NEW ORLEANS – Chad Roberson led 18 boats into one of the tiny, poorer corners of a storm-battered city – where a fetid sea kept the feeble and the elderly from finding their way to high ground.
He and members of the East Baton Rouge Urban Search and Rescue team had been in the city since Monday.
Under threatening skies Thursday morning, they turned an on-ramp of outbound Interstate 10 into a staging ground for those too weak or scared to escape their inundated homes.
The first boats went to one of four schools that they'd tried to clear the previous day. There, they pulled 500 people who had huddled since the storm in places no one in the outside world would know to look.
Almost by accident, the crews found more people waving frantically for help – this time from the upper windows of a nursing home.
Mr. Roberson's crew radioed back: What they found at St. Martin's Assisted Living Center could be bad. The place had run out of food and water, and some of the people appeared unable to walk. Some might not be able to make it if left on an interstate on-ramp and told to find their way to help.
At least 80 confused and frightened people were already on that same ramp – slumped on the ground beside bags and boxes of belongings. Just across I-10 that morning, the crew had seen the body of an old man, carefully tucked into blue blankets and dirty sheets and left by his loved ones after dying on the side of the road.
"I can stack 20 people in my truck, if I have some place to take 'em," said an EMT, Christian True. "We put 'em out on the ramp, it's just as bad as leaving them out there."
A crew member searching the home called out on the radio: "They got any access to research to help us with ambulances and stuff? We're gonna need it."
They had to call their emergency operations center in Baton Rouge to find out. Communications in New Orleans was so bad that none of the rescue crews could talk directly to local officials.
The command center responded with worries about their safety. But the East Baton Rouge crew had deputies from the Rapides Parish who were part of a SWAT team, and armed policemen with riot guns patrolled the interstate above their boat ramp.
"I'm telling them we're secured," a crew member said, and they turned back to their work.
Paul Mire of Destrehan, La.,who brought his boat to New Orleans and joined Mr. Roberson's crew, couldn't stand hearing any more. He shoved off his 20-foot bay boat, heading toward the back of the neighborhood to find the nursing home.
"I've got to do something," he said, as Christen Romero, a Louisiana State University student who'd come along to help, fended off wreckage and tried to keep the boat from getting grounded.
He was a few blocks from the nursing home when Christen spotted four people frantically waving towels from the balcony of the Corpus Christi Catholic School.
Seeing no children, he yelled back that he'd have to come back later. As the boat rounded a corner, a woman on the porch of a house called out: "Go down there. There's somebody that's real sick."
He turned back toward the school. Someone from a second story yelled that they had two people in wheelchairs and others with medical conditions inside.
The red-brick Catholic school house was the highest place in a neighborhood so small that it wasn't even worthy of a name, a place in the Seventh Ward where the water lapped against shotgun houses and people wondered whether anyone would ever come.
So the feeble and the scared and the elderly made their way there and huddled in a second floor gym. They shared what food and water they could carry or scavenge from neighboring homes. They waited – hoping and praying someone would come.
There were boats that came by, but didn't have room for everyone. So they stayed together, keeping an eye on the fierce pair of Rottweilers that someone left behind.
On Thursday, as a cloud burst, Mr. Mire's boat pulled up at a bottom side door.
"Do you need any money for gas?" asked 19-year-old Nathaniel Lewis, the only one there not sick or disabled.
"Just bring them down," Mr. Mire said.
Betty Witz, a dainty woman in a print top and black headscarf, kissed her rescuers, calling, "Thank you baby!"
By 3 p.m., they'd pulled another 200 people out of the water, but no ambulances or medical help had arrived. It was time to pack up. "We would like to work this area some more," Mr. Roberson said. "It's not big at all, and we've pulled 700 people in two days – out of a three-city block area. ... There's so much work to do. ''
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E-mail lhancock@dallasnews.com
