Posted on 09/03/2005 10:07:13 AM PDT by SauronOfMordor
Paramedic Patrick Keathley of Benicia happened to be in New Orleans with seven colleagues for an industry convention as a small storm called Katrina, off the coast of Florida, changed course and picked up steam.
"We didn't realize the storm was going to be as big as it was, or that it would turn and hit Louisiana," Keathley said.
"By the time we did, we couldn't get a rental car, even though we had one reserved, because everyone was fleeing," he said by rapidly dying cell phone as he made his way back to California.
The eight paramedics were forced to ride out the storm in their hotel on the Louisiana coast.
"It was like hell," Keathley said. "Completely black. We heard structural-sounding noises, and we went out to take a look and we saw debris flying. Palm trees."
Keathley said the men barricaded themselves with about 40 others inside the hotel for 12 hours as the storm raged around them.
"We thought we were going to die. And that was before the water started rising. We got out before the flooding, just as the city started to flood," Keathley said. "We met this little old lady with a car who wanted to go to Lafayette. So we piled into her VW and drove her there."
The men rented a car in Lafayette and drove to their firm's location in Baton Rouge where they volunteered to stay and help.
"We wanted to assist. It was Ground Zero in a place called Hancock, Mississippi. Half the town was wiped out. They had a 50-foot wave destroy the hospital. Cars were piled on top of each other. There were bodies in the trees. There were bodies littering the beach.
"This is catastrophic," he added. "We were just as much in shock as anyone. We set up like a M.A.S.H. station. People came in carrying dead people. They came in with broken bones, and we didn't have the equipment to help them. We could only give them something for the pain.
"People were fighting for food. It was just a mess. There are still 1,000 people missing from there."
Keathley told of a young boy, about 13, arriving at the makeshift hospital asking for a tetanus shot.
"We told him he needed parental consent, but he told us he didn't have parents. They floated off, he said. I worked in Oakland after the Loma Prieta quake, and that was terrible, but it was nothing like this. This is such a huge scale. It's just hard to explain," Keathley said.
Keathley and his colleagues have had little water, food or sleep for several days, and now that he's home, Keathley said he plans to rest.
"First, I'll see my wife. Then I'll take a nap and some time off," he said. "I can't go back there right now. It's just too much."
For a bureaucracy, the feds were moving like lightning in a bottle, (and the corporate and charity groups were moving at lightning speed) while the state EMA groups were slugs stuck in sewage.
Kudo's to My Favorite Headache for putting out a "first person" account! Must be the total pitts when you know what you were told was true (the cell phone call), and no other way to back-up was available - except time itself.
Yep, I remember Hugh Hewitt was railing against that thread.
re: shortage of news about MS deaths:
There are a lot of people who are out of contact with their friends and relatives in MS. For most, that lack of contact is because phones are down. For some unknown percentage, the lack of contact is because the people are dead
The Gulf Coast is a big area. If the news media broadcast lots of stuff about large numbers of deaths, you would have hundreds of thousands of concerned people clogging the roads to the affected areas to go and find out what happened to their relatives and friends. I don't think the government wants that while theyre still working on rescue efforts
Click on the skycopter tour of the coast links on this site. MS has been utterly devasted along the entire coast
http://www.wlbt.com/
Nobody wants numbers like I have been hearing to be true. But there is a legal process that is being followed and Haley is going to creep those numbers up daily as time goes along.
Nobody wants numbers like I have been hearing to be true. But there is a legal process that is being followed and Haley is going to creep those numbers up daily as time goes along.
A little vindication for MFH! Nice to see after all the flack in the earlier thread.
Senator Vitter said 10,000 in NO would be a place to start with number of dead. I suspect this will far surpass the worst hurricane loss in the USA which was the 1900 Galveston hurricane that killed 8,000.
I don't know if they have reporters there or not, they are too busy calling President Bush a racist because NO wasn't evacuated.
Thanks for the post!
I expect it will go higher. It's going to take time to scour the woods and go through the rubble. It's so sad that it hard to take it all in.
I love it when a lady pings the list. Female pings are much more graceful than our crude male pings.
This post was not meant to be my comment- it should have been been italicized as it is not my thoughts - it is a quote from another thread - I couldn't be that crass. I might ask questions, but cannot begin to imagine what it must be like to be on the MS coast.
It SHOULD be possible for FEMA to take what they know for sure about some localities and make a model that would predict the death toll to within 10%.
Makes you wonder what we will be told about a bioterror attack.
The numbers are easy to fudge, as long as you never issue a comprehensive list of the names of the dead. If there's a list, then anybody who knows about names that are not on the list can start raising a stink on blogs all over cyberspace.
But as long as they just say "XXX deaths" how can you tell, unless you or a group of friends can compile a list of names that's bigger than XXX?
A bit belated...like the rescue response supposedly is.
If I can stand on an off ramp or overpass; and vehicles can come IN past me, then I can damned sure walk OUT, to where they are coming from. One priority, among several others, is those who can't get to that ramp.
Read the Constitution, please.
The blame the Feds crap is so old, the chain of command should be explained on FR home page.
Well, aren't you the sweetest thing.
You two are true Southern Gentlemen, make no mistake about that. ;o)
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