weather Service officially retired Katrina from the Atlantic hurricane naming list.
Hurricane Katrina hit the American Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, causing initial destruction from Texas to Florida. It wreaked such damage over such a large area that it changed the way the U.S. government responds to disasters.
According to the National Hurricane Center Katrina was directly responsible for around 1,200 deaths, making it the third most deadly hurricane in American history. It caused $108 billion in property damage, making it the costliest hurricane to strike the U.S.
DoD personnel were in the middle of rescue and recovery efforts for weeks and months after the storm hit.
More than 60,000 members of the U.S. military forces were on the ground, first saving, then sustaining lives.
An Enormous Effort
It was an enormous effort with 18,000 active duty service members joining 43,000 National Guardsmen that focused on Katrina relief operations.
And they were needed. When Katrina hit, it caused a storm surge that inundated whole coastlines, according to National Hurricane Center Service measurements. The storm had sustained winds of more than 120 mph. Portions of Louisiana and Mississippi received 15 inches of rain.
Katrina knocked out power and the communications grid crashed. Bridges, underpasses and roads were all closed. Flooding forced relief personnel to detour for miles.
Huge Storm
The size of the storm caused its own set of problems. The storm surge in Mobile Bay -- fully 70 miles east of where Katrina hit land -- was still between 12 and 16 feet. Hurricane force winds lashed the Florida Panhandle.
Typically, hurricanes lose force quickly once striking land. Not Katrina. Tornadoes and rain lashed inland areas up into Georgia. Hurricane Katrina affected over 93,000 square miles of the United States, an area almost as large as Great Britain and left an estimated five million people without power, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Levees protecting the city of New Orleans weren’t high enough with the storm surge overtopping some of the protective berms, and breaching others. At a U.S. Senate hearing after the storm, Army Corps of Engineers officials said there were 55 breaches in the levee system protecting the city.
New Orleans Residents Experience the Storm
New Orleans officials estimated that 80 percent of the population evacuated, but that still left between 50,000 and 60,000 people who were hunkering down in their homes or in “last-chance” shelters like the Superdome. The levee failures flooded about 80 percent of the city. Some 26,000 people who had taken refuge in the Superdome were surrounded by water.
The city also sustained wind damage. The Hyatt Hotel in downtown New Orleans had almost every window blown out on the north side of the building.
The Mississippi coast was devastated. Pass Christian, a pretty town along the Gulf Coast, disappeared. The storm surge and winds scoured the town leaving nothing but concrete slabs where brick homes once stood. The surge picked up whole section of a bridge that carried Route 90 and deposited the huge concrete structure 200 to 300 meters inland. Strangely, the other two lanes of the bridge remained in place. More than 80 percent of the structures in Pass Christian were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, according to local officials who had set up a headquarters in a relatively unscathed gas station.
In Biloxi the surge picked up freight train cars full of chicken and the winds broke them apart. For weeks, the smell was something to behold.
Seabees based in Gulfport, Mississippi, began work with their base essentially underwater.
Rescue Efforts Commence
U.S. Coast Guard and National Guard personnel moved in as soon as conditions allowed. Coast Guardsmen were the first on the scene with any kind of organization. Coast Guard helicopters skittered across the city rescuing people from rooftops, from flooded streets and providing the eyes for those following in their wake. The Coast Guard helicopters were soon followed by Coast Guard boats. The airport in Mobile became the world’s largest Coast Guard base with choppers from around the service flying missions. Overall, Coast Guard personnel rescued 33,544 people during Katrina operations, according to their records. For its response, the Coast Guard received the Presidential Unit Citation.
National Guardsmen tried to move into the city even as the winds were blowing and the rain was falling. Fallen trees and flooded roads stalled their progress, said Guardsmen. Many of the Guardsmen had lost their homes, yet they were heading out to help others. There was confusion about what powers Guardsmen had and who they reported to.
In New Orleans order had broken down. Shortly after the hurricane passed looting began and reports out of the city mentioned everything from murder to rape to carjackings. Later investigations found the reports were exaggerated, but it was no exaggeration that the city was in dire straits.
Multi-Service Effort
National Guard forces entering the city conducted humanitarian, search-and-rescue, evacuation and security missions, officials reported. While Coast Guard, Air Force and Army helicopters sought out those trapped in attics or roofs, National Guardsmen and police conducted house-to-house searches. The doors marked with an X and information in the various quadrants saying who searched the house, what was found and when the search was conducted, soon became a familiar sign.
The Guardsmen were soon joined by active-duty soldiers and Marines.
Navy and Coast Guard vessels sailed up the Mississippi River to lend the help their crews and facilities could provide. In time, 28 ships -- 21 Navy and seven Coast Guard -- were stationed in the affected region.
Coordinating the DoD effort was Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, who commanded Joint Task Force Katrina. Honore, a Louisiana native, became a legend for his gruff, no nonsense approach. “He got things done,” then-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said of Honore.
Getting Back to Normal
The Army Corps of Engineers set about mending the breached levees and getting the pumping stations that usually kept the below-sea-level city dry working again. It was October before the floodwaters were pumped out.
There are still signs of Katrina in New Orleans and along the coast. Then-President George W. Bush said recovery would take years, and he was right. A decade on, the area is still rebuilding. New, deeper levees were emplaced, new water control apparatus erected. Some areas were elevated, while others were cleared. It remains a work in progress.
Katrina has served as a warning against complacency, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said. It is an example of why people should take evacuation orders seriously and be prepared for emergencies.
The loss of life and the damage from Katrina was so severe, that the National Weather Service officially retired Katrina from the Atlantic hurricane naming list.
WASHINGTON, August 28, 2015 — In 2005, Hurricane Katrina rocked the nation’s complacency in how it would face a major disaster.
The storm, which hit Louisiana and Mississippi 10 years ago, killed about 1,200 people and caused $10 billion in damage, according to the National Hurricane Center.
About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, and roughly 80 percent of the Mississippi coast was destroyed by the Category 3 hurricane.
U.S. Northern Command was not quite 3 years old when it was thrust into the rescue and recovery phases of Katrina’s aftermath. More than 60,000 service members -- both active duty and National Guard -- participated in storm recovery efforts.
Lessons Continue to Resonate
The lessons from the storm continue to resonate with Northcom, said Tim Russell, the vice director for future operations at in the command’s Colorado Springs, Colorado, headquarters. The command has thorough plans on how to respond to a disaster in the United States, he said. These include not only hurricanes, he noted, but also fires, earthquakes and man-made disasters.
The Defense Department has tremendous resources and the ability to get them where needed, said Donald J. Reed, deputy chief of Northcom’s civil support branch. “Logistics, security, communications, medical support, aircraft -- the list goes on,” he said.
Need for Planning With State and Local Officials
One lesson the command learned from Katrina was the need to do all planning with state and local officials, Reed said. “If something happens,” he explained, “all [parties] need to know how Northcom knits in with local, state and [Federal Emergency Management Agency] efforts.
“There are reams of papers on those plans,” he continued. “There are authorities the Northcom commander has been given by the [defense] secretary to get capability that may be more proximate to the incident site from another service and direct them to be moving in anticipation of a formal request from FEMA.”
In 2005, this wasn’t the case. Northcom was a new command, having been established in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks. “We were just getting our arms around our components,” Russell said. “We didn’t have any forces, … and we didn’t have any authorities to go after forces.”
To get forces, the command had to apply for them, and that was not a very nimble process, Russell said. That has changed, he added, and the Northcom commander now has the authority he needs to get forces.
Dual-Status Commanders
Another aspect learned from the Katrina response was command of the forces involved. While most of the troops in Joint Task Force Katrina were National Guardsmen on Title 32 state orders, many were Title 10 active-duty service members with different chains of command. Northcom since has established dual-status commanders.
“We have a Guardsman who also accepts a federal commission, or we have a federal general officer who takes a state commission, and he is able to provide that unity of effort over Guard and Title 10 federal forces in the same battlespace, working the same problem,” Russell said.
But much of what the command learned was around the need to build relationships for the defense mission of supporting civil authorities. “We work with the National Guard and the services to ensure they understand what our role is,” Russell said. “In 2005, it was not understood what the DoD role was.”
State and local officials also didn’t know what DoD could bring to the effort, how long it would take to get forces and capabilities where they were needed, and they didn’t understand how DoD would knit into state and local efforts, Russell said.
‘Now They Are Getting It’
“Now they are getting it,” he added. “We still have a lot to do, but I think there is a growing recognition of what the Department of Defense’s capabilities are and what our roles can be and, more importantly, there is a sense of trust and a better relationship among local, state, Guard and interagency partners.”
Northcom has a directorate -- the J-9 -- which is the “home room” for interagency representatives, Russell said. The J-9 has reps from the various states, as well as from the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers.
“We have all the organizations from within government that could be involved with a ‘defense support of civil authorities’ event in one place,” he said. “They live here. Immediately, we have people who understand how Northcom will be operating in any given event.”
The National Guard is the biggest partner for the command and Northcom’s deputy commander is a National Guard lieutenant general. The Coast Guard is also integrated at all levels of the command. “The tone and the conversations with our Guard and interagency partners are changing,” Russell said.
Major Change in Disaster-Response Strategy
What also has changed is the strategy behind employing DoD assets, Reed said. During Katrina, the doctrine in place was called “sequential failure,” meaning local officials had to fail and then the state effort had to fail before federal help could come in. Katrina changed this. Local, state and federal planners work together now.
“We are fully engaged in integrated planning with DHS and our other partners, and that has a huge, huge impact on our efforts,” Reed said. “It’s gone from a sequential to a simultaneous event. We’re not seen as threatening to the National Guard or the state, we’re seen as part of a concerted effort, and that enhanced our ability to get the right stuff to the right place.”
The command works constantly on plans and has a group that looks at possibilities around the nation and what the appropriate response should be. Plans do not get dusty on shelving in the headquarters, but are constantly updated with changes in populations, changes in terrain, changes in threats or changes in technology.
Wary of Complacency
The communications system has been reinvented since Katrina, and that must be taken under consideration. Remotely piloted vehicles also add a technology that can be used to survey situations, Russell said.
Both men said they are concerned about complacency, noting that Katrina showed what Mother Nature can do, and the command never wants to think they have everything covered.
“It’s been 14 years since 9/11 and 10 years since Katrina, and we haven’t had a disaster to that level since then, but that doesn’t mean the threats are not still there,” Reed said.
“We at Northcom, we are not complacent,” Russell said. “We spend a lot of energy planning and maintaining relationships that will help us in the event of a disaster.
The storm, which hit Louisiana and Mississippi 10 years ago, killed about 1,200 people and caused $10 billion in damage, according to the National Hurricane Center.
About 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, and roughly 80 percent of the Mississippi coast was destroyed by the Category 3 hurricane.
U.S. Northern Command was not quite 3 years old when it was thrust into the rescue and recovery phases of Katrina’s aftermath. More than 60,000 service members -- both active duty and National Guard -- participated in storm recovery efforts.
Lessons Continue to Resonate
The lessons from the storm continue to resonate with Northcom, said Tim Russell, the vice director for future operations at in the command’s Colorado Springs, Colorado, headquarters. The command has thorough plans on how to respond to a disaster in the United States, he said. These include not only hurricanes, he noted, but also fires, earthquakes and man-made disasters.
The Defense Department has tremendous resources and the ability to get them where needed, said Donald J. Reed, deputy chief of Northcom’s civil support branch. “Logistics, security, communications, medical support, aircraft -- the list goes on,” he said.
Need for Planning With State and Local Officials
One lesson the command learned from Katrina was the need to do all planning with state and local officials, Reed said. “If something happens,” he explained, “all [parties] need to know how Northcom knits in with local, state and [Federal Emergency Management Agency] efforts.
“There are reams of papers on those plans,” he continued. “There are authorities the Northcom commander has been given by the [defense] secretary to get capability that may be more proximate to the incident site from another service and direct them to be moving in anticipation of a formal request from FEMA.”
In 2005, this wasn’t the case. Northcom was a new command, having been established in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks. “We were just getting our arms around our components,” Russell said. “We didn’t have any forces, … and we didn’t have any authorities to go after forces.”
To get forces, the command had to apply for them, and that was not a very nimble process, Russell said. That has changed, he added, and the Northcom commander now has the authority he needs to get forces.
Dual-Status Commanders
Another aspect learned from the Katrina response was command of the forces involved. While most of the troops in Joint Task Force Katrina were National Guardsmen on Title 32 state orders, many were Title 10 active-duty service members with different chains of command. Northcom since has established dual-status commanders.
“We have a Guardsman who also accepts a federal commission, or we have a federal general officer who takes a state commission, and he is able to provide that unity of effort over Guard and Title 10 federal forces in the same battlespace, working the same problem,” Russell said.
But much of what the command learned was around the need to build relationships for the defense mission of supporting civil authorities. “We work with the National Guard and the services to ensure they understand what our role is,” Russell said. “In 2005, it was not understood what the DoD role was.”
State and local officials also didn’t know what DoD could bring to the effort, how long it would take to get forces and capabilities where they were needed, and they didn’t understand how DoD would knit into state and local efforts, Russell said.
‘Now They Are Getting It’
“Now they are getting it,” he added. “We still have a lot to do, but I think there is a growing recognition of what the Department of Defense’s capabilities are and what our roles can be and, more importantly, there is a sense of trust and a better relationship among local, state, Guard and interagency partners.”
Northcom has a directorate -- the J-9 -- which is the “home room” for interagency representatives, Russell said. The J-9 has reps from the various states, as well as from the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers.
“We have all the organizations from within government that could be involved with a ‘defense support of civil authorities’ event in one place,” he said. “They live here. Immediately, we have people who understand how Northcom will be operating in any given event.”
The National Guard is the biggest partner for the command and Northcom’s deputy commander is a National Guard lieutenant general. The Coast Guard is also integrated at all levels of the command. “The tone and the conversations with our Guard and interagency partners are changing,” Russell said.
Major Change in Disaster-Response Strategy
What also has changed is the strategy behind employing DoD assets, Reed said. During Katrina, the doctrine in place was called “sequential failure,” meaning local officials had to fail and then the state effort had to fail before federal help could come in. Katrina changed this. Local, state and federal planners work together now.
“We are fully engaged in integrated planning with DHS and our other partners, and that has a huge, huge impact on our efforts,” Reed said. “It’s gone from a sequential to a simultaneous event. We’re not seen as threatening to the National Guard or the state, we’re seen as part of a concerted effort, and that enhanced our ability to get the right stuff to the right place.”
The command works constantly on plans and has a group that looks at possibilities around the nation and what the appropriate response should be. Plans do not get dusty on shelving in the headquarters, but are constantly updated with changes in populations, changes in terrain, changes in threats or changes in technology.
Wary of Complacency
The communications system has been reinvented since Katrina, and that must be taken under consideration. Remotely piloted vehicles also add a technology that can be used to survey situations, Russell said.
Both men said they are concerned about complacency, noting that Katrina showed what Mother Nature can do, and the command never wants to think they have everything covered.
“It’s been 14 years since 9/11 and 10 years since Katrina, and we haven’t had a disaster to that level since then, but that doesn’t mean the threats are not still there,” Reed said.
“We at Northcom, we are not complacent,” Russell said. “We spend a lot of energy planning and maintaining relationships that will help us in the event of a disaster.
10 Years After -- Team Robins remembers Hurricane Katrina
Posted 8/26/2015 Updated 8/27/2015
Posted 8/26/2015 Updated 8/27/2015
| 8/26/2015 - ROBINS AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. -- The stories tell the same tales. The destruction Hurricane Katrina left when it made landfall Aug. 29, 2005 was immense. Now, 10 years later, Robins team members are sharing their stories of what it was like during and after the storm. "The devastation was unbelievable," said Marty Cain, 78th Air Base Wing legacy systems maintainer, who traveled to Biloxi with a group of coworkers and church members. "All the oak trees were just stripped. The houses were stripped to the foundations," Cain remembered. What his group of a few dozen did was mostly repair homes and cut down trees. Part of their efforts included rescuing an elderly lady who had been trapped in her home due to fallen trees. During his week-long stay - in which the assembly stayed in tents on someone's farm in Lyman, Miss. - Cain saw another place which was buzzing with hummingbirds looking for food. "You can't appreciate the scope of the damage through videos or pictures," he said. In fact, the storm affected areas from Louisiana to Alabama causing 1,304 deaths and $50 billion in damages, according to a report by Dr. Daniel Haulman, Nov. 17, 2006, titled, "The U.S. Air Force Response to Hurricane Katrina." Between Aug. 23 and 29, the Air Force flew 109 hours in WC-130 airplanes which were used to measure and track the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. "Air Force fixed wing aircraft, including C-130s, C-17s and C-5s, flew crucial airlift missions to transport both people and equipment and supplies," the report said. The Air Force evacuated 2,602 medical patients and an additional 26,943 displaced people from the area. In all branches, the Department of Defense "flew 12,786 helicopter sorties, rescued 15,000 citizens and transported 80,000 people," Haulman said. A 433rd Airlift wing C-5 shuttled more than 1,200 patients from New Orleans to San Antonio, Texas. The aircraft also brought in large water pumps from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to help pump water from the flooded New Orleans. Robins deployed 68 personnel and $4 million in equipment for the relief effort from the 51st Combat Communications Squadron and volunteers from the 52nd Combat Communication Squadron were also called upon to aid in setting up communications, according to Tech Sgt. Joshua Bendall, historian for the group. "We brought everything we had," said Master Sgt. Brad Schafer, 78th Medical Group first sergeant and formerly with the 5th Combat Communications Group. The main mission for the group was to set up communications at Keesler Air Force Base near Gulfport, Miss., and to provide assistance to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The deployed airmen stayed in the student triangle at the base during their six- to eight-week stay. Schafer remembered the base commissary being flooded with water and cars floating. He said technical school students at the base were told to leave their cars and were evacuated to other bases. Cars were spray painted with insurance company's names, and houses were also marked to let others know it had been checked for survivors. "It reminded me of a city dump," Schafer said. "All around were trash piles, but those piles were houses. It looked like someone had picked the house up, crumbled it and dropped it back down," Master Sgt. Avis Smith, now the the Robins Airman and Family Readiness Center noncommissioned officer in charge, was stationed at Keesler during the storm. Her husband and three children evacuated to Atlanta while she sheltered on base. She and her fellow coworkers stayed in the dorms, which were made of thick concrete, while the storm hit. In the interior rooms, Smith said she couldn't hear much, but in the bathroom or in the stairwell was a different story. "It sounds like the roof was falling apart," she said. Her siblings lived in New Orleans and lost their homes. Her father, a firefighter in the city, had to gut his house. For years, Smith wouldn't drive along the coast. "I couldn't stand looking at it," she said of the loss of the antebellum homes along the gulf coast along with countless trademark restaurants and shops. Cain was one who did drive along the beach. "There was not a single home standing. It was as ugly as it could get," he said. Joel Watson, a C-130 aircraft overhaul supervisor with the 560th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, was on a different mission. He went to the city as part of an animal rescue. His wife heard there were three women who wanted to help animals in the area. "When we got off the exit, going into Mobile, Ala., there were people looting," Watson said. The closer they got to where the hurricane made landfall, the worse the roads were. "There were big old shrimp boats turned upside down. It was creepy," Watson said. Watson said even with all the devastation and the sadness that came with the tragedy, he was able to take away a touch of happiness when he brought home a Catahoula hound dog he named Jazz. "I got a good dog from it," Watson said. |
[h=1]Soldiers remember Hurricane Katrina on 10th anniversary[/h]August 20, 2015
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Aug. 20, 2015) -- One of the first things Col. Rodney Painting noticed on entering New Orleans 10 years ago, after Hurricane Katrina had left the city flooded, was the smell.
"There is a unique smell that comes along with a house being flooded," Painting said. "You can smell the wet sheet rock, the wet insulation, the wet furniture. It was odd. The entire city smelled like that."
Painting, a National Guardsman, serves as commander of the 225th Engineer Brigade. As a civilian, he serves as director of capital improvements for the Louisiana Recovery School District, and administers the $1.8 billion Federal Emergency Management Agency grant that is meant to rebuild schools damaged by Katrina.
When Katrina happened, Painting was a lieutenant colonel, and was commander of the 205th Engineer Battalion.
Ten years later, New Orleans has largely recovered from the devastation rained upon it as a result of the hurricane. That storm landed in the city Aug. 29, 2005. While the wind from the storm caused damage in New Orleans and surrounding areas, and wind and flash flooding from storm surges caused damage in neighboring Mississippi, New Orleans was unique in that the flood waters came in and didn't leave until months later. Nearly 80 percent of the city was underwater.
"But even after the water started to go down in St. Bernard Parrish and in Orleans Parrish, it was an eerie smell," Painting said of the city. "And even into the fall, as summer faded away and temperatures started to drop into the 70s, the 60s, and even the 50s - you still had that odor. It was an odd smell."
AID FROM THE AIR
After Katrina hit the southern United States, causing the most damage in Louisiana and Mississippi, National Guard Soldiers and airmen from all 50 states, as well as first responders from the local area and from around the nation, descended on the afflicted areas to provide relief, to clear away damage from roads, and in New Orleans, to rescue citizens, who were trapped in their own homes by the floodwaters.
Maj. Timothy Cleighton grew up in Slidell, Louisiana. It's a city just north of Lake Pontchartrain, and is considered, like many communities on the "north shore" of the lake, to be part of the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area.
Cleighton serves now as a full-time National Guardsman with the 204th Theater Airfield Operations Group. But in 2005, he was a first lieutenant and UH-60 Black Hawk pilot with the National Guard's 1/244th Air Assault Helicopter Battalion. He was also a graduate student.
Just before Katrina, his unit had returned from a 14-month deployment, mostly in Iraq.
"This was the first real 'all-hazards' event I'd been a part of as aviation," Cleighton said. "Previously I was in the engineers. My only experience with hurricanes or tornadoes was when I was maybe an E-3 gate guard over in one of the neighborhoods, trying to keep people from looting. And that was a small event. Katrina was the first full-scale natural disaster I was part of."
He said in advance of the hurricane, his unit evacuated aircraft from New Orleans to Houston, Texas, and Alexandria Esler Regional Airport - about 162 miles northeast of New Orleans. Once the damage to New Orleans was evident, he said, they moved the aircraft back to the Louisiana capital of Baton Rouge to stage their operations from there.
Those operations, he said, started out pretty intense. Not quite 24-hour operations for him, but 18-hour days at least. He said they were flying missions in New Orleans every day, all day, to rescue those who were trapped by the flood waters.
"Because it was such a high-impacted area with the number of people, our mission every day was to go fly into New Orleans and rescue as many people as we could. That was the task," he said.
He said initially, with the number of helicopters flying around the city, and from so many units and agencies, there wasn't really a plan for who would go rescue people in a particular part of the city.
"What we kind of did was fly around, find a spot without a lot of activity, and start searching there," he said. "It was amazing the amount of deconfliction we could do internally. You'd see an aircraft, or five, over in the north side. So we'd slide over and go to the south side and start looking.
"We'd put a wheel on top of a house and throw people on, or we'd land in the middle of the street, or the levy. Anything we could do to pick them up. I didn't have a hoist. I was kind of limited with what I could do."
Initially, Cleighton said, they brought those rescued to the Superdome in New Orleans. Later, they started taking citizens to the New Orleans International Airport.
"Once we did that it was just - I had to have been, sometimes, number 50 in line to drop people off," he said. "That's with a full aircraft full of people. All of us lined up to drop people off. I've never seen so many aircraft."
Cleighton said he and his crew flew long hours for four or five days - from maybe 6 a.m. out of Baton Rouge until nightfall. Later, he said, relief came when other pilots from his units showed up to start relieving him and his crew. But then it was too late for the college student to start back to his regular schedule.
"I was in my master's program," he said. "And I ended up just not going to class, and withdrawing, and started running missions."
After the bulk of the rescue missions ended, he said, he ran other flying missions, including moving VIPs and other personnel around New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana. Included among his passengers were then-governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, and then-adjutant general of Louisiana, Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau.
"She was doing an assessment," Cleighton said of the governor. "We flew from the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain to the south shore, so she could address the damage."
"It really hit home," he said of the flood. "Not so many times do you see a disaster where you see eight feet of water around a bunch of houses where you grew up yourself ... or you have friends that grew up in the area. Just to see the impact on them. There were a couple of people who had lived in the area that was flooded with water up to the rooftops. To see their reaction, it was gut-wrenching. They grew up on that street, or played football there."
'LIKE 1862'
Painting said before Katrina hit, he'd been in his unit's headquarters in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The eye of Katrina passed over that city and "rode the state line" between Mississippi and Louisiana all the way to the north, he said.
Afterward, his team was responsible for clearing highways in and around Bogalusa, Slidell, Covington, Franklinton and Hammond - all cities just north of Lake Pontchartrain. In fact, his area of responsibility, he said, was from the north shore of the lake about 40 miles north to the state's border with Mississippi.
"We cleared a significant amount of land," he said. Additionally, his unit was responding to the storm surge from the lake that had hit Slidell. "We were doing house-to-house checks in that area, along with the local sheriff office." The storm surge had also affected Mandeville and Madisonville on the north shore.
"We were going house to house, doing searches, and using the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] marking system on the doors," he said. And at the same time, communications lines with higher headquarters were down.
"It was like 1862 - like the Civil War," he said. "We had to send runners, to a certain point, to deliver hard copy messages. I remember specifically we took a convoy, after it took three days to get the roads cleared."
Eventually, Painting said, he was able to link up with an Air National Guard unit that had communications capability. They stayed together for about two weeks to keep a line of connection open with the state command group to direct them on missions.
While Painting said his primary area of responsibility was north of the lake, eventually "the severity of the situation in New Orleans basically dictated that nearly every National Guardsman had to surge toward the city."
About a week after the storm struck, his unit went down to New Orleans to work alongside units already there, including the 769th Engineer Battalion, and the 527th Engineer Battalion.
With a unit of about 600 Soldiers, and for about six months, he said, they did such work as levy repair, debris removal, and movement of huge sandbags using sling load operations. "We ran a gamut of everything," he said.
"The devastation in New Orleans is tremendous," he said. "And when the flood waters went down, it left a fine layer of silt everywhere. You could always identify how high the water was on a building by the water line. And each day the water would drop it would dry at a different line. You had a line, like when your children grow up and you have them stand next to the door and you mark off a different year of their life by how tall they are. You could gauge the water going down day by day, with various water marks."
'CITIES OF THE DEAD'
Heading southbound toward Belle Chasse, a community also considered part of the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area, and also home of the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans, Painting saw more mind-boggling damage that came as a result of flood waters.
"There were two fish trawlers that had washed up onto the highway," he said. "Like ships, lying in the middle of the road. And further down the road, coffins and caskets floated in from a cemetery. All the burials in that part of Louisiana are above ground. Just like in New Orleans - they call them the 'cities of the dead.' They are all above ground because the water table is so high, so coffins float up if there is a flood. And there is also a huge citrus industry down there. So you had dead cattle that flooded in, you have these old vintage caskets that had floated in from all these old cemeteries, and you had millions of citrus lining the highways."
As part of his civilian job today, Painting said, he is reminded daily of the damage from Katrina.
"We were in a school a few weeks ago ... and we walked into two or three classrooms in a row and the electric clocks were all stopped at the same time, from when the power went out at that school," he said. "You still have the school dates written in chalk in the corner of the chalk board from the teacher's first lesson that never really happened."
He said Katrina is like 9/11, in that it is a significant marker in people's lives by which they place other events. "For people in South Louisiana, it is a milestone in our lives," he said. "We determine things as before Katrina or after Katrina."
"The biggest takeaway here is that a tragedy like this can happen to just about anybody," he said. "And depending on how the community is prepared for it before, that will dictate how they react afterward. It takes a short time to destroy a community. But it has taken 10 years here to get back to normal."
Painting said the nation and the National Guard in Louisiana are now better prepared than before Katrina for another similar disaster. Painting and "about 100 percent" of his Soldiers stayed on duty in support of relief efforts for about six months. Even those Soldiers whose own homes had been destroyed stayed on to work, he said.
"They returned to duty the next day," he said. "When you talk about selfless-service, these guys were the epitome of that."
60 MILES EAST
Watching the news in the summer of 2005, one might have overlooked that Katrina had hit other parts of the United States besides New Orleans. Just 60 miles east of that city, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and further west in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the National Guard there was also dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, which left a different set of problems for the state.
"The average American thinks Katrina only hit New Orleans," Col. Lee W. Smithson said. "But it didn't. We had a greater swath of damage in Mississippi than New Orleans did. Mississippi has 82 counties. Of those, 80 had some type of disaster declaration."
Smithson serves as director of military support for the Mississippi National Guard. He said during Katrina, the Guard became the solver of problems nobody else knew how to deal with. At the time, he was responsible for the six southern counties in Mississippi, to include Pearl River, Stone, George, Jackson, Harrison and Hancock.
In Gulfport, he said, home to the third-largest container port in the Gulf of Mexico, one of those problems reared its head.
"Our two biggest exports here are poultry and shrimp," he said. "The port was full of poultry and shrimp when the storm surge washed all those containers off the port in Gulfport. We had a massive bio-hazard along the shore of Gulfport. Nobody knew what to do with all the dead shrimp and poultry. The local responders came to the Guard and asked us to get rid of it."
He said the material couldn't be dumped in a landfill, because it would contaminate the groundwater. They loaded up all the material into dump trucks, using front loaders, and brought it out into the Gulf, past the barrier islands about nine miles to the south, and dumped it there.
"We did so much more than we normally do," he said. "We had to be the coastal problem solvers."
While in New Orleans the levies broke and left the city flooded for months, in Mississippi, the flooding didn't last long. It moved in and out fairly quickly, in advance of the hurricane passing over, as part of a storm surge. But the storm surge had been devastating nonetheless, Smithson said.
His team weathered Katrina at Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It's about 70 miles north of the coast. On the afternoon of Aug. 29, he and about 125 military police, 100 engineers and 150 highway patrolmen traveled south to Gulfport.
"It took us from 5 p.m. in the afternoon until 11 p.m. that evening to clear all the trees off the highway to get down there," he said. And when the sun came up the next day, "we were blown away by the amount of damage that had been done there in Gulfport."
"We had a 32-foot storm surge," he said. "We had never seen a three-story wall of water anywhere in the United States. We had a tsunami 32 feet tall the whole length of the coast."
That wall of water, he said, went up to a mile inland, except where there were rivers and bays - there it went farther inland.
"We had a wall of water, 10 miles inland in Hancock County," he said. And water also pushed up the Jordan River. Bay St. Louis and Biloxi Bay faced similar devastation. Normally, he said, the barrier islands, about 9 to 12 miles off the coast of Mississippi, would protect the coast, he said. "But you can't protect against a 32-foot storm surge."
'THIRD-WORLD'
Lt. Col. John B. Brown serves as the deputy human resources officer with the Mississippi National Guard. When Katrina came in 2005, he was a liaison Guard officer to Pascagoula in Jackson County.
He said that the devastation in Pascagoula, as a result of the storm surge there, was the worst he's ever seen.
"It reminded me [of] a third-world nation," he said. "Just because of the dirt and grime. Everything was covered in mud. The streets - you couldn't tell they were paved - they looked like a mud street. The people were out doing what they needed to be done."
As a liaison officer to Pascagoula, Brown led a composite team of 25 Soldiers there in advance of the storm making landfall.
"As liaison officer, our job was to coordinate with the emergency management coordinator and let him know what assets we had available and what were our capabilities," he said. "We acted as kind of a sounding board; he'd say what he needed done and ask if we could do it. And if we could, I'd go through the proper procedures to request and get those assets allocated to Jackson County."
He went down with military police and engineers. The engineers, he said, brought trucks that could evacuate people in high water. "The water rises before the storm hits. So we have time before the storm actually makes landfall to make evacuations, and we needed high-water vehicles to do that."
After the landfall, he said, the small composite team he had been in charge of went back to their organic units. The Alabama National Guard sent a task force of 2,000 Soldiers into Jackson County to provide assistance.
"They were fully prepared, and fully organized for the task they came to do, and did a fantastic job," he said. "They were there within maybe two days after landfall."
Brown said that one of the things that makes him proud of being a Mississippian is that the citizens of Pascagoula didn't wait for help to arrive before getting to work on their own.
"They started doing what they needed to do: clearing roads, doing house-to-house searches," he said. "As soon as the water left, they were out there straightening up stuff. Everybody we were working with down there was affected by the storm, because they all live there. They put all that aside. They were policemen, or worked for the Red Cross, or work for the city. They all lost something. "
Smithson said after Katrina, the Guard in Mississippi cleared 3,900 miles of roads with their engineering effort; handed out medicine and 1.2 million meals, ready to eat, or MREs, and almost a million gallons of water by air - which is something they hadn't expected to be asked to do - and distributed an additional 5.4 million gallons of water and 3 million MREs to civilians, across 37 counties, at ground-based points of distribution.
In Mississippi, like in Louisiana, there were communications problems. But Smithson said that as a result of those communications problems, he learned something about military leadership.
"If the commanders out in the field know what it is the big commander wants, his intent, and they understand what their missions are, they will figure a way to make things happen," he said.
After Katrina, he said, there was a Department of Homeland Security grant to build the Mississippi Wireless Integrated Network - a voice and data network "that is second to none." It allows communications across the state, even off shore past the barrier islands. During Deepwater Horizon, he said, the National Guard could fly helicopters out to the spill site and communicate with leadership.
MISSISSIPPI AFTERMATH
Brown said that while the debris and the trash and the leveled homes are now gone in southern Mississippi, reminders of the storm are still evident.
"You can still see some of the devastation. There are still concrete slabs that haven't been rebuilt," he said, including slabs where pre-Civil War homes once stood. "Katrina is the high watermark of hurricanes. Every year when we go through hurricane season, we ask will it be another Katrina. It's still on everybody's mind."
If another storm comes, he said, he thinks the National Guard will be ready to provide support. And he said he thinks that after Katrina, and other storms that have been endured by Mississippi, the residents in affected communities will welcome Guardsmen.
"Just the sight of somebody in a BDU [Battle Dress Uniform] or an ACU [Army Combat Uniform] uniform brings calm," he said. "Even [if] it's just one or two Guardsmen there trying to assess damage, people know help is there."
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Aug. 20, 2015) -- One of the first things Col. Rodney Painting noticed on entering New Orleans 10 years ago, after Hurricane Katrina had left the city flooded, was the smell.
"There is a unique smell that comes along with a house being flooded," Painting said. "You can smell the wet sheet rock, the wet insulation, the wet furniture. It was odd. The entire city smelled like that."
Painting, a National Guardsman, serves as commander of the 225th Engineer Brigade. As a civilian, he serves as director of capital improvements for the Louisiana Recovery School District, and administers the $1.8 billion Federal Emergency Management Agency grant that is meant to rebuild schools damaged by Katrina.
When Katrina happened, Painting was a lieutenant colonel, and was commander of the 205th Engineer Battalion.
Ten years later, New Orleans has largely recovered from the devastation rained upon it as a result of the hurricane. That storm landed in the city Aug. 29, 2005. While the wind from the storm caused damage in New Orleans and surrounding areas, and wind and flash flooding from storm surges caused damage in neighboring Mississippi, New Orleans was unique in that the flood waters came in and didn't leave until months later. Nearly 80 percent of the city was underwater.
"But even after the water started to go down in St. Bernard Parrish and in Orleans Parrish, it was an eerie smell," Painting said of the city. "And even into the fall, as summer faded away and temperatures started to drop into the 70s, the 60s, and even the 50s - you still had that odor. It was an odd smell."
AID FROM THE AIR
After Katrina hit the southern United States, causing the most damage in Louisiana and Mississippi, National Guard Soldiers and airmen from all 50 states, as well as first responders from the local area and from around the nation, descended on the afflicted areas to provide relief, to clear away damage from roads, and in New Orleans, to rescue citizens, who were trapped in their own homes by the floodwaters.
Maj. Timothy Cleighton grew up in Slidell, Louisiana. It's a city just north of Lake Pontchartrain, and is considered, like many communities on the "north shore" of the lake, to be part of the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area.
Cleighton serves now as a full-time National Guardsman with the 204th Theater Airfield Operations Group. But in 2005, he was a first lieutenant and UH-60 Black Hawk pilot with the National Guard's 1/244th Air Assault Helicopter Battalion. He was also a graduate student.
Just before Katrina, his unit had returned from a 14-month deployment, mostly in Iraq.
"This was the first real 'all-hazards' event I'd been a part of as aviation," Cleighton said. "Previously I was in the engineers. My only experience with hurricanes or tornadoes was when I was maybe an E-3 gate guard over in one of the neighborhoods, trying to keep people from looting. And that was a small event. Katrina was the first full-scale natural disaster I was part of."
He said in advance of the hurricane, his unit evacuated aircraft from New Orleans to Houston, Texas, and Alexandria Esler Regional Airport - about 162 miles northeast of New Orleans. Once the damage to New Orleans was evident, he said, they moved the aircraft back to the Louisiana capital of Baton Rouge to stage their operations from there.
Those operations, he said, started out pretty intense. Not quite 24-hour operations for him, but 18-hour days at least. He said they were flying missions in New Orleans every day, all day, to rescue those who were trapped by the flood waters.
"Because it was such a high-impacted area with the number of people, our mission every day was to go fly into New Orleans and rescue as many people as we could. That was the task," he said.
He said initially, with the number of helicopters flying around the city, and from so many units and agencies, there wasn't really a plan for who would go rescue people in a particular part of the city.
"What we kind of did was fly around, find a spot without a lot of activity, and start searching there," he said. "It was amazing the amount of deconfliction we could do internally. You'd see an aircraft, or five, over in the north side. So we'd slide over and go to the south side and start looking.
"We'd put a wheel on top of a house and throw people on, or we'd land in the middle of the street, or the levy. Anything we could do to pick them up. I didn't have a hoist. I was kind of limited with what I could do."
Initially, Cleighton said, they brought those rescued to the Superdome in New Orleans. Later, they started taking citizens to the New Orleans International Airport.
"Once we did that it was just - I had to have been, sometimes, number 50 in line to drop people off," he said. "That's with a full aircraft full of people. All of us lined up to drop people off. I've never seen so many aircraft."
Cleighton said he and his crew flew long hours for four or five days - from maybe 6 a.m. out of Baton Rouge until nightfall. Later, he said, relief came when other pilots from his units showed up to start relieving him and his crew. But then it was too late for the college student to start back to his regular schedule.
"I was in my master's program," he said. "And I ended up just not going to class, and withdrawing, and started running missions."
After the bulk of the rescue missions ended, he said, he ran other flying missions, including moving VIPs and other personnel around New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana. Included among his passengers were then-governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, and then-adjutant general of Louisiana, Maj. Gen. Bennett C. Landreneau.
"She was doing an assessment," Cleighton said of the governor. "We flew from the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain to the south shore, so she could address the damage."
"It really hit home," he said of the flood. "Not so many times do you see a disaster where you see eight feet of water around a bunch of houses where you grew up yourself ... or you have friends that grew up in the area. Just to see the impact on them. There were a couple of people who had lived in the area that was flooded with water up to the rooftops. To see their reaction, it was gut-wrenching. They grew up on that street, or played football there."
'LIKE 1862'
Painting said before Katrina hit, he'd been in his unit's headquarters in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The eye of Katrina passed over that city and "rode the state line" between Mississippi and Louisiana all the way to the north, he said.
Afterward, his team was responsible for clearing highways in and around Bogalusa, Slidell, Covington, Franklinton and Hammond - all cities just north of Lake Pontchartrain. In fact, his area of responsibility, he said, was from the north shore of the lake about 40 miles north to the state's border with Mississippi.
"We cleared a significant amount of land," he said. Additionally, his unit was responding to the storm surge from the lake that had hit Slidell. "We were doing house-to-house checks in that area, along with the local sheriff office." The storm surge had also affected Mandeville and Madisonville on the north shore.
"We were going house to house, doing searches, and using the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] marking system on the doors," he said. And at the same time, communications lines with higher headquarters were down.
"It was like 1862 - like the Civil War," he said. "We had to send runners, to a certain point, to deliver hard copy messages. I remember specifically we took a convoy, after it took three days to get the roads cleared."
Eventually, Painting said, he was able to link up with an Air National Guard unit that had communications capability. They stayed together for about two weeks to keep a line of connection open with the state command group to direct them on missions.
While Painting said his primary area of responsibility was north of the lake, eventually "the severity of the situation in New Orleans basically dictated that nearly every National Guardsman had to surge toward the city."
About a week after the storm struck, his unit went down to New Orleans to work alongside units already there, including the 769th Engineer Battalion, and the 527th Engineer Battalion.
With a unit of about 600 Soldiers, and for about six months, he said, they did such work as levy repair, debris removal, and movement of huge sandbags using sling load operations. "We ran a gamut of everything," he said.
"The devastation in New Orleans is tremendous," he said. "And when the flood waters went down, it left a fine layer of silt everywhere. You could always identify how high the water was on a building by the water line. And each day the water would drop it would dry at a different line. You had a line, like when your children grow up and you have them stand next to the door and you mark off a different year of their life by how tall they are. You could gauge the water going down day by day, with various water marks."
'CITIES OF THE DEAD'
Heading southbound toward Belle Chasse, a community also considered part of the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area, and also home of the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans, Painting saw more mind-boggling damage that came as a result of flood waters.
"There were two fish trawlers that had washed up onto the highway," he said. "Like ships, lying in the middle of the road. And further down the road, coffins and caskets floated in from a cemetery. All the burials in that part of Louisiana are above ground. Just like in New Orleans - they call them the 'cities of the dead.' They are all above ground because the water table is so high, so coffins float up if there is a flood. And there is also a huge citrus industry down there. So you had dead cattle that flooded in, you have these old vintage caskets that had floated in from all these old cemeteries, and you had millions of citrus lining the highways."
As part of his civilian job today, Painting said, he is reminded daily of the damage from Katrina.
"We were in a school a few weeks ago ... and we walked into two or three classrooms in a row and the electric clocks were all stopped at the same time, from when the power went out at that school," he said. "You still have the school dates written in chalk in the corner of the chalk board from the teacher's first lesson that never really happened."
He said Katrina is like 9/11, in that it is a significant marker in people's lives by which they place other events. "For people in South Louisiana, it is a milestone in our lives," he said. "We determine things as before Katrina or after Katrina."
"The biggest takeaway here is that a tragedy like this can happen to just about anybody," he said. "And depending on how the community is prepared for it before, that will dictate how they react afterward. It takes a short time to destroy a community. But it has taken 10 years here to get back to normal."
Painting said the nation and the National Guard in Louisiana are now better prepared than before Katrina for another similar disaster. Painting and "about 100 percent" of his Soldiers stayed on duty in support of relief efforts for about six months. Even those Soldiers whose own homes had been destroyed stayed on to work, he said.
"They returned to duty the next day," he said. "When you talk about selfless-service, these guys were the epitome of that."
60 MILES EAST
Watching the news in the summer of 2005, one might have overlooked that Katrina had hit other parts of the United States besides New Orleans. Just 60 miles east of that city, in Gulfport, Mississippi, and further west in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the National Guard there was also dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, which left a different set of problems for the state.
"The average American thinks Katrina only hit New Orleans," Col. Lee W. Smithson said. "But it didn't. We had a greater swath of damage in Mississippi than New Orleans did. Mississippi has 82 counties. Of those, 80 had some type of disaster declaration."
Smithson serves as director of military support for the Mississippi National Guard. He said during Katrina, the Guard became the solver of problems nobody else knew how to deal with. At the time, he was responsible for the six southern counties in Mississippi, to include Pearl River, Stone, George, Jackson, Harrison and Hancock.
In Gulfport, he said, home to the third-largest container port in the Gulf of Mexico, one of those problems reared its head.
"Our two biggest exports here are poultry and shrimp," he said. "The port was full of poultry and shrimp when the storm surge washed all those containers off the port in Gulfport. We had a massive bio-hazard along the shore of Gulfport. Nobody knew what to do with all the dead shrimp and poultry. The local responders came to the Guard and asked us to get rid of it."
He said the material couldn't be dumped in a landfill, because it would contaminate the groundwater. They loaded up all the material into dump trucks, using front loaders, and brought it out into the Gulf, past the barrier islands about nine miles to the south, and dumped it there.
"We did so much more than we normally do," he said. "We had to be the coastal problem solvers."
While in New Orleans the levies broke and left the city flooded for months, in Mississippi, the flooding didn't last long. It moved in and out fairly quickly, in advance of the hurricane passing over, as part of a storm surge. But the storm surge had been devastating nonetheless, Smithson said.
His team weathered Katrina at Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It's about 70 miles north of the coast. On the afternoon of Aug. 29, he and about 125 military police, 100 engineers and 150 highway patrolmen traveled south to Gulfport.
"It took us from 5 p.m. in the afternoon until 11 p.m. that evening to clear all the trees off the highway to get down there," he said. And when the sun came up the next day, "we were blown away by the amount of damage that had been done there in Gulfport."
"We had a 32-foot storm surge," he said. "We had never seen a three-story wall of water anywhere in the United States. We had a tsunami 32 feet tall the whole length of the coast."
That wall of water, he said, went up to a mile inland, except where there were rivers and bays - there it went farther inland.
"We had a wall of water, 10 miles inland in Hancock County," he said. And water also pushed up the Jordan River. Bay St. Louis and Biloxi Bay faced similar devastation. Normally, he said, the barrier islands, about 9 to 12 miles off the coast of Mississippi, would protect the coast, he said. "But you can't protect against a 32-foot storm surge."
'THIRD-WORLD'
Lt. Col. John B. Brown serves as the deputy human resources officer with the Mississippi National Guard. When Katrina came in 2005, he was a liaison Guard officer to Pascagoula in Jackson County.
He said that the devastation in Pascagoula, as a result of the storm surge there, was the worst he's ever seen.
"It reminded me [of] a third-world nation," he said. "Just because of the dirt and grime. Everything was covered in mud. The streets - you couldn't tell they were paved - they looked like a mud street. The people were out doing what they needed to be done."
As a liaison officer to Pascagoula, Brown led a composite team of 25 Soldiers there in advance of the storm making landfall.
"As liaison officer, our job was to coordinate with the emergency management coordinator and let him know what assets we had available and what were our capabilities," he said. "We acted as kind of a sounding board; he'd say what he needed done and ask if we could do it. And if we could, I'd go through the proper procedures to request and get those assets allocated to Jackson County."
He went down with military police and engineers. The engineers, he said, brought trucks that could evacuate people in high water. "The water rises before the storm hits. So we have time before the storm actually makes landfall to make evacuations, and we needed high-water vehicles to do that."
After the landfall, he said, the small composite team he had been in charge of went back to their organic units. The Alabama National Guard sent a task force of 2,000 Soldiers into Jackson County to provide assistance.
"They were fully prepared, and fully organized for the task they came to do, and did a fantastic job," he said. "They were there within maybe two days after landfall."
Brown said that one of the things that makes him proud of being a Mississippian is that the citizens of Pascagoula didn't wait for help to arrive before getting to work on their own.
"They started doing what they needed to do: clearing roads, doing house-to-house searches," he said. "As soon as the water left, they were out there straightening up stuff. Everybody we were working with down there was affected by the storm, because they all live there. They put all that aside. They were policemen, or worked for the Red Cross, or work for the city. They all lost something. "
Smithson said after Katrina, the Guard in Mississippi cleared 3,900 miles of roads with their engineering effort; handed out medicine and 1.2 million meals, ready to eat, or MREs, and almost a million gallons of water by air - which is something they hadn't expected to be asked to do - and distributed an additional 5.4 million gallons of water and 3 million MREs to civilians, across 37 counties, at ground-based points of distribution.
In Mississippi, like in Louisiana, there were communications problems. But Smithson said that as a result of those communications problems, he learned something about military leadership.
"If the commanders out in the field know what it is the big commander wants, his intent, and they understand what their missions are, they will figure a way to make things happen," he said.
After Katrina, he said, there was a Department of Homeland Security grant to build the Mississippi Wireless Integrated Network - a voice and data network "that is second to none." It allows communications across the state, even off shore past the barrier islands. During Deepwater Horizon, he said, the National Guard could fly helicopters out to the spill site and communicate with leadership.
MISSISSIPPI AFTERMATH
Brown said that while the debris and the trash and the leveled homes are now gone in southern Mississippi, reminders of the storm are still evident.
"You can still see some of the devastation. There are still concrete slabs that haven't been rebuilt," he said, including slabs where pre-Civil War homes once stood. "Katrina is the high watermark of hurricanes. Every year when we go through hurricane season, we ask will it be another Katrina. It's still on everybody's mind."
If another storm comes, he said, he thinks the National Guard will be ready to provide support. And he said he thinks that after Katrina, and other storms that have been endured by Mississippi, the residents in affected communities will welcome Guardsmen.
"Just the sight of somebody in a BDU [Battle Dress Uniform] or an ACU [Army Combat Uniform] uniform brings calm," he said. "Even [if] it's just one or two Guardsmen there trying to assess damage, people know help is there."
