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Press Releases

Date: 9/4/2005

Contact: Denise Bottcher or Roderick Hawkins at 225-342-9037

Task Force Pelican Update

TASK FORCE PELICAN
(NATIONAL GUARD FORCES IN LOUISIANA)
OPERATIONS UPDATE FOR 4 SEPTEMBER 2005

Goal is to provide a daily Task Force Pelican update.

National Guard forces continue to pour into Louisiana. There are currently approximately 12,000 National Guard Soldiers and Airmen conducting operations in Louisiana; by 5 September this force will number in excess of 16,000.

The Task Force Pelican Commander's priorities are:

1. Save lives

2. Security, Law and Order

3. Evacuation
.Ill/Special Needs
.General population

4. Support existing critical infrastructure

Preliminary numbers indicate that Task Force Pelican has distributed over 620,000 bottles of water and 320,000 meals to affected citizens. We will be obtaining better numbers over the next few days.

As federal law prohibits active duty military forces from conducting law enforcement activities, the National Guard remains focused on improving security the security environment. The greater military and civilian relief presence, increase in rescues and the completion of evacuation of the Convention Center and Superdome have rapidly improved security throughout the area of operations.

An example of the effectiveness of Task Force Pelican was the securing and evacuating of the Morial Convention Center: LTC Jacques Thibodeaux (Louisiana National Guard) led the Task Force Pelican Security Response Team at 12:00 pm on 2 September to secure the Convention Center; within 30 minutes the center was secure. By 3:00 pm meals were being served. By approximately 7:00 pm on 3 September, less than 30 hours after operations began, 19,000 personnel had been evacuated from the Convention Center.

Search and Rescue are ongoing with aerial and maritime forces. Last 24 hours, 95 critical patient medical evacuations. One UH-60 with hoist was on call through night dedicated to 911 service calls. Task Force Eagle (Air Operations Task Force) reports 1,825 evacuated by National Guard helicopters in last 24 hours. Total of 3,000 evacuated by air by all services and organizations.
One incident of civilian threat (sniping) on military personnel occurred in the Superdome area in the past 24 hours. Law Enforcement mitigated the threat. These types of incidents remain isolated and will lessen as the security posture and presence of military personnel in the region strengthens.
TASK FORCE PELICAN OPERATIONS UPDATE 4 SEPTEMBER 2005

At the direction of Governor Blanco, Major General Bennett Landreneau, Task Force Pelican senior commander, has ordered a significant expansion of the Task Force Pelican area of operations. The movement toward stability in New Orleans and the arrival of additional National Guard troops will enable Task Force Pelican to provide support to 12 additional parishes. Mission coordination and movement of troops to these parishes will begin today; in fact, some of these parishes already have a troop presence. As forces are allocated to the individual parishes, we will provide a troop list. Each parish task force will work directly with the leadership in that parish to determine which missions to conduct. Therefore the type of missions we will be conducting throughout the area of operations will vary by parish. Having our military commanders work directly with parish authorities will significantly increase the responsiveness of our force. The Task Force Pelican organization matrix is attached.

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