Editor:
Tim Ruestman
On Tuesday September 20, 2005 I was contacted by FEMA to assist with DMORT and provide help to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I left on Thursday morning to go to Baton Rouge,LA where the Find Family Assistance Center was located. I was scheduled to sleep in a tent city located near the center. As a standby I took my pop up camper along. I was thankful I did this because on Friday morning tent city was taken down and the rest of us volunteers had to sleep on the floor of a banquet room in a hotel. I parked my pop up in the parking lot and that is where I slept for the remainder of my detail. Once I arrived in Baton Rouge I was explained how the family assistance center would work. One of my jobs was to take information over the telephone from families who had loved ones missing or deceased. The assistance center was building a database of the missing and presumed dead. The family members gave information on their loved ones such as, height, weight, fingerprints, x-rays, DNA etc. This information was then compared to the deceased bodies already recovered and at the temporary morgue. The morgue was located in St. Gabriel,LA just a few miles from the call center. If a body was positively identified it was then released. At the time of my service 648 bodies were at the morgue. The temporary morgue was located in a large storage building next to an old grade school. The temperature in the morgue was well above comfortable. On Friday I went to New Orleans to see the devastation. The entire four hours I was in downtown New Orleans I did not see 5 people on the streets. The devastation is unbelievable, the smell of oil, sewage and decomposing bodies is very strong. The threat of hurricane Rita was keeping people from coming back to their homes. We were able to leave New Orleans under severe weather conditions. We actually had to travel the wrong way on Interstate 10 to escape the second round of flooding. The Friday I was in New Orleans a majority of the homes had not yet been searched and their were still many bodies located in the homes.
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Talking to the victims of Hurricane Katrina really made me appreciate my family as well as the many things we take for advantage. I heard some very sad stories of how families have been torn apart. One elderly man told me his house filled with water in less than 3 minutes and he and his wife fled to the attic. After three days in the attic his wife died so he tied her body to the rafters so it would not float away and he swam to safety. I heard a story of a woman who was bit by a snake and had died in the attic. A story from a man who left his quadriplegic wife in her bed and he knew she must be dead. Some families had found their relatives miles away that had been evacuated. One man talked to me at length about the horrors from the Superdome. I was impressed by everyone in Louisiana's thoughtfulness and thanking us for helping. I learned volumes of information on how to handle mass casualties and I hope Woodford County never has to experience. I wish everyone would quit throwing political spears at each other and concentrate more on putting families back together. I will be forever changed by my time I spent helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina. If I made one family's burden a little easier to handle I accomplished what I had set forth to do. ** Mr. Ruestman is Woodford County Coroner
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