|
A man walks past sailboats tossed by Hurricane Rita in Lake Charles, La., where a LifeCare medical team has been helping residents. |
By PORTSIA SMITH
Stafford County resident Kevin Dillard says his past three weeks have been like a movie.
The setting is the Gulf Coast, the period is September 2005, and the co-directors are Rita and Katrina.
The plot: A huge portion of the region is devastated by deadly, back-to-back hurricanes, with whole communities left battered and soaked.
Mostly evacuated, major cities sit silent like ghost towns. The few people who stayed behind fear for their lives--or what's left of it.
Dillard, president of LifeCare Medical Transports of Stafford, said yesterday that he feels like a movie superhero as victims thank him for saving them from that reality.
He and a crew of nine, who man five LifeCare ambulance trucks, are just some of the Fredericksburg-area residents who recently have volunteered their time to help hurricane victims and evacuees on the Gulf Coast.
The LifeCare staffers first traveled to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, but their efforts were pushed west toward Lake Charles, La., last Wednesday in advance of Hurricane Rita, which hit there Saturday.
The group helped evacuate residents of two Lake Charles-area hospitals and a nursing home to the city's Chennault International Airpark, where the medical crew was staying. But when Rita collapsed some buildings in Lake Charles, including one at the airport, they had to move again.
"They took a pretty hard hit," Dillard said of the city of nearly 72,000 residents. "About 95 percent got out of the city, but some people were hard-headed. Today, we are assisting some of the people who couldn't get out and are trapped in their homes."
Rita came ashore early Saturday just to the south of Lake Charles as a Category 3 hurricane with 120-mph winds and heavy rains.
Search-and-rescue teams working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency arrived late Saturday in Lake Charles, in a convoy of about a dozen vehicles loaded with water, ready-to-eat meals, medical supplies and fuel.
The western Louisiana city is mangled, with power poles and trees snapped, roofs blown off, buildings crushed and a white-capped Lake Charles spilling into downtown streets.
Damage stretched across the city. The airport structure collapsed, winds tore the roof off a community college building and tossed it onto the street, and surging waters ripped barges from their moorings and slammed them into a 2,500-foot-long high-rise bridge on Interstate 10, damaging it. Officials estimate that about 35 percent of the city's residential areas are flooded.
Authorities have asked residents not to return to Lake Charles for the time being, and roadblocks encircle the city, manned by National Guard and state highway patrol officers.
Pump prices for gasoline and diesel fuel will rise or fall depending on how slowly oil refineries in the region resume operations, so analysts are paying close attention to petroleum facilities in Lake Charles and Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas.
Another Stafford resident, Frank Estevez, a warrant officer with the U.S. Coast Guard, is on loan to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the storm-tossed region.
Yesterday, he was aiding victims in Fort Bend County, Texas, home to the Houston suburb of Stafford.
Estevez initially traveled to Houston to help Katrina evacuees at the county's Red Cross shelters by assisting them with aid applications and translating for Spanish-speaking victims.
And when forecasters predicted Hurricane Rita could hit Houston, he knew there would be more chaos.
Rita evacuees who were stuck for hours on Interstates 10 and 71 gave up and took shelter in his hotel in Stafford, Texas, southwest of the nation's fourth-largest city.
But they were stranded there with no food because all of the stores were closed, Estevez said.
When a woman saw him in his uniform, she begged him to find food so she could feed her baby.
He immediately met with Fort Bend County officials and made them aware of the situation.
Estevez then called the local Red Cross shelters and a food bank and collected 10 truckloads of food that was delivered to 14 hotels in the county--that fed about 1,000 people, he said.
"People were angry," he said. "And I was giving them food and hope that they would have lunch and dinner the next day."
Besides power outages and debris from downed trees, Rita didn't hurt the area much, he said.
Now, FEMA has stationed Estevez in Austin, the state capital, where he will be helping out at the city's Disaster Resource Center for another week or so.
This morning, the Rev. Carson Riley and five members of Round Oak Baptist Church in Caroline County are en route to Picayune, Miss., halfway between Gulfport and New Orleans. They're going to help clean up storm debris, repair roofs, provide child care and man feeding shelters.
Yesterday, Kevin Dillard and his LifeCare workers were assigned for 72 hours to a search-and-rescue operation in DeRidder, La., 48 miles due north of Lake Charles. They expect to return to Stafford on Oct. 3.
The team's monthlong efforts in the devastated areas have not gone unnoticed.
"People are extremely appreciative of what we're doing," Dillard said. "As soon as we say we are from Virginia, they say, 'Thank you for coming.'"
The Associated Press and Knight Ridder Newspapers contributed to this report.
To reach PORTSIA SMITH:
