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300 AirBoat Pilots To Help Storm Victims

POSTED: 6:13 pm EDT August 29, 2005
UPDATED: 6:38 pm EDT August 29, 2005

About 300 airboat pilots from Florida are headed to New Orleans to search for stranded victims of Hurricane Katrina, according to a Local 6 News report.

"From what I understand, we are going to be going into some pretty nasty places where maybe some people are stranded or need some help," Volusia County airboat pilot Jerry Flynn said. "They are going to need some help."

Officials have called for the airboats to reach places other vehicles are not able to reach.

"From what I understand, we are going to be going into some pretty nasty places where maybe some people are stranded or need some help," Volusia County airboat pilot Jerry Flynn said. "They are going to need some help."

The combination search and rescue team were preparing to leave Monday for the most flooded areas on the Gulf Coast.

Flynn said he was told to prepare for 10- to 15-hour days in adverse conditions.

"With our airboats, you can slide on inches of water and even on dry ground so you take the risk factor out of either hurting yourself or the boat," Flynn said.

Flynn said he has joined the group because rescue teams did the same thing for Floridians last year.

Louisiana National Guard officials are also calling for swamp buggies, not knowing what to expect in the areas hit hardest by the storm.

Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast at daybreak Monday with shrieking, 145-mph winds and blinding rain, submerging entire neighborhoods up to the rooflines in New Orleans, hurling boats onto land and sending water pouring into Mississippi's strip of beachfront casinos.

At least two highways deaths in Alabama were blamed on the storm, and an untold number of others were feared dead in flooded neighborhoods.

"Some of them, it was their last night on earth," Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, said of people who ignored evacuation orders. "That's a hard way to learn a lesson."