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The only thing more incredible than the stories about the heroic lengths people went to in order to help their fellow man in the wake of Katrina and Rita are the stories about squabbling in the face of disaster.
In addition to horror stories about FEMA managers interfering with local law enforcement, and a completely incompetent federal response in general, there are other tales which are almost too weird to be true.
Two Navy helicopter pilots and their crews returned from New Orleans on Aug. 30 expecting to be greeted as lifesavers after ferrying more than 100 hurricane victims to safety.
Instead, their superiors scolded the pilots – Lt. David Shand and Lt. Matt Udkow – at a meeting the following morning for rescuing civilians when their assignment that day had been to deliver food and water to military installations along the Gulf Coast.
“I felt it was a great day because we re-supplied the people we needed to and we rescued people, too,” Lieutenant Udkow told the Associated Press in an interview. But the air operations commander at Pensacola Naval Air Station was quick to remind the pilots that the logistical mission needed to be the area of focus.
The episode dramatically illustrates how the rescue effort in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina had to compete with the military’s logistical needs.
It was days after the federal response to the disaster was seen as inadequate when troops and dozens of helicopters, trucks and other equipment arrived.
In the days immediately following the storm, rescue operations were almost exclusively the result of individuals deciding they had to do something on their own, orders or no orders – individuals like Lieutenants Shand and Udkow.
The two lieutenants were each piloting a Navy H-3 helicopter, a type often used in rescue operations as well as transport and other missions.
On the day in question, the pilots were delivering emergency food, water and other supplies to Stennis Space Center, a federal facility near the Mississippi coast. The storm had cut off electricity and water to the center, and the two helicopters were ordered to drop their loads and return to their home base.
“Their orders were to go and deliver water and parts and to come back,” Commander Holdener said.
But as the two helicopters were heading back home, the crews picked up a radio transmission from the Coast Guard saying helicopters were needed near the University of New Orleans to help with rescue efforts.
The two Navy flyers were out of range for direct radio communication with Pensacola, more than 100 miles to the east, but they decided to answer the desperate call for help without notifying superiors, turning their helicopters around and arriving over New Orleans minutes after receiving the distress calls.
“We’re not technically a search-and-rescue unit, but we’re trained to do search and rescue,” said Lieutenant Shand, a 17-year Navy veteran.
Flying over Biloxi and Gulfport and other areas of Mississippi, they could see rescue personnel on the ground, Lieutenant Udkow told the AP, but he noticed that there were few rescue units around the flooded city of New Orleans on the ground or in the air. “It was shocking,” he said.
As he approached, Lieutenant Udkow could see people on the roofs of houses waving to him in desperation. Hovering over power lines, his crew dropped a basket to pick up two residents at a time. He took them to Lakefront Airport, where emergency medical teams had established a makeshift medical center.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Shand put his helicopter down on the roof of an apartment building where more than a dozen people were stranded. Women and children were loaded first aboard the helicopter and ferried to the airport, he said.
When they returned to pick up the civilians they had left behind after the first trip, the crews learned that two blind residents had not been able to climb up through the attic to the roof and were still in the building. Two crew members entered the darkened building to find the men and led them to the roof and into the helicopter.
Recalling the rescues in several interviews, he became so emotional that he had to stop and compose himself. At one point, he said, he executed a tricky landing at a highway overpass, where more than 35 people were stranded.
Lieutenant Udkow said that he saw few other rescue helicopters in New Orleans that day.
The toughest part, he said, was seeing so many people imploring him to pick them up and having to leave some.
“I would be looking at a family of two on one roof and maybe a family of six on another roof, and I would have to make a decision who to rescue,” he said. “It wasn’t easy.”
The two pilots rescued 110 people, but the next morning, the two crews were called to a meeting with Commander Holdener, who said he told them that while helping civilians was laudable, the lengthy rescue effort was an unacceptable diversion from their main mission of delivering supplies.
“We all want to be the guys who rescue people,” Commander Holdener said. “But we have other missions we have to do right now and that is not the priority.”
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