 |
| Maj.
Stacia Belyeu comforts an elderly patient at the Louis
Armstrong New Orleans International Airport moments
before she is evacuated from here Sept. 3. Belyeu
is a flight nurse with the 452nd Air Evacuation Squadron
at March Air Reserve Base, Calif. (U.S. Air Force
photo by Master Sgt Jack Braden) |
EDITOR’S NOTE:
The events described in the article below
are typical of hundreds of similar events involving AF
active-duty, Reserve and Guard medics in recent days.
This article appeared in the San Antonio Current.
It appears here with the publisher’s permission.
By Michael Cary
SAN ANTONIO
-- New Orleans native Robert Danfield stared balefully
out of the airplane's small porthole, a row of parachutes
hanging above on the bulkhead, and glimpsed a final view
of his hometown. As a 9-year-old in 1965, he had lived
through Hurricane Betsy; 40 years later, he and his family
barely survived Hurricane Katrina. "The grace of
God is what got us out."
As the passengers boarded the airplane,
the air overhead buzzed with rescue helicopters that landed
by the twos and threes every 30 seconds at the Louis Armstrong
New Orleans International Airport, unloading hundreds
of people who were plucked out of their attics, from rooftops,
and hard-to-reach high ground in the Crescent City.
The C-130's engines roared and the
aircraft vibrated underfoot. A medical technician distributed
earplugs to weary residents who had only hours earlier
been rescued. The plane smelled metallic, like a set of
keys held too long in a sweaty palm.
The 25 passengers who could walk
were strapped into red, webbed seats designed to carry
paratroopers, and they sat subdued. Air Force medical
crews hooked up intravenous saline pouches and attached
blood pressure monitors to the critically ill patients
- those with tuberculosis, kidney failure, or sickle cell
anemia - who were strapped into 20 stretchers rigged along
the spine of the plane.
Danfield patted his nervous wife
on the knee as if to reassure her that they were leaving
the chaos of New Orleans, where thousands were still being
rescued from their attics and rooftops. Although the death
toll hasn't been calculated, city officials estimate thousands
of people died during the week that passed since Katrina
stopped the heartbeat of the city.
Nine months ago, Danfield, 50, moved
into a newly mortgaged home near Franklin Avenue with
his wife, Deborah Glenn, and his stepdaughter, Heather.
Their three-bedroom home in the New Orleans' 8th Ward
is located about midway between Lake Pontchartrain and
the Mississippi River.
When Hurricane Katrina bore down
on the Gulf Coast on August 28, Danfield's family was
among the 20 percent of New Orleans' 480,000 residents
who did not evacuate. Relieved that the eye had veered
to the east of the city, they went to bed feeling safe
in their home.
But, Danfield, says, about 6 a.m.
Monday, Heather awoke from a dream that her family was
in danger. Later that morning, floodwaters breached a
levee on the 17th Street Canal, and Lake Pontchatrain
flowed into the 8th Ward, engulfing most of the homes.
Like scores of residents, the family
became trapped in the attic by the rapidly rising floodwaters.
To escape, Danfield knocked a ventilation fan out of the
roof. He broke off a PVC pipe and used it to fly a white
T-shirt through the hole to signal any would-be rescuers.
But the disaster had just struck New Orleans, and few
had arrived to rescue the thousands who were suddenly
stranded.
Fortunately, Danfield had a flashlight,
and that night he used it to send signals into the darkness
with the thin hope that help would come. On the afternoon
of August 30, rescue workers from Coast Guard and National
Guard units pulled the family to safety and delivered
them to the New Orleans Convention Center, where, Danfield
says, they stayed in "pure hell" for the next
three days. Thousands were stranded at the facility without
food, water, electricity, medical care, or law enforcement.
Now Danfield confronted a bigger
problem. Glenn suffers from kidney disease, and without
crucial dialysis treatment, her health was rapidly deteriorating.
Danfield decided he needed to move his family to the Superdome,
where he thought his wife would more likely receive medical
care or be evacuated.
So, on Sept. 2, the family traversed
the one-and-a quarter miles from the Convention Center
to the Superdome. "We waded through water up to our
waists, past dead bodies, to get to the Superdome,"
Danfield says. There the waiting began anew.
As the Danfields were settling into
the Superdome hoping to find medical help for the ailing
Glenn, in San Antonio, aircraft were departing Lackland
Air Force Base every 45 minutes to rescue sick and injured
New Orleans residents who had been transferred from the
Superdome to Louis Armstrong International Airport, where
military forces had set up the largest triage center in
United States history.
At 4 a.m. on Sept. 3, a five-person
medical crew at Lackland Air Force Base with the 452nd
Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron joined an Air Force flight
crew from Arkansas, which had been put on alert Thursday
night. The crew loaded medical gear onto the C-130 cargo
plane. The crew included nurses, technicians, and an additional
three-member Critical Care Air Transport Team, including
Maj. (Dr.) James Johnson, a cardio-thoracic anesthesiologist,
Captain William Wolfe, a critical-care nurse, and Staff
Sgt. Sybyl Thibodaux, a critical-care technician, all
from Lackland's 59th Medical Wing.
At 6 a.m., the pilot lifted the aircraft
off the runway and sped into the pre-dawn, set to arrive
at Armstrong Airport less than two hours later. The seven-person
flight crew and the medical teams were taking help and
hope to thousands of severely traumatized New Orleans
residents.
The crew landed at 7:50 a.m. and
taxied to the D gates, where people lay on stretchers
in the middle of the airport concourse. They had been
rescued, processed through triage, and were queued up
for the many medical evacuation flights that would occur
until everybody was in medical facilities in Texas or
other states. Complicating matters, rescue airplanes and
evacuation helicopters had to share one runway, because
the remaining tarmac at Armstrong Airport were eroded
by floodwaters.
"We're going to Ellington,"
said Maj. Stacia Belyeu, the nurse in charge of the aeromedical
evacuation team. Ellington Field is a former military
airport that Houston now maintains, 15 miles south of
downtown.
Chief Master Sgt. Rodney Christa
of San Antonio was in charge of evaluating patients, many
of which were rescued from nursing homes and hospices.
He is assigned to the 433rd Airlift Wing at Lackland.
Since Aug. 31, he said, "we worked until we couldn't,
16 hours on duty, four hours to sleep."
Christa said his airport troops were
dealing with people whose needs differed from the wounded
who arrive from Iraq and other battle zones. "There
are things we haven't seen before. If I don't move fast
enough, people will die. If mom is sick or injured, we're
moving the whole family."
The scene inside Armstrong Airport
resembled a hospital critical-care unit, except that uniformed
troops stood guard, lounged in airport gate waiting areas,
or slept on the floor during off-times. Other troops helped
with patients, patrolled the concourse and entrances,
or prepared MREs, the military's prepackaged meals.
The airport terminal was littered
with duffel bags, and other troop gear. The building was
lit and air-conditioned by a generator with air blowing
through ducts in the entryway. Foodstuffs and other relief
supplies sat in stacks adjacent to medical triage areas
roped off to keep TV camera crews away from the patients
that lined the passageways. Outside the airport terminal,
misery and chaos reigned among the young and old who squatted
among the refuse, trying to get into the airport and out
of New Orleans.
On the tarmac, the flight team revved
the motors of the C-130. The evacuation crews had loaded
the 20 patients on stretchers and 25 more who could walk.
"Tell CNN these people are not
refugees," said Belyeu. "They are Internally
Displaced People, or IDPs. Refugees leave the country."
In Houston around noon on Saturday,
Danfield and Heather walked off the airplane alongside
Glenn, who was pushed in a wheelchair across the tarmac
to a terminal where hundreds of relief workers and medical
personnel had set up an intake area. Glenn soon received
her life-saving dialysis.
The C-130's four powerful engines
revved again, and the airlift crews boarded the cargo
plane for another flight to New Orleans to pick up 40
patients who would be evacuated to Lackland. Johnson,
Williams, and Thibodaux lay back in the webbed seating
in the aircraft's cargo hold for some much-needed rest
before they landed again in New Orleans.
"We'll go back to New Orleans,
but not to live there again," Danfield said as he
smoked a cigarette and pondered his family's future. He
dialed numbers on his cell phone, trying to reach relatives
in Houston. "I have no identification, no credit
card; not a nickel in my pocket. We've just got to start
over ... we're thinking about staying in Texas."
