The U.S. Coast Guard & Hurricane Katrina

THE COAST GUARD’S KATRINA DOCUMENTATION PROJECT 

by Scott Price, Deputy Coast Guard Historian

One of the largest search-and-rescue operations in the history of the United States occurred in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc across a great swath of the nation’s Gulf Coast. The governments’ response at the local, city, state and federal levels came under intense media scrutiny and criticism. Certain government officials were vilified while the nation was transfixed by the carnage. Nevertheless, during the chaos, fear, and uncertainty of that time there was one shining light, one government agency that received nothing but accolades for its efforts: the United States Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard and its predecessors, including the Life-Saving Service, the Lighthouse Service and the Revenue Cutter Service, had extensive experience in responding to natural disasters. Cutters have been saving lives in the worst types of weather since the early 1830s. Life-Saving Service and Revenue Cutter Service personnel actively participated in relief efforts during the annual flooding of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers since the mid-nineteenth century. Responses to hurricanes began with the terrible hurricane of 1900 that virtually wiped out Galveston. The Revenue Cutter and Life-Saving services also responded during earthquakes, including the one in 1906 that leveled San Francisco. Lighthouse keepers too, including women, rescued those in need during storms near their lighthouses. The men and women of these services were always ready to go to the assistance of their fellow citizens when nature struck, a core value that permeates the Coast Guard today. If every Marine is a rifleman, then every Coast Guardsmen is a lifesaver. 

Coast Guard preparations began well before Hurricane Katrina struck the coast of Florida. Aircraft were scattered to safe airports out of harm’s way but close enough to permit them to respond quickly as the hurricane withdrew. Assets in the Gulf region too made preparations. The hurricane came ashore near the Dade-Broward county line on the night of 25 August. The first rescues occurred soon thereafter when aircraft were dispatched to rescue unlucky boaters and fishermen who were at sea as the hurricane passed over them. As Katrina swirled out into the Gulf of Mexico the storm strengthened to frightening proportions, with forecasts calling for a Category 5 hurricane. As it approached the Gulf Coast, the Coast Guard assembled helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and cutters, many brought in from other Coast Guard districts, near the area where the storm was expected to make landfall. Hurricane Katrina came ashore near Buras, Louisiana, on the morning of 29 August as a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds of 145 mph. 

Rescue operations commenced as the hurricane moved inland. Cutters had trailed the hurricane as closely as they could and began rescuing those offshore while the helicopters, HH-65 Dolphins and HH-60 Jayhawks, were launched as the hurricane’s eye passed over the city of New Orleans. The tempo increased as everyone realized that the levees protecting the city had given way, creating an urban nightmare. Dispensing with peace-time regulations on the amount of time needed to rest between flights, aircrews worked around the clock to pluck survivors from rooftops while maintenance crews kept the aircraft in service. Communications were problematic, but the Coast Guard is known for and prides itself on its ability to improvise. When rescue swimmers found victims trapped in their attics with no way to escape the rising waters, axes were used to chop through rooftops. When it was found that not enough were available, a trip to Home Depot solved that. Urban search and rescue techniques were developed on the fly, since few aircrews had experience of flying night sorties through a flooded city where high winds and hanging power lines added to the danger. Coast Guard cutters and small craft too entered the fray, rescuing people from small islands of dry land, flooded overpasses, inundated homes and buildings and transported them to safety.

The scale of operations during the Katrina response defies imagination and the statistics generated are almost unbelievable. Search and rescue operations alone saved 24,135 lives from imminent danger, usually off the roofs of the victims’ homes as flood waters lapped at their feet. Coast Guardsmen “evacuated to safety” 9,409 patients from local hospitals. In total, 33,545 souls owed their lives to the men and women of the nation’s oldest continuous-going sea service, nearly equaling the number of persons the Coast Guard saves during a calendar year. 

As valiant as their actions were, there were many other unheralded tasks for which the Coast Guard was responsible for. The eponymous Damage Assessment Teams, known as DATs, were sent to the area. DARTs, the Disaster Area Response Teams, paddled and operated their small boats through the flooded streets searching for survivors at water level. Many of these Coast Guardsmen, including 800 recalled-reservists, came from as far away as Alaska and Maine. Helicopters working with the Army Corps of Engineers dropped 18,000 pounds of sandbags to restore the breached levees. Aids to Navigation Teams, known as ANTs, repaired and repositioned all of the navigational aids that were displaced or destroyed by the hurricane. Strike Teams, the Coast Guard’s oil-spill and other environmental disaster responders, arrived to assist in the cleanup of the over 4,000 pollution cases in the area. Marine Safety and Security Teams were sent to the area to assist with security and then recovery efforts. Coast Guard responders also included Environmental Response Teams, Critical Incident Stress Management teams, Port Security Units, and Incident Management Teams all rounded out the varied Coast Guard response. Every Coast Guard District contributed something to the Katrina effort.

Clean up operations are still on-going, including the removal of the almost 3,000 fishing and work vessels that the hurricane scattered across the landscape, with some being stranded far inland. For many Coast Guardsmen the hurricane hit close to home with approximately 30 percent of those stationed in the New Orleans area losing their homes. Many of the stations in the hurricane’s path also suffered extensive damage and repairs are still being carried out. Katrina’s impact proved to be devastating. Just as the operations tempo began to ease, however, another hurricane approached the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Rita. Rita passed through the Florida Straits and made landfall near the Louisiana-Texas border on 24 September as a Category 3 hurricane. Rescue operations commenced as the hurricane moved inland but conditions were no where near as dire as they had been with Katrina.

During the Rita rescue operations, the Coast Guard saved an additional 138 lives and conducted 53 medical evacuations. This brought the total of lives “saved” and “evacuated to safety” for both hurricane rescue operations to 33,735. A total of 76 Coast Guard and Coast Guard Auxiliary aircraft took part in the rescues. They flew 1,817 sorties with a total flight time of 4,291.3 hours in the air. The air crews saved 12,535. A total of 42 cutters and 131 small boats also participated, with their crews rescuing 21,200. Over 5,000 Coast Guardsmen served in Katrina operations. Once again the Coast Guard, the nation’s fifth armed service, demonstrated that Semper Paratus or “Always Ready” is more than a motto. 

The Historian’s Office’s efforts to capture for posterity the Coast Guard’s role during Hurricane Katrina began prior to its landfall at Florida’s east coast and gained considerable momentum within three days of the hurricane’s Gulf Coast landfall. This effort to collect the “history” of the service’s response was an unprecedented effort made relatively easy due to the support of senior leadership, a critical factor to any such effort’s success. In the case of Katrina, we had support from the very top. The service’s Chief of Staff, VADM Thad Allen (who is now Commandant), ordered the Coast Guard to make every effort to save the history of the service’s response to Katrina and ordered the formation of the Katrina Archival Records Team, or KART, to fulfill that effort. The effort gained some momentum and further in-depth support when President George W. Bush appointed Vice Admiral Allen as the Principal Federal Official for the federal government’s Katrina response efforts. When President Bush ordered every agency involved in Katrina operations to save all documentation, we were already in place and ready to comply.

The Coast Guard formed KART with personnel from the Historian’s Office and uniformed Coast Guard reservists who were ordered to active duty as well as representatives from various information technology offices within the Coast Guard. KART was responsible for capturing all relevant documentation and photography generated during the Katrina operations. The documentation was prodigious, including thousands of emails from high ranking officers sending out orders, operational orders from mid-level commanders, mundane bureaucratic issues, logistics, and the poignant pleas for assistance from civilians trapped in New Orleans or their families elsewhere requesting that the Coast Guard rescue a loved one. 

The Historian’s Office suggested an active oral history program to acquire first-hand accounts from Coast Guard participants. This was accomplished by activating a Reserve Collection Team, consisting of a number of reservists brought on active duty and sent into the field even as the SAR efforts were fully underway. These reservists, under the direction of PACS Peter Capelotti, Ph.D., USCGR, and historians from the Historian’s Office, conducted 240 oral histories over a period of several months. These interviews spanned the spectrum of those Coast Guardsmen involved in Katrina operations, from Admiral Allen while he was the PFO working in New Orleans to the rescue swimmers who braved the hurricane’s wrath and rescued so many from the roof tops of the flooded city. Those involved in the planning operations, the mechanics who serviced the helicopters, the dozens of flight personnel who took part in the rescue operations, the commanding officers of the stations, the admirals who made the decisions, all were interviewed extensively.

Additionally, KART captured all relevant communications, including emails from all offices involved, situation reports from all commands, including those from other federal agencies including DHS, FEMA, and DoD, summaries, Power Point briefings to senior leadership, and lessons learned documents. Every document was saved in an electronic format and placed in a large electronic archive developed by Mr. Jeffrey Bowdoin of the Historian’s Office. The archive is huge, consisting of over 113,000 individual files that take up over 614 gigabytes of memory. Each of the 240 oral histories was recorded digitally and many were filmed; all of them are kept in the archive as well. We have written detailed abstracts for each interview and are currently getting the interviewees to edit and sign off on their interviews.

There was one aspect of the collection effort that garnered considerable interest among the senior leadership and consequently increased the visibility of the Historian’s Office. We developed a detailed visual historical timeline of the Coast Guard’s response. Using an Excel spreadsheet, we transcribed various subjects including: storm development and conditions, major events, key Coast Guard and civilian leadership decisions, assets deployed, Coast Guard personnel involvement, key accomplishments, search-and-rescue statistics including numbers rescued and evacuated, marine environmental response, damage to Coast Guard facilities, among others, and charted them on a day-to-day basis. There are also sections that covered cutter movements, ports and marine status, and other government agencies’ actions. The senior leadership made dozens of requests for copies of the timeline for use in briefings, including those briefings for Congress and the White House. Having a product that can be easily emailed or printed generates considerable interest from many different quarters and can increase the visibility and appreciation of your efforts.

This was an unprecedented experience for the Coast Guard and for the Historian’s Office. Never before had we attempted to capture every possible piece of documentary evidence at the time of an on-going large-scale operation. In this case we believe that we have captured almost all of the relevant material regarding the Katrina operations. The oral histories alone are worth their weight in gold. We have also added a few historic artifacts to our artifact collection, including a number of the boats used for rescues and an axe, signed by the personnel that took part in the rescues, that was first used by a rescue swimmer to free a family trapped in their attic. That axe symbolizes the spirit of Coast Guard operations: improvisation, ingenuity, courage, and a willingness to do what was necessary to save thousands of lives. The axe is perhaps the best iconic representation of the Coast Guard’s response to Katrina that we have in the collection.

[This article was first published in The Federalist: Newsletter for the Society for History in the Federal Government, Second Series, No. 12 (Winter 2006-2007), pp. 1, 3-5.]