The City Where the Dead Are Left Lying on the Streets
By Andrew Buncombe
The Independent UK
Tuesday 06 September 2005
In a makeshift grave on the streets of New Orleans lies the body of Vera Smith. She was an ordinary woman who, like thousands of her neighbours, died because she was poor. Abandoned to her fate as the waters rose around her, Vera's tragedy symbolises the great divide in America today.
However Vera Smith may have lived her life, one thing was certain. In death, she had no dignity. Killed in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, her body lay under a tarpaulin at the junction of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue for five full days. Not her friends, her grieving husband, not her neighbours could persuade the authorities to take her corpse away.
Finally, disgusted by the way she had been abandoned - and concerned, too, about the health implications of advancing decomposition - her friends buried her in a makeshift grave. A local man fashioned a simple cross, and on top of the soil that was shovelled over her body he placed a white plastic sheet and wrote "Here Lies Vera. God Help Us."
The overwhelming majority of the people who died or suffered in this disaster were, like Vera, the poor - that segment of American society that so often appears to be overlooked or deliberately ignored. These were the people unable to evacuate, who had nowhere else to go or else no means of getting there. These were the people who simply did not have the resources to get a body taken to the morgue.
As the floodwaters are pumped out of New Orleans' streets, rescue workers are bracing themselves for further grisly discoveries and a death toll that will evenually reach tens of thousands.
With the authorities overwhelmed by the effort to find and rescue the living, they have been forced to abandon the dead where they lie or, more often, where they float. Vera, aged 65, was apparently killed by a hit-and-run driver as New Orleans descended into chaos and anarchy the day after the storm struck. Nothing better underlines the breakdown in the civic ability to respond to this disaster than those police officers who shrugged their shoulders helplessly when they were asked to remove Vera's body.
"She had gone out to the shop to get something. We knew it was going to close. We did not want to run out of anything," Vera's husband, Max Keene, 59, told The Independent yesterday, standing outside the couple's humble rented home in the neighbourhood known as Irish Channel. "I did not know what had happened to her. A guy came round to say she was lying by the side of the road with a piece of cardboard over her. It was me that went and put the tarp over her."
He added: "I spoke to the police and asked them to take her away but they just told me to get the hell out of there. It was dark and they were clearing the streets."
Max and Vera were not married in the formal sense but they had been together for 25 years. They had met when she was working as a waitress in a bar and he was working off-shore for one of the many oil companies that operate in the Gulf of Mexico.
There was nothing particular that struck Max about Vera, he recalled, but he liked her sense of fun, her spirit. She liked clothes and shoes and shopping and - like many people in this city - sometimes she liked a drink. She also liked books and every Sunday she went to the local Catholic church, St Mary's Assumption. Smith was her name from her first marriage; she was originally from Mexico.
"She was married, her old man left her. I had a different girlfriend then, she left me. It was the right time. We just got together. Every now and then it happens that way," said Mr Keene, tears in the corners of his eyes. "We used to lie in bed. I'd drink bourbon, she'd read books."
Who knows how many other stories there are like Vera's; how many other bodies lie scattered across this besieged city? Local officials refuse to predict a total but one thing is certain, the city is littered with abandoned corpses. They are left in the street, in buildings, in the backs of trucks wrapped in sheets with a name tag attached. One woman's body was discovered sitting upright in a chair at the back of a dental surgery. The rescue workers have had to leave them and instead concentrate on those who are alive.
Harold Brandt, a doctor from Baton Rouge who has been assisting rescue crews as they search the still flooded areas of the city for survivors, said the biggest concerns was the number of bodies that may be discovered in attics."One of the things with Hurricane Betsy [in 1965] was that people climbed into their attics to avoid the rising water and then they had no way to escape and they drowned. Now, veterans of hurricanes will always put an axe in their attic."
Vera, of course, was not killed by the hurricane - as Max Keene stresses. The couple had survived the storm and, knowing they would face days with out electricity or water - or any assistance from the authorities, Vera was on her way to the local store for supplies when she was knocked down.
Patrick McCarthy, a retired electrician, was one those who helped bury her. "If you need a metaphor for failure, this is as good as it gets," he said. "Everybody should be buried. [This is] an insult to our humanity."
However Vera Smith may have lived her life, one thing was certain. In death, she had no dignity. Killed in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, her body lay under a tarpaulin at the junction of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue for five full days. Not her friends, her grieving husband, not her neighbours could persuade the authorities to take her corpse away.
Finally, disgusted by the way she had been abandoned - and concerned, too, about the health implications of advancing decomposition - her friends buried her in a makeshift grave. A local man fashioned a simple cross, and on top of the soil that was shovelled over her body he placed a white plastic sheet and wrote "Here Lies Vera. God Help Us."
The overwhelming majority of the people who died or suffered in this disaster were, like Vera, the poor - that segment of American society that so often appears to be overlooked or deliberately ignored. These were the people unable to evacuate, who had nowhere else to go or else no means of getting there. These were the people who simply did not have the resources to get a body taken to the morgue.
As the floodwaters are pumped out of New Orleans' streets, rescue workers are bracing themselves for further grisly discoveries and a death toll that will evenually reach tens of thousands.
With the authorities overwhelmed by the effort to find and rescue the living, they have been forced to abandon the dead where they lie or, more often, where they float. Vera, aged 65, was apparently killed by a hit-and-run driver as New Orleans descended into chaos and anarchy the day after the storm struck. Nothing better underlines the breakdown in the civic ability to respond to this disaster than those police officers who shrugged their shoulders helplessly when they were asked to remove Vera's body.
"She had gone out to the shop to get something. We knew it was going to close. We did not want to run out of anything," Vera's husband, Max Keene, 59, told The Independent yesterday, standing outside the couple's humble rented home in the neighbourhood known as Irish Channel. "I did not know what had happened to her. A guy came round to say she was lying by the side of the road with a piece of cardboard over her. It was me that went and put the tarp over her."
He added: "I spoke to the police and asked them to take her away but they just told me to get the hell out of there. It was dark and they were clearing the streets."
Max and Vera were not married in the formal sense but they had been together for 25 years. They had met when she was working as a waitress in a bar and he was working off-shore for one of the many oil companies that operate in the Gulf of Mexico.
There was nothing particular that struck Max about Vera, he recalled, but he liked her sense of fun, her spirit. She liked clothes and shoes and shopping and - like many people in this city - sometimes she liked a drink. She also liked books and every Sunday she went to the local Catholic church, St Mary's Assumption. Smith was her name from her first marriage; she was originally from Mexico.
"She was married, her old man left her. I had a different girlfriend then, she left me. It was the right time. We just got together. Every now and then it happens that way," said Mr Keene, tears in the corners of his eyes. "We used to lie in bed. I'd drink bourbon, she'd read books."
Who knows how many other stories there are like Vera's; how many other bodies lie scattered across this besieged city? Local officials refuse to predict a total but one thing is certain, the city is littered with abandoned corpses. They are left in the street, in buildings, in the backs of trucks wrapped in sheets with a name tag attached. One woman's body was discovered sitting upright in a chair at the back of a dental surgery. The rescue workers have had to leave them and instead concentrate on those who are alive.
Harold Brandt, a doctor from Baton Rouge who has been assisting rescue crews as they search the still flooded areas of the city for survivors, said the biggest concerns was the number of bodies that may be discovered in attics."One of the things with Hurricane Betsy [in 1965] was that people climbed into their attics to avoid the rising water and then they had no way to escape and they drowned. Now, veterans of hurricanes will always put an axe in their attic."
Vera, of course, was not killed by the hurricane - as Max Keene stresses. The couple had survived the storm and, knowing they would face days with out electricity or water - or any assistance from the authorities, Vera was on her way to the local store for supplies when she was knocked down.
Patrick McCarthy, a retired electrician, was one those who helped bury her. "If you need a metaphor for failure, this is as good as it gets," he said. "Everybody should be buried. [This is] an insult to our humanity."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Navy Ship Nearby Underused
By Stephen J. Hedges
The Chicago Tribune
Sunday 04 September 2005
Craft with food, water, doctors needed orders.
Oon the USS Bataan - While federal and state emergency planners scramble to get more military relief to Gulf Coast communities stricken by Hurricane Katrina, a massive naval goodwill station has been cruising offshore, underused and waiting for a larger role in the effort.
The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.
The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.
But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.
Captain Ready, Waiting
"Could we do more?" said Capt. Nora Tyson, commander of the Bataan. "Sure. I've got sailors who could be on the beach plucking through garbage or distributing water and food and stuff. But I can't force myself on people.
"We're doing everything we can to contribute right now, and we're ready. If someone says you need to take on people, we're ready. If they say hospitals on the beach can't handle it ... if they need to send the overflow out here, we're ready. We've got lots of room."
Navy helicopters from the Bataan and Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida have joined the growing aerial armada of choppers that are lifting hurricane survivors from flooded surroundings and delivering food and water.
More will arrive throughout the weekend when the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and four other Navy ships, including three amphibious assault ships-really mini-aircraft carriers for helicopter use-arrive in the gulf from Norfolk, Va. The USS Comfort, a hospital ship from Baltimore, also is steaming there.
The Bataan, though, was already in the gulf when Katrina crossed Florida and picked up new, devastating energy from the warm gulf waters. The ship, sailing near the Texas coastline, had just finished an exercise in Panama and was scheduled to return to its home port in Norfolk on Friday after six weeks at sea.
Instead, the ship rode out the hurricane in 12 to 14 foot seas and then fell in behind the storm as it neared the gulf coast. A day after Katrina struck, Navy helicopters arrived from Corpus Christi, Texas, and began survey flights over New Orleans.
The initial belief, Tyson said, was that the city had been spared.
"On Monday it was like, `Wow, it missed us, it took a turn east,' and everything eased up," Tyson aid. "It was `Let's open up Bourbon Street, have a beer, let's go party, and understandably so. And then all of a sudden, literally and figuratively, the dam broke, and here we are."
When the city's levees broke Tuesday, Tyson's pilots were rescuing stranded residents. Communications became muddled as the rescue and humanitarian supply efforts were bogged down by rising water and sketchy information. Tyson, who would get debriefings from returning pilots, had perhaps one of the best vantage points to see what was unfolding.
'Like a Bad Dream'
"It was like a bad dream that you knew you had to wake up from," she said.
A 135-foot landing craft stored within the Bataan, the LCU-1656, was dispatched to steam up the 90 miles of Mississippi River to New Orleans. It took a crew of 16, including a doctor, and its deck was stacked with food and water. The craft carries enough food and fuel to remain self-sufficient for 10 days.
Moving up through the storm's flotsam, the crew couldn't believe the scene.
"We saw a lot of dead animals, dead horses, floating cows, dead alligators," said Rodney Blackshear, LCU-1656's navigator. "And a lot of dogs that had been pets. But no people."
Near Boothville, La., the storm surge had lifted a construction crane and put it on top of a house. Near Venice, the crew members considered going ashore to examine the damage, but dogs drove them back.
"I didn't want any of my guys in there," said Bill Fish, who commands LCUs and who went on the river trip.
"Everything was decimated. It was the storm surge."
Then the Bataan was ordered to move to the waters off Biloxi, Miss., and LCU-1656 was ordered to return. The landing craft was 40 miles from New Orleans, but it wouldn't be able to deliver its cargo.
"It was a disappointment," Fish said. "I figured we would be a big help in New Orleans. We've got electricity, and the police could have charged up their radios. We've got water, toilets. We've got food."
Now sailing within 25 miles of Gulfport, Miss., the Bataan has become a floating warehouse. Supplies from Texas and Florida are ferried out to the ship, and the helicopters distribute them where Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel say they are needed.
The Bataan has also taken on a substantial medical staff. Helicopters ferried 84 doctors, nurses and technicians 60 miles out to the ship from the Pensacola Naval Air Station on Friday, and on Saturday afternoon 24 of the medical personnel were flown to the New Orleans Convention Center where they expected to augment the staff of an Air Force medical clinic on the center's bus parking lot. The medical staff had come from Jacksonville, Fla., Naval Hospital, and they covered a wide swath of medical specialties from surgeons and pediatricians to heart specialists, a psychiatrist and even a physical therapist.
"It's really a cross section of a major hospital," said Capt. Kevin Gallagher, a Navy nurse who was part of the group. "We haven't been told what to expect, but we're going to find out once we get out there."
Moving In, Ready to Go
On Friday evening the Bataan was edging closer to the Mississippi shoreline; until then, it had stayed well out into the gulf to avoid floating debris.
Closer to shore, it will be able to deploy the landing craft again, as well as Marine hovercraft that can ride up onto shore to deliver supplies.
LCU-1656 cruised 98 miles overnight Thursday with a failed electrical generator and broken starboard propeller to join up again with the Bataan, their mother ship. After repairs, it was to set out for the shoreline near Gulfport, Miss., Saturday with a 15,000 water tank lashed to vessel's deck, as well as pallets of bottled water.
The role in the relief effort of the sizable medical staff on board the Bataan was not up to the Navy, but to FEMA officials directing the overall effort.
That agency has been criticized sharply for failing to respond quickly enough.
Tyson said the hurricane was an unusual event that has left some painful lessons.
"Can you do things better? Always," Tyson said. "Unfortunately, some of the lessons we have learned during this catastrophe we are learning the hard way. But I think we're working together well to make things happen."
The Independent UK
Tuesday 06 September 2005
In a makeshift grave on the streets of New Orleans lies the body of Vera Smith. She was an ordinary woman who, like thousands of her neighbours, died because she was poor. Abandoned to her fate as the waters rose around her, Vera's tragedy symbolises the great divide in America today.
However Vera Smith may have lived her life, one thing was certain. In death, she had no dignity. Killed in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, her body lay under a tarpaulin at the junction of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue for five full days. Not her friends, her grieving husband, not her neighbours could persuade the authorities to take her corpse away.
Finally, disgusted by the way she had been abandoned - and concerned, too, about the health implications of advancing decomposition - her friends buried her in a makeshift grave. A local man fashioned a simple cross, and on top of the soil that was shovelled over her body he placed a white plastic sheet and wrote "Here Lies Vera. God Help Us."
The overwhelming majority of the people who died or suffered in this disaster were, like Vera, the poor - that segment of American society that so often appears to be overlooked or deliberately ignored. These were the people unable to evacuate, who had nowhere else to go or else no means of getting there. These were the people who simply did not have the resources to get a body taken to the morgue.
As the floodwaters are pumped out of New Orleans' streets, rescue workers are bracing themselves for further grisly discoveries and a death toll that will evenually reach tens of thousands.
With the authorities overwhelmed by the effort to find and rescue the living, they have been forced to abandon the dead where they lie or, more often, where they float. Vera, aged 65, was apparently killed by a hit-and-run driver as New Orleans descended into chaos and anarchy the day after the storm struck. Nothing better underlines the breakdown in the civic ability to respond to this disaster than those police officers who shrugged their shoulders helplessly when they were asked to remove Vera's body.
"She had gone out to the shop to get something. We knew it was going to close. We did not want to run out of anything," Vera's husband, Max Keene, 59, told The Independent yesterday, standing outside the couple's humble rented home in the neighbourhood known as Irish Channel. "I did not know what had happened to her. A guy came round to say she was lying by the side of the road with a piece of cardboard over her. It was me that went and put the tarp over her."
He added: "I spoke to the police and asked them to take her away but they just told me to get the hell out of there. It was dark and they were clearing the streets."
Max and Vera were not married in the formal sense but they had been together for 25 years. They had met when she was working as a waitress in a bar and he was working off-shore for one of the many oil companies that operate in the Gulf of Mexico.
There was nothing particular that struck Max about Vera, he recalled, but he liked her sense of fun, her spirit. She liked clothes and shoes and shopping and - like many people in this city - sometimes she liked a drink. She also liked books and every Sunday she went to the local Catholic church, St Mary's Assumption. Smith was her name from her first marriage; she was originally from Mexico.
"She was married, her old man left her. I had a different girlfriend then, she left me. It was the right time. We just got together. Every now and then it happens that way," said Mr Keene, tears in the corners of his eyes. "We used to lie in bed. I'd drink bourbon, she'd read books."
Who knows how many other stories there are like Vera's; how many other bodies lie scattered across this besieged city? Local officials refuse to predict a total but one thing is certain, the city is littered with abandoned corpses. They are left in the street, in buildings, in the backs of trucks wrapped in sheets with a name tag attached. One woman's body was discovered sitting upright in a chair at the back of a dental surgery. The rescue workers have had to leave them and instead concentrate on those who are alive.
Harold Brandt, a doctor from Baton Rouge who has been assisting rescue crews as they search the still flooded areas of the city for survivors, said the biggest concerns was the number of bodies that may be discovered in attics."One of the things with Hurricane Betsy [in 1965] was that people climbed into their attics to avoid the rising water and then they had no way to escape and they drowned. Now, veterans of hurricanes will always put an axe in their attic."
Vera, of course, was not killed by the hurricane - as Max Keene stresses. The couple had survived the storm and, knowing they would face days with out electricity or water - or any assistance from the authorities, Vera was on her way to the local store for supplies when she was knocked down.
Patrick McCarthy, a retired electrician, was one those who helped bury her. "If you need a metaphor for failure, this is as good as it gets," he said. "Everybody should be buried. [This is] an insult to our humanity."
However Vera Smith may have lived her life, one thing was certain. In death, she had no dignity. Killed in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, her body lay under a tarpaulin at the junction of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue for five full days. Not her friends, her grieving husband, not her neighbours could persuade the authorities to take her corpse away.
Finally, disgusted by the way she had been abandoned - and concerned, too, about the health implications of advancing decomposition - her friends buried her in a makeshift grave. A local man fashioned a simple cross, and on top of the soil that was shovelled over her body he placed a white plastic sheet and wrote "Here Lies Vera. God Help Us."
The overwhelming majority of the people who died or suffered in this disaster were, like Vera, the poor - that segment of American society that so often appears to be overlooked or deliberately ignored. These were the people unable to evacuate, who had nowhere else to go or else no means of getting there. These were the people who simply did not have the resources to get a body taken to the morgue.
As the floodwaters are pumped out of New Orleans' streets, rescue workers are bracing themselves for further grisly discoveries and a death toll that will evenually reach tens of thousands.
With the authorities overwhelmed by the effort to find and rescue the living, they have been forced to abandon the dead where they lie or, more often, where they float. Vera, aged 65, was apparently killed by a hit-and-run driver as New Orleans descended into chaos and anarchy the day after the storm struck. Nothing better underlines the breakdown in the civic ability to respond to this disaster than those police officers who shrugged their shoulders helplessly when they were asked to remove Vera's body.
"She had gone out to the shop to get something. We knew it was going to close. We did not want to run out of anything," Vera's husband, Max Keene, 59, told The Independent yesterday, standing outside the couple's humble rented home in the neighbourhood known as Irish Channel. "I did not know what had happened to her. A guy came round to say she was lying by the side of the road with a piece of cardboard over her. It was me that went and put the tarp over her."
He added: "I spoke to the police and asked them to take her away but they just told me to get the hell out of there. It was dark and they were clearing the streets."
Max and Vera were not married in the formal sense but they had been together for 25 years. They had met when she was working as a waitress in a bar and he was working off-shore for one of the many oil companies that operate in the Gulf of Mexico.
There was nothing particular that struck Max about Vera, he recalled, but he liked her sense of fun, her spirit. She liked clothes and shoes and shopping and - like many people in this city - sometimes she liked a drink. She also liked books and every Sunday she went to the local Catholic church, St Mary's Assumption. Smith was her name from her first marriage; she was originally from Mexico.
"She was married, her old man left her. I had a different girlfriend then, she left me. It was the right time. We just got together. Every now and then it happens that way," said Mr Keene, tears in the corners of his eyes. "We used to lie in bed. I'd drink bourbon, she'd read books."
Who knows how many other stories there are like Vera's; how many other bodies lie scattered across this besieged city? Local officials refuse to predict a total but one thing is certain, the city is littered with abandoned corpses. They are left in the street, in buildings, in the backs of trucks wrapped in sheets with a name tag attached. One woman's body was discovered sitting upright in a chair at the back of a dental surgery. The rescue workers have had to leave them and instead concentrate on those who are alive.
Harold Brandt, a doctor from Baton Rouge who has been assisting rescue crews as they search the still flooded areas of the city for survivors, said the biggest concerns was the number of bodies that may be discovered in attics."One of the things with Hurricane Betsy [in 1965] was that people climbed into their attics to avoid the rising water and then they had no way to escape and they drowned. Now, veterans of hurricanes will always put an axe in their attic."
Vera, of course, was not killed by the hurricane - as Max Keene stresses. The couple had survived the storm and, knowing they would face days with out electricity or water - or any assistance from the authorities, Vera was on her way to the local store for supplies when she was knocked down.
Patrick McCarthy, a retired electrician, was one those who helped bury her. "If you need a metaphor for failure, this is as good as it gets," he said. "Everybody should be buried. [This is] an insult to our humanity."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Navy Ship Nearby Underused
By Stephen J. Hedges
The Chicago Tribune
Sunday 04 September 2005
Craft with food, water, doctors needed orders.
Oon the USS Bataan - While federal and state emergency planners scramble to get more military relief to Gulf Coast communities stricken by Hurricane Katrina, a massive naval goodwill station has been cruising offshore, underused and waiting for a larger role in the effort.
The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.
The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.
But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.
Captain Ready, Waiting
"Could we do more?" said Capt. Nora Tyson, commander of the Bataan. "Sure. I've got sailors who could be on the beach plucking through garbage or distributing water and food and stuff. But I can't force myself on people.
"We're doing everything we can to contribute right now, and we're ready. If someone says you need to take on people, we're ready. If they say hospitals on the beach can't handle it ... if they need to send the overflow out here, we're ready. We've got lots of room."
Navy helicopters from the Bataan and Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida have joined the growing aerial armada of choppers that are lifting hurricane survivors from flooded surroundings and delivering food and water.
More will arrive throughout the weekend when the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and four other Navy ships, including three amphibious assault ships-really mini-aircraft carriers for helicopter use-arrive in the gulf from Norfolk, Va. The USS Comfort, a hospital ship from Baltimore, also is steaming there.
The Bataan, though, was already in the gulf when Katrina crossed Florida and picked up new, devastating energy from the warm gulf waters. The ship, sailing near the Texas coastline, had just finished an exercise in Panama and was scheduled to return to its home port in Norfolk on Friday after six weeks at sea.
Instead, the ship rode out the hurricane in 12 to 14 foot seas and then fell in behind the storm as it neared the gulf coast. A day after Katrina struck, Navy helicopters arrived from Corpus Christi, Texas, and began survey flights over New Orleans.
The initial belief, Tyson said, was that the city had been spared.
"On Monday it was like, `Wow, it missed us, it took a turn east,' and everything eased up," Tyson aid. "It was `Let's open up Bourbon Street, have a beer, let's go party, and understandably so. And then all of a sudden, literally and figuratively, the dam broke, and here we are."
When the city's levees broke Tuesday, Tyson's pilots were rescuing stranded residents. Communications became muddled as the rescue and humanitarian supply efforts were bogged down by rising water and sketchy information. Tyson, who would get debriefings from returning pilots, had perhaps one of the best vantage points to see what was unfolding.
'Like a Bad Dream'
"It was like a bad dream that you knew you had to wake up from," she said.
A 135-foot landing craft stored within the Bataan, the LCU-1656, was dispatched to steam up the 90 miles of Mississippi River to New Orleans. It took a crew of 16, including a doctor, and its deck was stacked with food and water. The craft carries enough food and fuel to remain self-sufficient for 10 days.
Moving up through the storm's flotsam, the crew couldn't believe the scene.
"We saw a lot of dead animals, dead horses, floating cows, dead alligators," said Rodney Blackshear, LCU-1656's navigator. "And a lot of dogs that had been pets. But no people."
Near Boothville, La., the storm surge had lifted a construction crane and put it on top of a house. Near Venice, the crew members considered going ashore to examine the damage, but dogs drove them back.
"I didn't want any of my guys in there," said Bill Fish, who commands LCUs and who went on the river trip.
"Everything was decimated. It was the storm surge."
Then the Bataan was ordered to move to the waters off Biloxi, Miss., and LCU-1656 was ordered to return. The landing craft was 40 miles from New Orleans, but it wouldn't be able to deliver its cargo.
"It was a disappointment," Fish said. "I figured we would be a big help in New Orleans. We've got electricity, and the police could have charged up their radios. We've got water, toilets. We've got food."
Now sailing within 25 miles of Gulfport, Miss., the Bataan has become a floating warehouse. Supplies from Texas and Florida are ferried out to the ship, and the helicopters distribute them where Federal Emergency Management Agency personnel say they are needed.
The Bataan has also taken on a substantial medical staff. Helicopters ferried 84 doctors, nurses and technicians 60 miles out to the ship from the Pensacola Naval Air Station on Friday, and on Saturday afternoon 24 of the medical personnel were flown to the New Orleans Convention Center where they expected to augment the staff of an Air Force medical clinic on the center's bus parking lot. The medical staff had come from Jacksonville, Fla., Naval Hospital, and they covered a wide swath of medical specialties from surgeons and pediatricians to heart specialists, a psychiatrist and even a physical therapist.
"It's really a cross section of a major hospital," said Capt. Kevin Gallagher, a Navy nurse who was part of the group. "We haven't been told what to expect, but we're going to find out once we get out there."
Moving In, Ready to Go
On Friday evening the Bataan was edging closer to the Mississippi shoreline; until then, it had stayed well out into the gulf to avoid floating debris.
Closer to shore, it will be able to deploy the landing craft again, as well as Marine hovercraft that can ride up onto shore to deliver supplies.
LCU-1656 cruised 98 miles overnight Thursday with a failed electrical generator and broken starboard propeller to join up again with the Bataan, their mother ship. After repairs, it was to set out for the shoreline near Gulfport, Miss., Saturday with a 15,000 water tank lashed to vessel's deck, as well as pallets of bottled water.
The role in the relief effort of the sizable medical staff on board the Bataan was not up to the Navy, but to FEMA officials directing the overall effort.
That agency has been criticized sharply for failing to respond quickly enough.
Tyson said the hurricane was an unusual event that has left some painful lessons.
"Can you do things better? Always," Tyson said. "Unfortunately, some of the lessons we have learned during this catastrophe we are learning the hard way. But I think we're working together well to make things happen."
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