New Orleans – “If we come across a body floating?” Sgt. Chris Fisher of the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s office asked.
“Let it go,” Maj. Bobby Woods replied, as Fisher and other rescue workers prepared for the day’s mission. “Let’s first go for life.”
With hundreds of New Orleans residents stranded on upper floors and roofs by rising floodwater from Hurricane Katrina, rescue teams from across the country mobilized in the gulf area in the largest relief effort since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
They sailed the seas over Interstate 10 and other submerged arteries, plucking people to safety with an arsenal of life-saving equipment.
The people who were saved emerged with anguished testimony of the human toll.
A 95-year-old invalid drowned in her house after her daughter said she could not carry her to safety.
“I had to give her mouth-to- mouth,” the daughter, Judy Martin, said after swimming to a neighbor’s house and being rescued there Tuesday.
“She just said, ‘I give up,”‘ Martin said of her mother, Cecile Dupont Martin, a former teacher.
A truckload of National Guard troops said they had helped rush to the hospital a woman who delivered a baby in the back of a state wildlife and fisheries truck.
A man stepped out of a rescue boat cradling a piglet.
Pauline Stauss, 80, was rescued with a dog and three cats she was keeping for her daughter.
Kate Guelfo, 83, was the first of five in her flooded house to be rescued. With just one spot available in the rescue boat, her housemates pushed her out the window to safety, agreeing themselves to await later rescue.
Not all the rescues were carried out by the authorities.
Among a group of several hundred poor people and hospital patients removed from flooded areas and deposited by rescuers alongside Interstate 10 in an outlying area of the city was retired mail carrier Leonard J. Morris, 74, credited for his heroics in his boat.
“He saved our lives,” said Toniliese McNeil, 24. “We were trapped in the house, and he had no way to get over to us. He had no gas. But he paddled his way.”
Morris said he knew the eight people – women and children – across the way were in danger but that the raging wind on Monday morning made it almost impossible to respond.
“They yelled across the water, ‘It’s up to our necks!”‘ he said, explaining that he jumped into the water and pulled the boat by its anchor, tossing the anchor forward each time.
“I can’t watch this,” he remembered thinking. “I can’t see them die. So I kept throwing the anchor.”
Battling the waters are hundreds of emergency workers mobilized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including the Coast Guard and incident situation teams from Texas, Missouri and Tennessee. As of Tuesday night, they reported saving 315 people, including a 400- pound woman who was reached by cutting through a roof.