By
Barry Owems
As flood waters destroyed parts of Louisiana in
the wake of Hurricane Katrina last month, many residents
of Lower Manhattan, like those across the country,
got busy shipping clothing and supplies, organizing
fund-raisers, and manning lemonade stands and yard
sales.
But a few lent helping hands-literally-to the
people of New Orleans, wading waist-deep in the
muck to search for survivors. They are credited
with rescuing 50 people from their homes.
"We're a small piece of a big puzzle and whatever
we can do, we are happy to do it," said Sid
Baumgarten, team chief for the Battery Park City
Community Emergency Response Team, or CERT.
The team sent eight members to New Orleans, each
with special training in boat handling and water
rescue.
"I must have had a dozen calls from people
that wanted to go," Baumgarten said, "but
we needed people that were trained in marine rescue."
Among those was Hank Wisner. The 58-year-old Battery
Park
City resident was on his way to Connecticut for
a vacation when he got the call on his cell phone.
He immediately turned his car around.
"I remember during 9/11 when people from down
South came and stayed in our buildings and helped
us clean out our apartments," Wisner said.
"What comes around, goes around. It was a privilege
to be able go down there and help out."
Another Lower Manhattan resident who joined the
effort was Bing Chen, 56. Chen, a resident of Southbridge
Towers, also recalls the outpouring of support from
around the country following the Sept. 11 attack
on the World Trade Center, and said he felt that
it was his duty to join the rescue effort in New
Orleans.
"A lot of people said they were amazed that
Northerners had come to help," he said. "But
the way I look at it, we're all Americans."
The mission was organized by Scott Shields, founder
of the Bear Search and Rescue Fund (www.bearsearchandrescue.org),
a nonprofit group that funds search and rescue operations
nationwide. The group is named after Shields' late
dog, Bear, who aided in the search effort at the
World Trade Center site.
"One dead dog has done a lot of good for a
lot of people" Shields said.
The team stopped in Maryland to pick up rescue rafts
donated by Zodiac, their manufacturer, which were
loaded into rented moving trucks.
The eight-vehicle convoy rolled into New Orleans
on
Sept. 4, but it took hours to get the trucks into
the city. Seemingly at every turn, the streets were
blocked with water, debris or power lines, Wisner
said.
"If you can imagine a spider web descending
onto the city, that is what the power lines were
like."
After a morning spent outfitting the rafts, the
team paired up with soldiers from the Army's 82nd
Airborne Division and set out into the surreal landscape
of the flooded city.
Team members tagged dead bodies floating in the
water with orange markers that could be seen from
the air, rescued survivors from sagging front porches,
and attempted to coax holdouts from their homes,
using bullhorns to plead with them to evacuate.
"The people we saw, white or black, were very
poor," Wisner said. "Some stayed because
they wanted to protect their homes, or because they
didn't have any place to go."
Many stayed because they would not leave their pets
behind, Chen said.
Abandoned or trapped animals- team members said
they saw hundreds of them-created some of the more
heartbreaking scenes for rescue workers, whose orders
on the first day were to leave them behind.
Wisner recalls an exhausted Labrador retriever struggling
against its leash in the floodwater. Wisner cut
the leash, and the dog followed the boat for a while,
but it could not be brought aboard.
"There was dead silence on that boat,"
Wisner said.
Another time, Chen smashed the windshield of a flooded
van to free a cat that was trapped on the dashboard.
"We gave it a fighting chance," he said.
On the second day the teams started rescuing the
animals, and they estimated that by the end of the
week they had saved about 20.
After seven days in New Orleans, Chen returned to
New York City with two dogs he adopted from a shelter
set up for abandoned animals.
Wisner returned exhausted and humbled by the experience.
"When the World Trade Center was hit, we had
the means of starting up again," he said. "These
people are really going to have a difficult time
starting up their lives." |
