When news of Hurricane Katrina began pouring in on Monday, August 22, 2005, employees at our affiliate office in Baton Rouge believed the storm would not directly hit their area. After all, they had dodged major destruction during Hurricanes Andrew and Lily. But Lynda Vince, the owner of Special Risk, (also known as VFIS of Mississippi/Louisiana), was still concerned, and rightfully so. Her staff of five handles over 600 VFIS accounts, and she suspected some might need their help.

Following is the story of Lynda’s team and their response to the needs of emergency service organizations along the Mississippi and Eastern Louisiana Gulf Coasts after the Category 4 Hurricane struck. Also captured here is the remarkable resilience of emergency responders in the face of the chaos during and after Hurricane Katrina.

Preparing for the Worst
As the weekend approached and the media’s coverage of the storm became national news, Lynda began to realize they would not be spared. “My biggest concern at that time was what would happen if New Orleans took a direct hit. I never thought the devastation in the Mississippi Gulf Coast and eastern Louisiana Gulf Coast would be like this. It never entered my mind.”

To prepare for possible damage, they made a list of the areas they felt were in the hurricane “hit zone,” and wrote down multiple contacts and telephone numbers. On Friday and Saturday they began calling emergency service organizations that they insured to discuss storm preparation. “Since moving the vehicles to higher ground is very critical,” explains Lynda, “we had Jefferson Parish move 85 vehicles to Baton Rouge and the balance to higher ground. They prepared the best they could.”

On Friday, August 26, Chief Larry Hess of St. Tammany’s Fire Protection District #1 was leaving the office headquarters when he learned that the storm was turning from Alabama toward Louisiana. By the time he got home, hurricane coverage was the hot media topic. He quickly set up a meeting for 7:00 a.m. on Saturday. At that meeting, they started implementing their hurricane plan: arranging alternate staffing, boarding up windows, and moving assets from fire stations near Lake Pontchartrain to other areas.

In The Storm
Around midnight on Monday morning, St. Tammany felt the squalls of the storm. “I was in the command post,” Chief Hess explains. “Our parish emergency center had been activated, and we were in contact with them. At 3:00 a.m. we were in the storm. There seemed to be a lull for a while. During that lull, we still had communications.”

A report came in that a tree had fallen on someone. “We sent our guys out to do a snatch and grab,” Hess says, “just get the guy out and get back to shelter.” But when they arrived, the man was already dead. Trees were falling across the firemen’s paths, live wires were coming down, and it looked like they were going to be stranded. He adds, “We lost our radio tower, so communications became very problematic. About two hours later, that rescue squad returned, and I want to tell you, these four guys were really enlightened by the time they got back. At that point, we made the decision that nobody else would leave.”

Transcending the Dark
By 1:00 pm, since the storm was passing, emergency service personnel from St. Tammany were able to get out on the road for their first assignment: clearing debris from the streets. Chief Hess describes the scene. “City workers, parish workers, our fire department, and a number of other citizens started clearing the roads. We had trouble receiving alarms, because there were no communications.” They sent rescue-trained personnel toward the lake, where they expected the largest impact, but they could not get there; the lake had left its boundaries and had traveled about two miles inland, to a depth of about 5 feet. “It was unreal,” Hess recalls. “Unbelievable.”

The next day, the storm subsided enough so they could join the sheriff’s office on the south end of the district near the lake properties. About 150 emergency responders worked together, with around 30 boats. All that night, they rescued people from the tops of cars, roofs, and so on. Chief Hess remembers, “That night, it was pitch black. There was the absence of any light, and it transcended dark. It also transcended quiet, to the point where we could hear conversations from people on roofs, but they were nowhere to be seen.” As light broke, those trained in urban search & rescue (USAR) began using helicopters to rescue more stranded residents. They were able to remove about 2,800 people over the next few days, many from immediate danger.

After the Storm
On August 30, the day after the storm hit, the Special Risk staff left their homes, weaving through downed trees, power lines, and debris to get back to work. Once there, they armed themselves with their own emergency tools: a generator, a fan, and several cell phones. They knew the work would be difficult. “The news that we were getting from TV and radio outlets was that there was total devastation,” Lynda recalls. The office staff began putting in 12 to 14 hour days, and 7-day weeks. Lynda’s group concentrated on calling their customers to see how they were faring, but that proved frustrating. “Phone service was very spotty. We would dial a number sometimes 50 times. Redial, redial, and redial. And when we left the office I would go home and start dialing from my home. We called day and night. And eventually we would get someone.”

Meanwhile, Billy Horne (Wellington and Associates), a VFIS agent in Jackson, Mississippi, was busy contacting departments across the state, regardless of whether they resided on the coast. “Cell phones were down and lines were down,” says Billy, “and what we ended up doing was going through the county EMS and fire directors to make contact through them.” What were Billy Horne and the Special Risk staff hearing about their local ESOs? Many had damage to or had lost their homes. Exhibiting the unusual resilience of the emergency response community, they wrote their homes off and continued doing what they could to save lives first.
Lynda remembers one Mississippi fire chief telling her that he lost his home and everything he had. His parents, his brother, his sister and their families had also lost everything. “A lot of our local people, regardless of how bad their stations and their homes were, went to New Orleans to try and help.”

Help from Many Directions
In the first month following the hurricane, St. Tammany had 40 working structure fires. For the first three days, there were no communications. “We were left to our own devices in Slidell and Tammany Parish,” says Chief Hess, “because we could not even talk to the other side of the parish where the emergency operation center was located. We had no idea of what was happening in the outside world, and the outside world had no idea what was happening to us.” Help in the form of Task Force Number 1 arrived on the third day, as FEMA’s USAR from South Carolina joined the effort with physicians, specialists, and equipment. “They began assisting us with the overwhelming, massive rescue effort that we had. We continued fire suppression activities 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for about 6 weeks. We searched 30,000 b businesses and residences in a little over two and a half weeks.”

On day five Division 3 of the Mutual Aid Box Alarm System (MABIS) showed up with 52 Illinois firefighters with apparatus. Chief Hess recalls, “MABIS blended right into our organization, allowing the personnel to get some relief from the tremendous, laborious, physical work of being in the sun all day performing rescues and fighting fires all night. It also gave our guys the opportunity to go to their own properties.” Over the next four months, St. Tammany had help from fire departments from Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New York, and as far away as Oregon and California. Since December, the department has been back on its own.

“Whatever Normal Would Be Today”
For many responders and citizens in the Gulf Coast Region, the focus has been to reestablish fire protection and try to get back to normal lives. Or, as Chief Berthelot puts it, “Whatever normal would be today.” Jefferson Parish received mostly wind damage, according to Berthelot. “Of our 3 fire stations, two sustained wind damage, and the wind tore everything apart. We lost a roof, had wall destruction, and had mold and mildew damage. We lost a portable building, which was crushed by the wind. Our oldest station, made of cinder block, sustained the least damage. All of our stations had a lot of water damage inside the interior.” Three of St. Tammany’s seven firehouses received major damage. Four suburbans and pickups were also destroyed. But according to Chief Hess, it’s the firefighters who lost the most. “Thirty-six of our 130 firefighters are homeless; their properties were either totally annihilated or vaporized without a brick being left, or barely anything was left. The rest were so heavily damaged that (as of January 6, 2006) no one is back into their homes yet. Their families were dispersed all over the United States.”

They soon experienced issues with separation, because many of the younger firefighters were not able to get their families back into Louisiana for several months. Hess says, “Two that I know of still have family out of state, one in California. Our next issue obviously became obtaining temporary housing so they had a place for their families.” Because of the separation strain, the damage, and the long hours of hard work, some responders were beginning to deal with “Critical Incident” stress. “It took some time,” he explains, “but all of our guys that needed trailers got trailers and started bringing their families home. While their lifestyles certainly had
changed, the situation was vastly improved from having your families live hundreds of miles away.”

Station renovations are continuing, and many are not completed. “This was a difficult time. I won’t kid you,” admits Hess. “To see your community sustain this large gaping wound, and to see its people just completely dumbfounded by the level of destruction, and the hopelessness of; ‘how do I cope?’ ‘what is tomorrow supposed to be about?’ [This] in a community where that was never, ever, a thought.”

A Long Road to Recovery
Keith Davidson, a VFIS agent at Special Risk Insurance, Inc and a volunteer firefighter himself, has seen the strain that Hurricane Katrina has placed on Gulf Coast responders. “For the state of Louisiana to return to some form or semblance of normal we’re looking at a minimum of 10 years.” He explains that area ESOs are really hurting because the tax base has dwindled, since it’s the tax funds that support many of the Gulf Coast fire departments. This means that a large part of their budget has been cut. Keith says the outlook for future funding is “grim at best,” and reports that ESOs in some areas of the Gulf Coast have had to borrow money just to operate.
According to Billy Horne, Mississippi is going to take “at least three to four years to get back to where they were prior to Katrina.” Some of the counties further inland are making repairs now, but a lot of departments on the coast are in clean-up stage, hauling off debris, etc. “Many of them are still working out of FEMA trailers,” he says.

Excerpted from VFIS News Vol. 06 No. 01