more good reading from a NO rescue pilot

[Scott]

Here's an eye opener, found on another board. Long but very interesting read.

more good reading from a NO rescue pilot

Posted By: joe
Date: 9/8/05 21:29

The last message was kind of a big picture overview of what's been going on
the past few days...I will attempt to break it down a little bit, but
realize that I am dealing with a little time compression, so I may ramble or
repeat previous information. I will do the best that I can to keep it
straight.
We got the best information we could Wednesday after we landed, but everyone
coming off the helicopters were zombies and information was hard to come by.
The helicopters were on the ground minimum time between turns. Often ground
crews were still fueling them when the next crew showed up to fly it on the
next mission. Most of our aircraft have been logging 20 hours of flying time
every 24 hours. Our turn around rate and systems failure rates will be one
for the record books. One thing to keep in mind is that the HH-60 requires a
comprehensive inspection that under normal circumstances requires 4-6 hours.
Under wartime conditions that can be extended with a "thruflight" inspection
to 20 hours, but with the current turn times that still only leaves an
average of two hours from landing to take-off (keep in mind that includes
shutdown and runnup time). Its not that they are not getting the required
inspections...I think quite the contrary. In actuality you get to the
aircraft and usually there are 6-8 guys all over it, quite often the crew
helps out to finish up any inspections and then prepares for their sortie.
After take-off you have an hour and about 15 minutes of flying to prepare
yourself for what it is you are about to endure for the next 8-10 hours.
The first day was the worst. because of the humidity and the fires a grayish
haze blankets the entire city and it is only after you come through it and
cross over the shoreline of the lake that the enormity of the destruction
and the totality of the flooding. It's momentarily overwhelming, and all you
can think for the firs few moments is "Holy {inappropriate language}, where do you begin?". I've
been to New Orleans a few times over the last 15 years, and while I have to
admit that I never really liked the town I did appreciate the architecture
and the history of the place. The food was generally worth the trip and the
night life was fun to a point. Surprisingly the one place that did not
suffer from the flooding was the wharf and surrounding few blocks of the
Bourbon street area. Beyond that, in an arc around it that includes the
superdome and the majority of the downtown area extending out to the 17th
street canal to the NE and all the way south to the Mississippi river again
(NO resides in a deep bow in the river along the downtown side and Lake
Ponchartrain on the North end). As stated previously the water level varies
and other areas are obviously lower than others as evidenced by the amount
of the house still visible. We did quickly learn that where water levels are
on buildings was not a very good gauge of water depth at ground level. So
many buildings are elevated that when we put our PJ's down in areas that
looked shallow they frequently ended up in waist deep or more of water. A
more reliable means of measuring depth turned out to be checking the
vehicles and seeing where the water level was in relation to the vehicles.
They were at least a measurable standard of reference we could use for scale
since we all knew how big a suburban or a Honda or a Chevy truck is. There
are a lot of areas where not even the roof tops of vehicles are evident
though you know they are there. As I stated previously, and I can't seem to
stress this enough...New Orleans, as a city, as a community, economic
center, vacation party place, historical site, port of entry, or as a
home...is simply gone. I will qualify that statement later.
The flying is more intense than anything I have experienced in combat. In
combat you typically understand that there are a few immutable facts: There
are bad guys out there, they are gunning for you. But if you play your cards
right and avoid hitting the ground in the process usually all things being
equal you will come out of it o.k. For anyone that thinks that may be a flip
or quaint remark, its not...I have over 500 hours of combat flying and have
managed to avoid both the bad guys and the ground. That cannot prepare you
for the scene over the city. Thursday, Friday and Saturday there were no
less than 200 helicopters hovering, searching, flying, landing, hoisting,
and transporting...all the things helicopters do best, in approximately a 15
square mile area. That may sound big, but considering that we were all
occupying an areas that size below 500 feet, and all without any command and
control. At first it's a little unnerving to be flying in that close
proximity to all those helicopters, but after awhile it kind of becomes like
background noise from the AC when you're sleeping in a hotel room. Its
there, you hear it, but you are more absorbed by other things to acknowledge
it in the moment. To date, no close calls. Maybe that is kind of relative
now though, my definition of "close" has narrowed a bit. Everyone is very
heads out. It does complicate your search though. You're attempting to fly,
navigate, search for people that are surprisingly difficult to see, avoid
the multitude of unlit towers all over the city, the power lines, the trees,
the light poles, the birds, blowing debris...somehow you have to overcome
the moment and remember how much gas you have, plan power management, how
much weight you can lift, etc...
Our education began with our first rescue. It's interesting the difference
your perspective takes on even from 300 feet to 100 feet...at about 100 feet
you realize that because the water table is so high here nothing is buried.
There are power lines strung everywhere and in every direction. You can't
possibly land, and there's always the possibility of blowing the people off
the roof from rotor wash if you did, so hoisting, though hazardous seems to
thread the needle between operational risk management and necessity. It's
technical to say the least. The last thing you want is to wind your PJ
around a power line. So anyway, we plucked our first couple off a rooftop of
a blockbuster. Don't know how they got there, but it was a short ride out.
Everyone was being triaged at the International Airport a few miles away.
After that we stopped by Tulane University and did a one wheel landing so we
could talk to the guys waving at us. They directed us to an old couple in a
house nearby that were bedridden and needed to get out before they died.
This was a weird one. The PJ's went to the house and we extracted them using
the stokes litter. She had a broken hip and he was not conscious and had
rigor in one side of his body. We couldn't hoist from the house because of
the wires overhead so they were loaded on a boat and towed into the street
where we hovered hoisted them from 150 feet to minimize the effects of the
downwash. That single rescue took 2 hours. That's almost 2 hours in a hover.
By that time we had 4 people and we had been flying 4 hours...this was
looking to be tougher than we thought and we had to earn every life. After
that we needed a break and flew to the Navy base on the other side of the
river to shut down and refuel. We weren't there long enough. After that the
rest of the day was a complete blur. We picked up people at a steadier rate.
When it got dark we put on goggles. I think we ate, but it was in the air.
We eventually ended up at the projects near downtown on the south side of
the interstate and there we worked the rest of the evening hoisting people
from second story rooms out of windows and from balconies. This involved
hoisting a PJ down from 100 feet to where I thought they were level with a
window, then swing them into it so they could hook up someone, then waiting
while they were out of site until they called us on the radio with a "Ready
to Lift", then slowly reeling in cable until they swung out from the
building and I could bring them up. You can't train for this. You can't
prepare for this, you just have to do it the first time and hope you don't
kill someone. All the time relying on the fact that you are hopefully good
enough to handle whatever you might encounter. We were good or lucky, and I
am not attempting to differentiate between which it was. Either way,
everyone survived. All we kept thinking over and over was: 1- you only get
one shot for every attempt, 2 - Ironically or not, you did not want the cure
to be more deadly than the disease. In other words, we did not want to
injure or kill anyone during the rescue attempt when they had survived such
a tragedy. We saw this later on, and it affected us deeply. Day one- 32
people, 17 by hoist, plus 2 by stokes litter. This does not count the number
of times I lowered and raised the PJ's to talk to people who had decided not
to leave yet. We only really count rescues.
More one the people who decided not to leave. We are extraordinarily
frustrated by the people who refuse to leave. Whether through ignorance of
the enormity of the loss, hope that it will end soon, or just a desire to
not lose everything by saying goodbye we cannot tell. The end result, we
knew, was that as water ran out and food was eaten and health declined as a
result, their chances of survival decreased exponentially. All of this would
only make otherwise healthy adults only more difficult to rescue later and
placing us at increased risk as well. But since we had no authority to force
them to go we just did the best to explain the situation and move on. There
were just too many that wanted to get out to worry about those that did not.

That night on the way back I think we were still struggling to come to grips
with the situation, and the day had flown by. All too soon we were at the
end of our duty day and had to return so another crew could take the
helicopter out again that night for their shift. We hit the tanker for gas
on the way out and our first day ended at 9.3 hours of flying.
The next day we were in at 1200 for a 1400 take-off. We were sore, tired,
and still wired from the day before. The seats in the helicopter were still
warm from the previous occupants and we started as soon as we briefed,
pre-flighted and could get ready to go. Today the condition of the city was
not as overwhelming and we were able to get right to work. This day we chose
to start working where we left off and spent all our efforts at hoisting
people out of the projects areas. It was a slow day. Not work wise, but for
us. We were tired and knew it so we ere going slowly so as to not make any
mistakes. To be completely honest, it is hard to remember everyone. After
awhile they all blur in to a single tragic face. I remember one woman who
stood out though. We were trolling along some streets along the south side
of the city when we passed an old lady who from 100 feet looked to be in her
60's sitting on her porch. We slowed enough to let her know we saw her and
she got up and reached inside her front door. When she emerged she had a
suitcase and she walked down her front steps into the water. She was
obviously ready to go and knew the drill. Because of wires that ran along
her street 25 feet from her steps and subsequently to the front of her house
in an open "V" I had to hoist the PJ down precisely to her position to
effect the pick-up. By this time precision hoisting was becoming old hat so
I don't think it occurred to us that we couldn't do it. The PJ hit the water
3 feet from her and had her hooked up in 30 seconds. On the way up she
didn't look back and never looked down. I think the most striking thing
about her was her look of determination and complete faith in us. It is an
image frozen in my memory forever. Once she was on board we flew her to the
airport and dropped her off, but before she could leave I felt compelled to
tell her that she was "A very brave lady, and that she did a good job", she
was shocked and said thank you to us all before she got off the helicopter
and walked away. We had a Japanese reporter onboard the helicopter that day
who writes for Asahi-Shinbun in Japan. Later on that night after we landed
he asked me about that moment, because it was off intercom and just between
me and her. Apparently he didn't miss anything that day and believed it to
be very important. I guess it surprised him as well. The hovers were more
difficult today, the hoisting more technical and hazardous than the previous
because we worked a more difficult area. We did land near city park on a
grassy median between 4 light poles when we saw a group of 5 people with two
uniformed individuals trying to flag us down as we passed by. Turns out that
the two were Army Nurses working on the ground trying to get as many of the
retirees to leave as possible, but the work was slow and very difficult for
them. They had few resources and many of the older people would rather die
than leave their homes. There were apparently thousands of people in and
around the area, but few wanted to leave. We promised to return every few
hours and check back to see if he had more people who wanted to get out.
Over the next few days they were more successful and we fulfilled our
promise to return periodically. Day 2, we did not land except to pick up the
one group on the ground and to deliver people to the clover leaf, another
collection point nearer than the airport that was a dry interstate overpass
cloverleaf near city park and the causeway over the lake. The total was 14
people, 9 by hoist. The hoists were two families. 5 children, 4 adults. The
kids are fun, they think the helicopter is cool and the hoist is memorable.
Adults are a mixed bag, some are o.k. with it, and others are either scared,
relieved or indifferent. Most of them are in shock to a certain extent so
maybe that contributes to their mute expressions. We got gas three times
from the tanker that day and night, eventually landing after logging 10.0
hours in the air. 6 hours of that was spent in a hover. Our pilots had
earned their pay that day.
The water in the city was growing more putrid by the day. We saw our first
floater in the afternoon. It was shocking, like cold water when you expect
hot in the shower. We cannot do anything for the dead, so we continued to
move on and attempt to find more living. The dead we leave for another day.
We saw more than one this day, but the second was easier to deal with, the
third was worth noting but only because he was so close to the second.
Someone placed a flag over the second lying in the grass where we had picked
up the old people near city park. Our PJ's, despite the risks to their
health never once declined to go down the hoist into that water to talk to
someone or pick someone up. I in turn always set them down as gently as I
could so they would remain upright and not fall in over their heads. It was
much later that we realized we all smelled of the place from the mist we
constantly kicked up with our rotor wash and the people we hauled up into
the helicopter. The estimate for dead is unknown, but the scenario goes like
this...the canal breaks and begins to flood the city rapidly filling the
first floor. People in their houses move to the second floor to avoid it
then into the attic when it reaches the second floor. By the time it stops,
it is at or above most of the roof lines in an enormous part of town. People
were either forced to punch their way out of their roof, of break out of the
end of their house to get out. Those that could not, did not probably make
it out and ore still in their attics. As we fly over the city there are many
more houses without holes in their rooftops than those with. We hope that
they made it to safety in the one without, but only time and the receding
water will reveal the truth in that.
Day three. We flew down to the city from a different route and came across
the three bridges into East Orleans. We were looking to take a picture of an
Army Huey (H-1) that had become stuck in a rooftop the day before and been
abandoned that day, but apparently the Army was in no mood to have their
embarrassment photographed and had returned to pick it up that morning. Just
past that we found our first recovery of the day, a family ready to go with
bags packed on a rooftop. They told us that they finally figured the water
wasn't going to go away and it was time to leave. We had by then started to
ask people about neighbors and anyone they knew who wanted to leave besides
then and they told us about a church right up the road with people in it so
we landed to talk to them, but they did not want to leave and we moved on.
It was today that we noticed all of the pets still left over. Dogs chained
in back yards, dogs on submerged cars...We can't recover dogs, and it pains
us more to see them there because we know that they will perish before any
help comes to them. With people it's a choice to stay, so it's easier to not
be as sympathetic sometimes...animals are a different story, and when they
don't have a way out its worse.
After the first two it built quickly, we met up with the two Army Nurses and
they fed us a good 15-20 people that morning which we split with our other
aircraft. We found another family of 6 soon after that and then found some
more people that needed to be hoisted. By the end of our 4th hour when we
needed to get gas we had already picked up 25 people. We went back to the
roundabout by the park and found some more people that needed to get out. It
was here that we started to pick up pets as well as owners. It was also here
that we came face to face with the tragedy that we had attempted to avoid
all along. One of the old men we picked up along with his wife, both in
their late 70's or early 80's. He had just been through facial surgery and
Chemo, and along with him came a wheel chair. We loaded them along with the
chair into the helicopter and transported them to the international for
triage. When we got there they were unloaded and placed on the baggage
transporters to be moved. The old man was placed on a trailer in his chair.
We all commented on how dumb that was but were powerless to stop it. As they
pulled away and turned he was thrown out with his chair and landed on his
head. We do not believe he survived the fall. All that effort to recover
them safely to the airport where they were essentially home free, all to end
because of a careless moment and a dumb mistake. We all felt horrible
because in a way we played a role in his fate, a direct role in the outcome
of his ordeal. No matter how much we mitigated our risk there it was at all
levels of the recovery effort. A failure of the system, a critical link
overlooked. After that we saw that every person brought in on a wheel chair
never loaded in the chair onto anything and the chair always went
separately. I guess even the machine can learn from its own mistakes as
well. We picked up some more random people wherever we found them, but
nothing could erase that stain on our day. We were picking to fly away from
a search when the Puma (a French made helo) crashed only a few hundred yards
away. We immediately moved over to the site but a coastie Jayhawk crew
landed and began to recover the crew. We landed behind them to render aid
but they were apparently all in decent enough shape and none had life
threatening injuries. So they took off, we took off and it was left to lie
there to be recovered at a later date. We returned to the projects for
another search and found an old man slumped on his steps half in the water.
We sent one of the PJ's to investigate and he was alive but in really bad
shape. He struggled to get him into the area where we had to pick him up.
Hoisting directly to him was impossible even for us due to wires overhead.
When we got him onboard his shoes fell off and his feet had been in the
water so long that they were no longer recognizable. They were a shapeless
white blob and his legs were so swollen he could not walk. We expedited him
to triage and had him picked up immediately by EMT's to be looked at. Our
final pick-up was a family of 7 that night and we delivered them to
international as well. we had hit the tanker earlier that day and were at
the bingo fuel again. Deciding to call it a day we headed to the Naval
Station for gas and to pick up a passenger, an O-6 that needed a ride to
Jackson, and headed home. It was a short day for us, only 8.1. we picked up
33 people, 6 dogs and 2 cats.
Power came on in parts of the city that night. The water has not come down.
Back to my earlier comment about the city being a loss. Even if you could go
back to your home, it has been underwater for a week already and the water
has no inclination to recede. The pumps are underwater and not functioning
yet. I cannot even guess at the number of acre feet of water in the city or
how long it will take to remove. Even after the water is gone and the sludge
dries, what remains will be nothing that resembles a home. It will be a
complete loss. So much of the city is this way that this may become the
single greatest tragedy to befall an American city since Pearl Harbor, or
the San Francisco Earthquake of a hundred years ago. We figure that people
will be able to begin and end a career cleaning the city before it is done
in their lifetime. With only a small portion of the city undamaged there is
not enough infrastructure to support a population. The destruction is
complete.
Today was a down day for everyone so that the situation could be completely
evaluated and reassessed. We resume flying tomorrow.
I realize that this is long; I hope that you bear with me in this. There is
much I have left out simply because the details become fuzzy and
intermingled with others when you are so tired you can hardly think
straight.

[TunnelRat]

Wow, terrific stuff. I sent a copy to all my friends.

[Petrovich]

Yeah, needs a bit of editing for ease of reading but extremely compelling stuff.

I am going to agree with a previous poster here on the forum.

Dry out the city to the point citizens can return to salvage what they can. Strip the city of all usable materials.

Then blow the dikes and let the place flood. Heck, it'd make a great bass fishin' hole.

[Scott]

I am going to agree with a previous poster here on the forum.

Dry out the city to the point citizens can return to salvage what they can. Strip the city of all usable materials.

Then blow the dikes and let the place flood. Heck, it'd make a great bass fishin' hole.

Looks Like the fishin's pretty good now!!

[Linda]

Wow, pretty powerful words. It leaves me speechless!

Our friend who is a Navy Seabee (served 2 tours in Iraq) based in CA, called last night. He's being deployed to New Orleans today for up to 90 days, before he gets shipped to Korea. Ours prayers are with you Jason!

[Redhorse]

WOW


Hat's off to all personnel at work in NO