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Kevin Dillard of LifeCare lifts up a tarp marked 'No Entry' to get into a damaged Wal-Mart that now serves as headquarters for the 6th District New Orleans Police Department.
LEFT: LifeCare Medical Transport President Kevin Dillard talks with ambulance driver Dawn Sklepovich in downtown New Orleans yesterday. Many of the windows in the buildings of the downtown area were blown out by Hurricane Katrina.
TOP: Members of the LifeCare group from the Fredericksburg area wash off their ambulances at the St. George Fire Department at the end of the day. Washing helps to decontaminate the vehicles after a day of making calls around downtown New Orleans.
Waiting for the day's assignments begins to get to Jason Gonzales (left), Will Hurlbut and JR Berry as they sit in the Emergency Operation Center yesterday morning. The LifeCare team from the Fredericksburg area begins its day at 5:15 a.m. |
By RUSTY DENNEN
BATON ROUGE, La.--It's still dark outside and hot as a Cajun oven as Kevin Dillard walks through the darkened corridor of The Center of Hope to awaken his ambulance crew.
Slowly they drag themselves from bed after only three or four hours of sleep to face another day in and around the devastated city of New Orleans, about 50 miles to the south.
Since they arrived almost two weeks ago, this group of 10 rescue workers in their five ambulances are witnesses to the aftermath of a natural disaster that will define a generation.
"You never know what any day is going to be like," says Dillard, 45, president of LifeCare Medical Transports, based in Stafford County.
On any given day, they might be administering tetanus and hepatitis A shots, relieving emergency care workers, aiding residents of this now practically deserted city, or going about the grim task of removing bodies from hospitals and nursing homes.
And then there's the stark reality of responding to one of the nation's worst natural disasters: sitting and waiting around the Emergency Operations Center set up in televangelist Jimmy Swaggert's ministry offices off Interstate 10.
Those helping Dillard here are ordinary Virginians working in extraordinary circumstances, helping people cope, and often saving lives one call at a time.
There's Kirby Sage, 47, of Rural Retreat, and Bill Kerley, 40 of Hillsville, who work in LifeCare's Southwest Virginia office; JR Berry, 35, and his wife, Deanna, 35 of Spotsylvania, William Byrd, 37 of Caroline, Will Hurlbut, 22, of Stafford, Darrel Johnson, 32, of Montross, Dawn Sklepovich, 50, of Spotsylvania and Jason Gonzales, 34, of Caroline.
Yesterday morning after they signed in at the EOC, they sat in the lobby, next to the massive fountain, commiserating about getting no sleep, teasing each other good-naturedly, and waiting for their first call of the day.
"It's just hurry up and wait," Dillard said of the numbing daily routine, but one the crew is happy to do, with little regard for themselves, all the time missing the comforts of home.
The first call of the day came in around 9 a.m.--three hours after the crews arrived. The ambulance headed out to a shelter established a week ago at Louisiana State University Field House. As it turned out, they were not needed; the shelter had about 15 people on hand and was in the process of closing.
Then it was back to the operations center to pick up Dr. Beverly Calub, an internist from the Northwestern Memorial University Hospital in Chicago, who with six other doctors flew on their own to New Orleans to help out.
"There was a lot of red tape," she said. It would have taken them weeks to get official clearance. They've been volunteering since they arrived Sunday. As soon as she was in the ambulance, it was onto checking on 19 senior citizens, one at a time around town.
Calub smiled, "We're doing old-fashioned house calls."
Several hours later, the ambulance headed back to the operations center, a meal, a cold shower, and another short night's sleep.
Dillard's crew was the first rescue unit from Virginia to be dispatched by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Louisiana. They arrived in Baton Rouge on Sept. 3, after driving for 20 hours straight from Virginia with five ambulances.
The most intense and exhausting work--helping to rescue people--has largely been done.
Still, National Guard and Army troops, which are going door-to-door downtown, are still trying to enforce a mandatory evacuation order. Front doors across the city that have been checked by troops and police have been marked with Day-Glo orange Xes.
"It went from rescuing people, to saving pets" in the first week or so, Dillard said. Those images are indelibly etched in the nation's memory on countless clips on CNN.
"Now, it's pretty much a recovery operation," he says. For the rescue workers, hours of intense effort are punctuated by stretches of boredom, chatting and checking in on loved ones back home.
On Monday, Dillard and Sklepovich, his partner, helped FEMA's mortuary response team in a body recovery at a small hospital on St. Charles Street, which lies in New Orleans' high-end Garden District with million-dollar mansions and wide streets shaded by hundred-year-old live oaks.
"It was terrible-shocking," Dillard said. When killer Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on the city, it was too late for some of the sick in nursing homes and hospitals around the city to get out. Some on ventilators, or requiring power, died in their beds.
"I can't believe they left those people behind. How could that happen?" Fourteen bodies were recovered from a nursing home; another crew removed 40 bodies from a hospital.
One look around the largely ruined city and it's not so difficult to understand. The storm struck with such fury, followed by the unexpected levee breach and thousands of people were stranded--left to fend for themselves. As of yesterday, there were still people and pets wandering around the city.
Earlier this week, Dillard learned of one particularly gruesome scene: A woman who had died in her home was found impaled on her fence after her body floated there and stuck as the water receded.
Water levels have been dropping by the hour in the downtown area as huge pumps shunt the black, oily toxic soup into Lake Pontchartrain. The devastation left behind by the flooding and death is only now becoming numbingly apparent, even though the death toll appears to be less than feared.
Soldiers working in hazardous materials suits and wearing respirators are removing the bodies and zipping the corpses into body bags for shipment to makeshift morgues.
The water remaining in the city and the vast expanse of marshes surrounding it is indescribably foul. If death has a smell, it would smell like this--the odor first hits visitors miles away from the city if there's an East wind. Rescue workers carry with them little jars of a menthol compound to rub on their upper lips to mask the odor.
Yesterday morning, Dillard briefed his crew on the details of body removal.
"Mainly, you'll be assisting, but you have to be careful if you come in contact with a body. It's been two weeks now gases build up inside." Just touching one could cause an ejection of fluids that could contaminate a bystander with hepatitis, or even AIDS-containing blood or flesh.
On Monday evening, the day's routine had taken its toll on Dawn Sklepovich, who at 4 p.m. had already worked almost 10 hours and was looking at four more hours behind the wheel of her ambulance. "Sunday, it really hit me," she said, tooling east on I-10 toward New Orleans at 80 mph. Like the others here, she's been getting maybe four hours of sleep a night at shelter.
"How can I explain to anyone what's happening down here? It's complete devastation." Still, she and the others have to stay focused on the on their jobs. One fatigue-ridden mistake could have disastrous consequences for anyone in their charge.
"My family at first was very worried" about her coming down. "They just want to know that you're OK."
Her eldest daughter, Deede, calls frequently to check on her. She left her husband, Mike, and three grown children back in Virginia.
LifeCare has two more weeks left on its assignment; several of those here will be returning home soon and others from the company's 14 offices around Virginia will relieve them.
JR and Deanna Berry, the Spotsylvania couple, left their two children, Katrina, 16, and Steven, 14, at home with a relative.
Within a couple hours of their call to service, "we dropped everything and away we went," JR said, after making hurried arrangements. "The people back home have been so supportive."
Their business, Rock N Roll Drywall and Painting, is being taken care of by workers back home.
For the Berrys, the trip to the Big Easy has been more than they could have expected. While they were here, they managed to locate JR's aunt, Susie Barbaret, in a shelter. The storm destroyed her home in Mississippi. "All she had were the clothes on her back." JR said.
For Deanna, it was a defining moment of the trip: "We knew God sent us here for a reason. The one thing I wanted to do was find his sister."
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