Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [67]
In disasters, in war, it isn’t governments that help people, at least not early on. It’s individuals: policemen, doctors, strangers, people who stand up when others sit down. There were so many heroes in this storm, men and women who grabbed a bandage, an axe, a gun, and did what needed to be done.
Well past midnight, I stroll down Bourbon Street with a half-dozen cops. The street is empty and dark. The cops are off duty, out of uniform. A Louisiana state trooper pulls his car over and demands their IDs. He knows they’re New Orleans police, but it’s past curfew and he wants to prove a point.
“Fuck you,” one of the police officers yells. “You’re in my city, telling me I’m violating curfew? Fuck that.” The trooper drives off. We walk back to the bar. There’s no place else to go.
BLACK HAWK HELICOPTERS still pass overhead, the sound crushing, comforting. The cavalry’s come; help has arrived. They’re still occasionally plucking people off rooftops and porches. Now it’s the holdouts who decided to stay but have finally had enough.
Since the storm, the hallways at the Coast Guard command center at Air Station New Orleans have been crowded with cots—pilots and mechanics crashing between flights. Hundreds have come from all over the country, flying sparkling red choppers, angels from the sky.
Lieutenant Commander Tom Cooper flew the first rescue mission over New Orleans, hours after the storm. He joined the Coast Guard straight out of high school, and has been to a lot of disasters, but this one he’ll never forget.
“Their images stay with you, you know?” he says of the people he rescues, and I know exactly what he means. “You never get to talk to them because the helicopter’s so loud. You hear them yell thank you every once in a while, but most of the communications is just done looking in their eyes.
“It’s like an out-of-body experience, you know? To see that, to see it in person, to see it live—people crawling out of their attics on to their rooftops and signaling you for help.”
Underneath the hovering chopper, the rotor blades create a mini-storm, hot air whips your face, water sprays all about. When he hovers, Cooper is unable to see the people below him. Normally he has a copilot, but there are so many missions that at times he flies alone. A flight mechanic squats behind him, helping him line up the helicopter. The mechanic holds onto a handle, controlling a hoist used to lower the Coast Guard diver. The diver is attached to a cable, and the hoist can lower him as much as two hundred feet.
The day after the storm, Cooper flew with Lieutenant Junior Grade Maria Roerick, who had just been certified as a Coast Guard pilot. It was her first rescue mission.
“Everywhere you’d look, you’d turn, there’s somebody over there, there’s somebody over there,” she remembers. “You had to start sorting people out, saying, ‘There’s kids,’ or ‘There’s elderly. I think they need medical attention over there.’”
In the six days after Katrina, Coast Guard pilots out of Air Station New Orleans saved 6,471 lives—nearly twice as many as they’d saved here in the past fifty years combined.
When she sleeps, Roerick still sees the faces of people waiting to be rescued. “You go to bed at night completely exhausted,” she says, “knowing there are still thousands of people out there. You can’t get them all. You want to scoop them all up.”
WE WAKE EACH day unsure what lies ahead. Early in the morning, we gather in the lobby of the hotel. Few words are spoken before we head out. We climb into our SUV, a small platoon searching the city. The water recedes, new streets emerge, the map is redrawn every day.
Some residents still refuse to leave. On the street outside her two-room rental, I spot an elderly lady, overweight, overtired. She sits on a rusty metal chair and leans on a cane with the words LOVE MINISTRIES crudely carved into the