Katrina: 10 years later Coast Guard rescuers remember
New London — Jen Gaudio, curator of the museum at the Coast Guard Academy, says some people have called Hurricane Katrina the Coast Guard's war.
On the 10th anniversary of the catastrophic hurricane, the event is still remembered as a defining moment for the Coast Guard.
Until then, some people still believed the Coast Guard was a reserve unit of the Navy, as one local Coast Guardsman put it recently.
In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, there was no coordinated or formalized response plan.
"We were the only ones out there doing it initially because no one could figure out how to do it," said Senior Chief Petty Officer Robert Cain, a flight mechanic stationed out of Clearwater, Fla., at the time of Katrina.
He spoke last week in an interview at the Coast Guard Museum on the academy campus, which exhibits historical items that demonstrate the service's unique missionset.
It was the Coast Guard's standardized training that enabled the service to do its job efficiently despite the chaotic conditions, said Cain and Lt. Cmdr. Crist Holveck, who at the time of Katrina was a junior copilot stationed in Miami.
"The first three days, you'd just grab anybody asking for help," Holveck said.
At times air crews tackled neighborhoods, flying over street by street. When they saw a hand sticking out the side of a house or someone stranded on a roof top, they went in.
Coast Guard air crews often flew together for the first time. Flight mechanics, rescue swimmers and pilots who had never met each other, let alone worked together, were going out to conduct search and rescues.
Holveck described how this played out in the hangar where aircrafts refueled and underwent maintenance.
Maybe a crew member couldn't fly anymore because he'd reached the end of the legally allowed flight hours, so a crew would need a new member.
"Someone would walk over and say, 'You're qualified. Come with me. Hey, by the way, my name's Mike, let's go fly,'" Holveck said.
He recalled a piece of advice he offered to a Marine Corps aircraft commander who had just landed in the hangar. "He was like, 'Who do I check in with?' I said, 'Sir, if I was you, I would just get gas and just start grabbing people.'"
Ten years later, one rescue still stands out in Holveck's mind. While their aircraft was flying by a house that was submerged in water up to the second floor, the crew's flight mechanic said, "Sir, come back around. I see a hand."
"And we were doing 80-90 knots, or something, maybe 100 knots," Holveck said
"We're like, 'Uh, you see a hand?'" he recalled. "I remember almost laughing, like 'What are you talking about?'"
The flight mechanic was right. An elderly woman, Holveck said, had heard the aircraft above and poked her hand out of a hole in the side of an attic.
The crew lowered their rescue swimmer, then the swimmer's crash axe, and the swimmer ripped open the roof to get to the woman out safely.
"We don't really train for a lot of these scenarios," Holveck said. "We certainly don't go flying to somebody's house with the roof open for training."
Holveck is now an admissions officer at the Coast Guard Academy, and Cain is a company chief at the academy.
About five days after Katrina hit New Orleans, Cain headed to the area with a heavy maintenance team stationed in Mobile, Ala., and flying into New Orleans for rescue efforts.
"We were flying aircraft 24 hours a day so there was a lot of round-the-clock maintenance that had to be done," Cain said.
Holveck's crew, in the five days it spent responding in New Orleans, rescued about 130 people, he said. Records now show that the Coast Guard saved more than 33,500 people in the aftermath of Katrina.
Both men said they felt the catastrophic event raised awareness in the minds of the American public about who the Coast Guard is and what its members do.
"If nothing else, it certainly solidified our branding," Holveck said, in the minds of people who thought the Coast Guard was part of the Navy.
"I hope that put a lot of confidence in the American people in what we can do, and if and when another major disaster happens, that we're going to be doing the same thing and ready to respond," Cain said.
As they talked about the rescue operations the two men sat just a few hundred feet from the Coast Guard Academy museum's Katrina exhibit, which features Adm. Thad Allen's operational dress uniform or "ODU" as it is called.
Now retired, Allen was appointed the principal federal official in New Orleans on Sept. 6 by President George W. Bush, and his arrival on scene marked a turning point in response efforts.
The morning he became the principal federal official in New Orleans, a job he held for six months, he talked to a FEMA worker outside the Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge, La., and asked her how she was doing.
"She was very proud of what she was doing and was working exhaustive hours but knew she was doing meaningful work," Allen said. The woman said it was difficult to return to her hotel each evening knowing about the morale issues going on within FEMA.
After the news conference where it was announced that he was assuming this new role, Allen called for an "all hands" meeting.
He stood on a desk and looked out at about 2,000 people, all of whom had the same look of concern on their faces as the woman earlier, he said.
He told them, "I'm giving you all an order."
In a phone interview last week, Allen said, "I didn't have any legal authority to give an order but you do what you can."
He told them, "Treat everyone you come into contact with as if they're a member of your family. If you make a mistake and err on the side of doing too much, I'm OK with that. If somebody has a problem with what you did, they have a problem with me, not you."
People were openly weeping in the room, Allen recalled. Nobody had told this massive number of people in very simple terms what the mission was, he said.
Noting that people told him that was a major turning point in operations, he continued, "Most importantly, nobody ever told these people that they had their back."
Allen is in New Orleans this weekend to commemorate the anniversary.
He said he also plans to bring attention to the conversation around national resiliency, and how that can play out at the local, state and national levels.
Individuals, he said, "need to understand that the first responder in any situation will be them and the second first responder will be their neighbor."
j.bergman@theday.com
Twitter: @JuliaSBergman
Comment threads are monitored for 48 hours after publication and then closed.