Wright-Pat Medics Still Shaken By Katrina Trip
By Timothy R. Gaffney Staff Writer
The drama didn’t end with the takeoff.
On Sept. 1, three days after Hurricane Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast, the first medical teams from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base reached New Orleans Airport in a C-141 transport jet.
The reservists from the 445th Airlift Wing were in the first wave of response to the storm. Within a week after the storm, they would evacuate more than 500 ill and injured people from New Orleans, many of them patients from hospitals and nursing homes.
The 445th was one of several units at Wright-Patterson that played key roles in last year’s massive military relief effort.
On the eve of Katrina’s first anniversary, even the most seasoned medics are still affected by the disaster.
“I still have a lot of guilt feelings, like we should have done a lot more,” said Col. Danna Lilly, now commander of the 315th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron in Charleston, S.C.
A flight nurse with 30 years’ experience, Lilly was in a different unit but volunteered to be a medical crew director on the 445th’s New Orleans flights because one team was shorthanded.
But the medics faced conditions for which even wartime experience hadn’t prepared them.
Lilly said there was no “military footprint,” no ground support in place, when they landed for the first time at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
With buildings damaged and power out, the airport was shut down.
“There was not a soul around. We were trying to figure out where to go,” Lt. Col. Karla Voy of Springfield recalled.
But the passenger terminal teemed inside with hurricane victims, many unable to walk. More were pouring in from buses and rescue helicopters. The concourses were dark and the air reeked of body wastes and garbage. Civilian disaster workers on the scene were overwhelmed and exhausted.
The medics had to marshal evacuees themselves. Most were hospital and nursing home patients, but few had any medical records.
“We didn’t know what was wrong with these people. We didn’t know what medicines they were on or low long they’d gone without their medicines,” Lilly said.
They trucked stretcher-bound patients to their jet on baggage trams and commandeered a city bus for people who could walk. Pilots and loadmasters helped carry them aboard. Besides the elderly, the manifest included eight newborns and a little girl who smuggled a kitten aboard in her suitcase.
Their first airlift was to Fort Worth, Texas. A patient stopped breathing during the flight, forcing the flight crew to declare an emergency and land ahead of other planes, Lilly said. Despite her guilt pangs, Lilly called the mission “a pretty gallant effort.” And she noted that while the reservists were military responders, they were also volunteers — they had not been ordered to active duty. “Nobody told these people they had to be there,” she said.
Aviation news
See Web video, photos and also
read Tim Gaffney’s ‘Air City’ blog.
DaytonDailyNews.com/aviation
(c) 2006 Dayton Daily News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.