TheeBadOne
Moderator
Hell in High Water
by David Griffith
About 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina struck
the Gulf Coast Capt. John Bryson of the New
Orleans Police Department was in a McDonald’s in the city’s Ninth Ward buying a cup of coffee. Next to him in line was a woman and her four children; the youngest was a one-year-old baby.
Bryson spend the next few minutes making a futile attempt to persuade
this lady to evacuate. “I begged her to leave”, says Bryson, commander of the NOPD’s Fifth District, which encompasses the Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth Ward.
She dismissed Bryson’s concern with tragic diffidence. “She told me it was going to miss us”, he says.
“I told her, “This is a killer storm. So please
do us a favor. Write your name. Social Security number
and an emergency contact
number on your arm and on your
children’s arms. There’s a strong possibility
that none of you will survive it.’ She
looked at me disbelieving. I said, ‘Ma’am,
this is a killer storm.’” ~
Bryson doesn’t know what happened
to the lady in the McDonald’s. He prays
that she and her babies made it out alive.
But more than a month later in a phone
interview, he doesn’t know. And he fears
they may be among the “HRs” (human
remains) that the New Orleans police are
still recovering from his district.
Prelude to Disaster
The U.S. Weather Service will tell you
that Hurricane Katrina made landfall in
the lower Mississippi delta town of
Buras, La„ at 7 a.m. Central Standard
Time on Monday Aug. 29.
That statement does nothing to convey
how big the storm was, how well
formed, and how much damage the outer
bands of a Category 4 hurricane can do
long before the eye comes ashore. If you
want information on that, talk to the cops
who were out in the streets trying to get
people to head to higher ground as the
storm intensified around them.
In the Fifth District of New Orleans,
the men and women under Bryson’s
command spent Saturday and Sunday
trying to get people to evacuate. But very
early Monday morning, Bryson knew
that mission was over.
“I was driving down the street in an
Expedition at 1:30 that morning, and the
wind was hitting the side so hard that I
was on two wheels,” says Bryson. “I almost
flipped over, and I knew it was time
to get my people off the streets.”
Bryson had a hard time getting his Officers
to obey his orders to come in. They
were too busy trying to evacuate people.
“It was three in the morning, we had 135
mph sustained winds and the water was
rising, and I was begging my officers to
come off the street.”
Elsewhere in the Big Easy, a variety of
NOPD units were sheltering in predesignated
positions, waiting for the storm to
pass or at least decrease in intensity so that
they could move out to respond to the disaster.
The tactical team and its critical
equipment, including the personally
owned boats of some officers, took cover
in an elevated parking deck in the down-
town area, the chief’s staff was in the
Hyatt-Regency Hotel across from the.
Louisiana Super Dome where some 30,000 “
people had already sought shelter, and the :
vice and narcotics division had moved its
officers to the Maison Dupuy Hotel.
Before the storm had completely ‘=
passed, a detachment of Capt. Jeffrey ,
Winn’s tactical team braved the high
winds and blistering rain to recon the
area. They came back with reports of debris-filled
streets and rising water.
The Bywater Hospital
The tac team’s report was old news to “
Bryson. When he called his officers off .
the street at 3 a.m. Monday, they regrouped
at the nearby Bywater Hospital
to ride out the storm. The hospital was
supposed to have been evacuated. But
Bryson and his Fifth District officers were
in for a surprise.
There was a long-term care facility on
the third floor and 49 patients still had to
be evacuated. When the electricity went
down, those patients were in trouble.
“We had a generator there that we
were told would last at least seven days
before it ran out of diesel,” Bryson says.
“The hurricane knocked out the electricity and,
then about 2 a.m., the generator
went under water and that took it out.”
No power meant that patients in the
long-term care facility who were on respirators
had to be bagged. NOPD officers
and nurses took turns bagging those patients
for as long as 12 hours before they
could be evacuated.
Throughout the storm and into the
morning, Fifth District officers worked to .
evacuate the patients. The operation was
conducted in the dark using flashlights
and candles. They had to move the patients,
some of whom weighed as much
as 450 pounds, down three flights of stairs and
Through the ground floor of the hospital, which was flooded.
Carrying people through three feet of
floodwater is not pleasant. It was even
nastier at the Bywater Hospital, where the
rising waters knocked over bio-hazard
containers filled with used needles,
bloody gauze, dirty bandages, and other
biomedical waste. Six officers involved in
the Bywater evacuation contracted sever
staph infection.
We Need Boats
By 9 a.m, Monday, the worst of the
winds had passed. The flood was just
beginning.
What was left of the NOPD’s communication system crackled with urgent requests for aid from Capt. Bryson. The
Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth were
flooded and people were scrambling onto
their rooftops to escape the rising waters.
The tactical team started to respond to
the call. They were joined by the officers
of the vice and narcotics division who
had no specific mission and were operat-
ing independently, scrounging for equip-
ment and vehicles throughout the un-
flooded portions of the city.
“We knew we had water and that we
were in trouble,” says Capt. Tim Bayard,
commander of the narcotics and vice division.
“So I sent my guys out in their
trucks to take the trailer balls off any
truck they saw with a trailer ball. Then
we went out and got boats.”
Tile tactical team and the narcotics and
vice officers rallied at Harrah’s Casino on
the high ground on the banks of the Mississippi River.
They made the casino their
operations center. Then they set out to
make boat rescues in the Ninth Ward.
But first, they had to find a route into
the Ward through city streets that were
blocked with rubble and fallen trees. Debris
had to be chainsawed out of the way
and large trees had to be towed off the
road by trucks with chains.
On the ramps leading down from Interstate 10,
the tac team and the narcotics
officers launched their boats. Once in the
water, the officers navigated their craft
down flooded streets, steering around debris
and sunken vehicles. It was in a
word, hairy.
It was even hairier when they got to
the Ninth Ward. “It was very, very bad,”
says Winn, “Our guys had to
cut through rooftops to get to
people. We destroyed seven or
eight chainsaws in the first day
cutting through roofs.”
The officers, firefighters, and
civilians who were involved in
the boat rescues in the Ninth
Ward had to do a lot more than
just float up to a house and
help people into a boat. Many
of the people they were rescu-
ing wouldn’t or couldn’t swim,
and they would not get in the water to
board the boats.
So the emergency personnel on the
boats had to jump in the water and
swim the hurricane victims to safety.
NOPD tactical officers even had to swim
underwater to breach one dwelling,
then bring the family through that underwater
doorway, back up to the surface,
and into the boats.
The boat rescues continued for about
13 days, running even at night through
the darkened and dangerous streets. Officers
used large hunting Q beams and
their personal flashlights to illuminate
the operations.
A month later, Bayard marvels at what
his narcotics and vice officers were able
to accomplish. “What we knew about
boat rescue operations you could fit in a
thimble,” Bayard says. “We didn’t know
anything about that. We had never done
it before. But we knew we had to do it to
save people.”
(part 2 to follow)
by David Griffith
About 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina struck
the Gulf Coast Capt. John Bryson of the New
Orleans Police Department was in a McDonald’s in the city’s Ninth Ward buying a cup of coffee. Next to him in line was a woman and her four children; the youngest was a one-year-old baby.
Bryson spend the next few minutes making a futile attempt to persuade
this lady to evacuate. “I begged her to leave”, says Bryson, commander of the NOPD’s Fifth District, which encompasses the Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth Ward.
She dismissed Bryson’s concern with tragic diffidence. “She told me it was going to miss us”, he says.
“I told her, “This is a killer storm. So please
do us a favor. Write your name. Social Security number
and an emergency contact
number on your arm and on your
children’s arms. There’s a strong possibility
that none of you will survive it.’ She
looked at me disbelieving. I said, ‘Ma’am,
this is a killer storm.’” ~
Bryson doesn’t know what happened
to the lady in the McDonald’s. He prays
that she and her babies made it out alive.
But more than a month later in a phone
interview, he doesn’t know. And he fears
they may be among the “HRs” (human
remains) that the New Orleans police are
still recovering from his district.
Prelude to Disaster
The U.S. Weather Service will tell you
that Hurricane Katrina made landfall in
the lower Mississippi delta town of
Buras, La„ at 7 a.m. Central Standard
Time on Monday Aug. 29.
That statement does nothing to convey
how big the storm was, how well
formed, and how much damage the outer
bands of a Category 4 hurricane can do
long before the eye comes ashore. If you
want information on that, talk to the cops
who were out in the streets trying to get
people to head to higher ground as the
storm intensified around them.
In the Fifth District of New Orleans,
the men and women under Bryson’s
command spent Saturday and Sunday
trying to get people to evacuate. But very
early Monday morning, Bryson knew
that mission was over.
“I was driving down the street in an
Expedition at 1:30 that morning, and the
wind was hitting the side so hard that I
was on two wheels,” says Bryson. “I almost
flipped over, and I knew it was time
to get my people off the streets.”
Bryson had a hard time getting his Officers
to obey his orders to come in. They
were too busy trying to evacuate people.
“It was three in the morning, we had 135
mph sustained winds and the water was
rising, and I was begging my officers to
come off the street.”
Elsewhere in the Big Easy, a variety of
NOPD units were sheltering in predesignated
positions, waiting for the storm to
pass or at least decrease in intensity so that
they could move out to respond to the disaster.
The tactical team and its critical
equipment, including the personally
owned boats of some officers, took cover
in an elevated parking deck in the down-
town area, the chief’s staff was in the
Hyatt-Regency Hotel across from the.
Louisiana Super Dome where some 30,000 “
people had already sought shelter, and the :
vice and narcotics division had moved its
officers to the Maison Dupuy Hotel.
Before the storm had completely ‘=
passed, a detachment of Capt. Jeffrey ,
Winn’s tactical team braved the high
winds and blistering rain to recon the
area. They came back with reports of debris-filled
streets and rising water.
The Bywater Hospital
The tac team’s report was old news to “
Bryson. When he called his officers off .
the street at 3 a.m. Monday, they regrouped
at the nearby Bywater Hospital
to ride out the storm. The hospital was
supposed to have been evacuated. But
Bryson and his Fifth District officers were
in for a surprise.
There was a long-term care facility on
the third floor and 49 patients still had to
be evacuated. When the electricity went
down, those patients were in trouble.
“We had a generator there that we
were told would last at least seven days
before it ran out of diesel,” Bryson says.
“The hurricane knocked out the electricity and,
then about 2 a.m., the generator
went under water and that took it out.”
No power meant that patients in the
long-term care facility who were on respirators
had to be bagged. NOPD officers
and nurses took turns bagging those patients
for as long as 12 hours before they
could be evacuated.
Throughout the storm and into the
morning, Fifth District officers worked to .
evacuate the patients. The operation was
conducted in the dark using flashlights
and candles. They had to move the patients,
some of whom weighed as much
as 450 pounds, down three flights of stairs and
Through the ground floor of the hospital, which was flooded.
Carrying people through three feet of
floodwater is not pleasant. It was even
nastier at the Bywater Hospital, where the
rising waters knocked over bio-hazard
containers filled with used needles,
bloody gauze, dirty bandages, and other
biomedical waste. Six officers involved in
the Bywater evacuation contracted sever
staph infection.
We Need Boats
By 9 a.m, Monday, the worst of the
winds had passed. The flood was just
beginning.
What was left of the NOPD’s communication system crackled with urgent requests for aid from Capt. Bryson. The
Ninth Ward and the Lower Ninth were
flooded and people were scrambling onto
their rooftops to escape the rising waters.
The tactical team started to respond to
the call. They were joined by the officers
of the vice and narcotics division who
had no specific mission and were operat-
ing independently, scrounging for equip-
ment and vehicles throughout the un-
flooded portions of the city.
“We knew we had water and that we
were in trouble,” says Capt. Tim Bayard,
commander of the narcotics and vice division.
“So I sent my guys out in their
trucks to take the trailer balls off any
truck they saw with a trailer ball. Then
we went out and got boats.”
Tile tactical team and the narcotics and
vice officers rallied at Harrah’s Casino on
the high ground on the banks of the Mississippi River.
They made the casino their
operations center. Then they set out to
make boat rescues in the Ninth Ward.
But first, they had to find a route into
the Ward through city streets that were
blocked with rubble and fallen trees. Debris
had to be chainsawed out of the way
and large trees had to be towed off the
road by trucks with chains.
On the ramps leading down from Interstate 10,
the tac team and the narcotics
officers launched their boats. Once in the
water, the officers navigated their craft
down flooded streets, steering around debris
and sunken vehicles. It was in a
word, hairy.
It was even hairier when they got to
the Ninth Ward. “It was very, very bad,”
says Winn, “Our guys had to
cut through rooftops to get to
people. We destroyed seven or
eight chainsaws in the first day
cutting through roofs.”
The officers, firefighters, and
civilians who were involved in
the boat rescues in the Ninth
Ward had to do a lot more than
just float up to a house and
help people into a boat. Many
of the people they were rescu-
ing wouldn’t or couldn’t swim,
and they would not get in the water to
board the boats.
So the emergency personnel on the
boats had to jump in the water and
swim the hurricane victims to safety.
NOPD tactical officers even had to swim
underwater to breach one dwelling,
then bring the family through that underwater
doorway, back up to the surface,
and into the boats.
The boat rescues continued for about
13 days, running even at night through
the darkened and dangerous streets. Officers
used large hunting Q beams and
their personal flashlights to illuminate
the operations.
A month later, Bayard marvels at what
his narcotics and vice officers were able
to accomplish. “What we knew about
boat rescue operations you could fit in a
thimble,” Bayard says. “We didn’t know
anything about that. We had never done
it before. But we knew we had to do it to
save people.”
(part 2 to follow)
