A Rescue Team Reaches Only Despair

It was hot and dim and overcast just after dawn when the firefighters from Bossier City, La., gathered beside the parking lot to pray.

“Lord, give them a hedge about them to protect them,” said the chaplain, Durrell Tubberville, over the bowed heads of about 15 men.

“Protect them from any disease that might overcome them, from any environment that might be hostile to them. Be a hedge about them,” he said.

The Bossier City Fire Department is made up of country boys from the northwest corner of Louisiana. In a typical week, they respond to house alarms and medical calls.

This week, they clawed through roofs with bare hands to get to people who were trapped in attics. They moved hundreds, maybe thousands, to safety in a sleepless binge of unrelenting work, experiencing a flood of emotions that, as one firefighter put it, “ranged from bawling your eyes out to jumping up and down with joy.”

By Thursday morning, many of them had not slept for days, but they had perfect focus when they gathered to hear their mission. They were to drive into downtown and, using boats, rescue 15 ICU patients from Charity Hospital of Louisiana, under the care of a Dr. Simeon.

7:24 a.m. The convoy sped through the bayous that lead to New Orleans. There must have been 100 trucks, ambulances, flat-bottom boats on trailers -- a column of flashing blue lights -- and it was all a little much for Buddy Caskey, the Bossier City Fire Department’s chief of special operations.

Caskey is a wiry amateur boxer and admitted adrenaline junkie. He cherishes the memory of a training exercise (a foolish one, he now acknowledges) in which he stood alone in the middle of a fully involved house as the fire began to pop out the roof. It was an unforgettable rush, perhaps because he was able, for once, to stop and look around. He is not afraid of fire.

“I like to dance,” he said.

The day before, Caskey spent hours walking among refugees stranded on a highway overpass, telling them plainly that he did not know when buses would come to get them. He told them he would pray for them.

He had spent the previous day rescuing refugees by boats. On the boats, the refugees were effusive and grateful, he said. It was only when they got on dry ground, he said, that they “start wanting some answers.” He couldn’t blame them.

“You want to see somebody irate? You leave my mama lying on the ground dying, when I can see a row of ambulances lined up,” Caskey said. “You’d have to take me to jail.”

8:45 a.m. The convoy, which included a large contingent from the Shreveport Fire Department, was stuck in traffic. It had been joined by trucks pulling dozens of boats -- provided by the state Wildlife and Fisheries Department -- so great a number that the Bossier City boys had to wait almost 10 minutes for them to merge onto the highway. Firefighter Don Taylor shook his head in frustration.

“My daddy always told me, we lost two hours of daylight,” he said. “We lost valuable time.”

9:45 a.m. They had arrived. Taylor stepped out of the cruiser to the edge of the overpass, where he looked down at the Superdome, where thousands of people were crowded outside. Hundreds of others, some barefoot, many who had not had food and water for days, milled on an offramp below him.

“Oh my God, look at all those people,” said Taylor, who is also a preacher. “My God.”

There were problems. The Wildlife and Fisheries’ boats were nowhere to be seen. Vehicles from the Shreveport Fire Department had also taken a wrong turn, and Caskey had no way to communicate with them. He finally heard, via another fire chief in Baton Rouge, that they had exited on Tchoupitolas Street, into the heart of downtown.

He heard a scratchy transmission from Shreveport’s deputy chief, Margene McCoy: “We just got word that the Superdome was under siege. There’s shooting going on. People are setting fires everywhere.”

Caskey wasn’t sure where McCoy got this information. But as he looked down the line of vehicles behind him, he noticed that within minutes of their arrival, refugees were lined up, fierce and desperate, around the single ambulance in his convoy.

He realized then what Thursday was going to be like: He would have to protect his rescue operation from the refugees they had come to help.

11:30 a.m. It was more than an hour before the two convoys found each other. McCoy was shaken; when his group exited the highway, gunshots rang out from a building. He and Caskey stood by the side of the highway and debated whether to proceed with the Charity Hospital job.

McCoy said they needed security.

While they talked, one Bossier City firefighter tried to describe the experience of the last two days when the team went from rescue to rescue without pausing until dark.

“Look, when you pull 1,000 people out in two days, you know you’re accomplishing something,” said the man, a 16-year veteran who would not give his name.

12:50 p.m. After much negotiation, a seven-man team, including both chiefs, piled into a van to make a reconnaissance trip to a second hospital, where 500 people awaited rescue.

Lt. Robert Jones of the Bossier City Marshal’s Office unpacked the assault rifle that, he said, he hoped never, ever to use. They were finally underway.

But as they crossed the Crescent City Bridge, they saw that a SWAT team from Rapides Parish was setting up a sniper position on a guardrail, with a long-distance rifle trained on the neighborhood under the bridge.

Five minutes earlier, a gunman had fired from a building at the base of the bridge, and traffic on the bridge had stopped, Sgt. Troy Verheyven said. A second agent stuck his head into the van and asked a series of rapid questions.

“It’s going to take 100, 150 people to do what you’re talking about,” said the man, who was wearing a bulletproof vest. “It’s crazy down there. It’s a fricking war zone. This ain’t a SWAT operation no more. It’s a war zone. It’s going to take a major operation to take those people out.”

McCoy voted to turn back. He said it was too dangerous to move into the area without security. “There are people who will kill anyone for that,” he said.

Caskey wanted to keep going. It wasn’t just that the patients would die if they weren’t rescued soon; the hospital staff would too, he said.

There was a tense silence as the van proceeded. They passed exits 235a, 235b, 236. Around them on the road, in an ever-heavier rain, evacuees waved desperately for attention, or they screamed, but the van did not slow. The new rule was: Do not stop; they will try to stop you.

They did not go much farther. Just past North Claiborne Avenue, a group of several hundred people came into sight. They were standing in a solid wall across the highway.

The firefighters could not drive through them, so they turned around.

As the van headed back over the Mississippi River, out of downtown, a fire raged in an industrial building to their right, uncontrolled. The smell of burning plastic filled the air.

“Hey, Margene, that’s what we live for right there,” said Caskey, trying to sound cheerful.

3:12 p.m. The Bossier City mayor had called, ordering them to return home immediately because a large group of refugees was due to arrive. Several of the men wondered whether they were being called back because the operation had become too dangerous.

A drenching rain drummed on the cruiser as it crossed out of New Orleans, leaving behind the last bedraggled refugees. To the car’s left, a large mall was on fire and billowing yellow smoke. Beneath an underpass, a man was standing next to a young boy, who was crying. On the radio, the president of Jefferson Parish was saying this: “There is a place that’s lower than hell, and we’re in it. We’re living in it right now.”

Caskey was looking forward to seeing his wife and three sons, the way they would yell “Daddy” and try to knock him over. It was probably a good thing they were leaving New Orleans. The city, he said, is “a time bomb.” But then he suddenly turned to Lt. Jones, who was driving.

“I was just thinking about sitting [in my hot tub], turning the jets on,” he said. “That’s terrible that I’m thinking that when all those people are sitting on that bridge or in that Superdome.”

Jones was thinking the same thing. As hungry as he was today, he said, he didn’t want to eat.

5:30 p.m. Dinner was fried chicken and macaroni and cheese and biscuits, and the firemen ate hungrily. But a sad feeling had come over them. On Thursday, this happened: They were not able to reach people who called out to them.

At one point, a woman carrying a baby on each arm went to a medic attached to the Bossier City team and asked him to examine her children because she thought there was something wrong with them. They were both dead.

Danny Asbell, a paramedic, remembered a woman who had come to him while he was standing near the ambulance. The woman explained that she had been scheduled to receive a pacemaker this week, but that the surgery was canceled because of the storm. Asbell checked her pulse, and it was 40, about half the normal human heart rate. He left her there, knowing she was likely to die very soon.

“I didn’t want to do it. They told me to do it,” Asbell said.

But everyone was worried about a firefighter who, during the course of three frantic days rescuing people, came upon a woman so ill that he was afraid to move her out of her house.

He had promised her daughter he was coming back, and all day Tuesday he talked about it, but he was not able to go back.

“If there’s a man of his word on this Earth, it’s Tommy,” Asbell said.

“That’s going to haunt him the rest of his life.”