Helping Hands

Southcoast staff volunteer go to the front lines to help Hurricane Katrina victims

Many flooded neighborhoods in New Orleans were only accessable by trucks or boats after Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA

Not since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, has a homeland disaster riveted our attention in the way Hurricane Katrina did.

In less than 24 hours, the storm cut a swath of destruction through parts of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. The storied city of New Orleans sustained devastating damage and barely-known towns like Waveland, Miss., were reduced to rubble.

Coastlines, Southcoast's employee newsletter, recently spoke with three Southcoast employees whose lives were forever changed by the storm. Debi Ladd and Smoky Moak are long-time employees who worked in disaster relief through the American Red Cross. Moak was born in New Orleans and felt a kinship to hurricane survivors. Cindy Esmail is also a native of New Orleans and was working at Memorial Medical Center as the hurricane bore down upon it. She worked for Southcoast through a nursing agency while her father worked to rebuild the family home and returned to her hometown in January.

All were witness to the devastation, heartbreak and terrible human toll the hurricane brought upon those that lay in its path.

This article appears in the February 2006 issue of Coastlines.

Debi Ladd
Patient Care Technician, Tobey Hospital
33 years of service

What I did: I thought, with my medical background, I would be assigned to the Gulf Coast region, but the Red Cross asked me to go to Bakersfield, Calif., to work at a call center. We took calls from Katrina victims and arranged getting people money, health and mental health assistance. Even though I wasn't in a health care environment, my job called upon all my experience in the field.

There were 357 people answering phones. We took 5,000 to 6,000 calls each day. I started out answering phones, but in a few days became a supervisor. It was an emotional roller coaster. Callers were feeling all kinds of emotions — and our job was to get through all of that and determine their needs.

Lasting impressions 1: We received calls from a family who had been separated with members being evacuated to different states. They didn't know if other members of their families had survived. We managed to reunite them.

Photo by Smoky Moak

Lasting images 2: I took a call from a 58-year-old man who had been without his medications for a month. He had vision problems and he had been drinking. He told me that he had a loaded .45 to his head. As I was talking to him, I kept thinking, "Dear God, don't let me hear a gun go off." We were able to get a police officer there to help him before he harmed himself.

Most frustrating experience: Discovering incidents of attempted fraud. It was so frustrating to be working so hard and then to realize that there were people trying to take advantage of the situation. The Red Cross takes fraud very seriously and has methods in place to detect fraudulent claims.

Putting it in perspective 1: I hate to fly and getting to Bakersfield was a nightmare. My luggage got lost, the hotel was overbooked — everything seemed to be going wrong. Then I took a step back and thought, "God is putting you in the place of the people you are going to be trying to help tomorrow, except your luggage will be found and they will find you a place to stay. The people you talk to will have nothing."

Putting it in perspective 2: I was gone during the time in October that we had heavy rains and flooding at home. When I called home one night my husband told me we had a five-inch wake in the basement. I couldn't get very upset about it. I had been talking to people who had 20 feet of water in their house. It was hard to be sympathetic about what he was dealing with.

Smokey Moak
Emergency Department Technician, Charlton
17 years of service

What I did: I was dispatched to Baton Rouge, La., and arrived there on October 13. Since I have a social worker license, I was originally dispatched to do mental health work. I waited for an assignment, but received no direction at all for three days. Then I saw they were looking for staff to work at shelters. I signed up and was assigned to manage a shelter in Kenner, La., for relief workers who were cooking and distributing meals. The shelter was in a city gymnasium and there were about 150 people there with very few amenities. There was limited hot water, phone access and transportation.

What really amazed me was the closeness of the quarters and how much people respected each other in such a close situation. Cots were maybe 18 inches apart and your cot and the space under it was all you had to yourself. But people really respected each other's space. I was usually up at 4:30 a.m. and didn't get to bed until midnight. It was always very quiet at night. People made very little noise.

Photo by Smoky Moak

I spent most of my time at the shelter coordinating details, however I did get the opportunity to travel out in the meal delivery trucks. We were feeding up to 15,000 people a day. I learned that the Southern Baptists have a great deal of experience in mass meal preparation and feeding. They can produce an amazing amount of food in a very small space. The majority of the space they require for their operation is for the storage of supplies.

Lasting impressions 1: We walked in the Upper 9th Ward of New Orleans for blocks and there was no sign of life. There were no people, birds, leaves, lights, water — there weren't even any rats. There was such catastrophic loss in New Orleans alone. And when you multiply that by all the areas, it is almost incomprehensible. I went into Slidell, La., and had a sense of what the [Southeast Asian] tsunami must have been like. It wasn't just poor communities hit, but well-to-do communities as well. We saw the most unfathomable things — like boats in trees.

Lasting impressions 2: On the last day I was there, a man driving an expensive car and wearing expensive clothes approached one of Emergency Recovery Vehicles that was distributing meals. He was looking for something to eat. One of the ERV managers decided to check the man out. The man started crying and showed the manager pictures of his once expensive home, his wife and his daughter — all lost to Katrina. The man had also lost his job and was about to lose his car. Even though he looked prosperous, he was indeed in need of a free meal and compassion. It was a real lesson in not being judgmental. All I could think of was, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Photo by Smoky Moak

Most frustrating experience: Waiting in Baton Rouge for an assignment. Things were tremendously disorganized. If hospitals ran their Emergency Departments that way, people would die — and the sad fact is people there did.

Putting it in perspective: The experience gave me a much greater sense of what's really important — shelter, security, financial, familial and emotional stability.

I've lived and worked in poor communities much of my life and I have always been grateful for hot water, electricity — the things many take for granted. Now, I am also grateful for things like fresh drinking water and a meal to eat. An experience like this changes your definition about what you need to survive.

Cindy Esmail, RN
Temporary Staff Nurse, St. Luke's Hospital

Cindy Esmail, RN, worked as a temporary staff nurse at St. Luke's after Hurricane Katrina. She was a staff nurse at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans.

What I did: When I went in on the day before the hurricane — Sunday, August 28 — I thought I would be there for two or three days, but I ended up being there for five days. In the height of the storm there were windows breaking in the hospital. We could feel the wind pushing against the building. We lost electricity. The generators powered only the computers at the nurse's station, emergency lights and the emergency outlets in patients' rooms.

After we lost electricity, we were no longer giving medical care — we could only provide comfort measures. We did whatever we could to feed patients, give them water and keep them as clean as possible, but there was no running water and no flushing toilets. The stench got to be terrible. I spent a lot of time fanning patients. It got to be 110 degrees in the hospital and we were breaking windows to get some air in.

Photo by Cindy Esmail

We tried to get patients out by helicopter, but at the beginning there were just a few flights a day. We got ICU patients out first. We didn't start getting regular helicopter flights until Thursday. Then there weren't any elevators so we had to carry patients to the helipad. The last patients were evacuated on Thursday night. I left right after the last of the patients did. I didn't even go home. I got on a helicopter and got to the airport. I took a plane to Providence, R.I. One of my sisters lives in Pawtucket and my mother, another sister and I have been living with her. My father stayed in New Orleans. He has been working on our house and he says he's got a couple of bedrooms ready for us.

Most frustrating experience: The most frustrating thing for me was not being able to maximally fulfill my responsibilities as a nurse because of lack of supplies and electricity. I couldn't do what I was trained to do and could do little to make patients comfortable while they were waiting for help. I saw a new side of nursing. Before that I was always in controlled situations and that situation was totally out of control.

Photo by Cindy Esmail

Lasting impressions: We had lots of people in their 80s and 90s and some people didn't survive. All we could do was carry their bodies to the chapel, make sure they had identification on them and cover them with white sheets. We tried to be as respectful as possible.

I became a nurse in December 2003 and I never expected to see people pass under those conditions. It was like being in a war zone.

Putting it in perspective: What I want to say to people as a result of this experience is if you are able to help, don't run away from a hard situation. I don't just mean something like a hurricane. Just stay and get through it. Everyday it got harder because there were fewer supplies, patients were sicker and staff was disappearing. But it didn't feel right to abandon my patients. I gave my word I would be there for my patients — and I stayed.

On going back to New Orleans: People tell me that New Orleans is a ghost town. We're just going to take it day by day. We're going to give it a try in New Orleans, but we may decide to start over somewhere else.

U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)