New Orleans – Steve Aseltine swung an ax into a rooftop to get a hold so he could climb up from a small boat his team was using to search for more hurricane victims.
Chain saw in hand, he cut a 2- by 2-foot hole in the roof and then hopped down into the sweltering attic, looking for signs of life.
Tuesday, search-and-rescue teams from Colorado and other states began what is called a primary search – going house to house, block to block, cutting holes in every roof and spot-checking through windows for people or bodies.
If a body is found, teams note the location and move on. Recovery of bodies comes later.
“It’s a very arduous and long process, but it has to get done,” Aseltine said. “You hate to find dead people, but if they are out there, you want to find them too, for their loved ones.”
Aseltine is a member of Colorado Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 1, made up mostly of firefighters. Of 80 team members, nearly 40 were called to Louisiana.
Task forces assembled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency from around the country are conducting the search operation here. They train for thousands of hours for such a disaster.
“Most are the top guns of firefighters because they are trained in everything,” said Jim Chestnut, a FEMA spokesman. “This team is an asset for states where they exist, like Colorado.”
So far, about 22,000 people have been rescued in New Orleans, 5,500 of those by FEMA teams.
Until Tuesday, teams had been doing “rapid rescue,” driving or boating up and down streets looking for obvious survivors on balconies, waving out windows, calling out or on rooftops.
On Tuesday, they began the painstaking process of conducting a primary search in an area of the city that had experienced multiple shootings the night before and looting several days earlier.
Each team of four was required to call in every 30 minutes, or someone would be sent looking for them. Each boat or vehicle was accompanied by a U.S. Coast Guard member, armed with M-4 carbines for added safety.
“Every day, we’ve had to re- evaluate our circumstances, based on safety and where we are,” said Dave Quintana, task force safety officer and a Denver Fire Department special-operations chief.
In the water, which reached nearly 5 feet, soldiers patrolled in amphibious vehicles. All around them, furniture, toys and household items floated in the putrid water. The water is thick and black, ripples almost as slowly as molasses and reeks of oil, human waste, rotting flesh and toxic chemicals.
Mailboxes are barely visible in some spots, and in others, the boats skimmed the tops of submerged vehicles.
Team members took turns using a chain saw to cut a square into the roof of every home. Sometimes they just peered into it. But if it was deep enough for a person to get into, they crawled into the hole, said Roxanne Dunn of West Metro Fire Rescue, based in Lakewood.
It’s hard and painstaking work. The team of two boats covered 25 homes in about two hours.
Aseltine and John Saito, also from West Metro Fire, carefully laid a ladder across side yards to reach the next house. They crawled across it with chain saws and axes.
“It’s hard, and it’s hot,” Saito said while the team took a break in the shade under the eaves of a garage. “I like to think if we don’t find them, it means they got out.”
After the search is complete, the team paints a large X on the side of the house with orange spray paint that includes the date searched in the top quadrant, the name of the search team in the left quad and the number of alive or dead in the bottom quad. The right side of the X is for any special instructions.
In one house, broken glass exposed an American flag hanging in the place of a curtain.
Aseltine’s crew did not find any residents; it seemed most had left. Another Colorado team did evacuate a couple of people who had initially wanted to stick it out, said Mike Lee, safety officer for the team.
“These are people who finally reached the end of their rope and said, ‘OK, we’re done with this,”‘ he said.
There are still residents who refuse to leave, most of these on dry land. Team members take their names and addresses and mark their locations on a map.
Altogether, the task forces found nearly 50 people Tuesday in the 12-square-mile area they were searching.
Stanley and Queenesther Riley were among the few evacuated by the teams. An Arizona task force carried the couple out – each clutching one black trash bag with medications and a few pieces of clothing.
Their home still had 3 feet of water, so they lived in the loft and survived on cans of green beans, pineapple and spaghetti – anything they could find in a can.
“I was crying when I saw them,” Queenesther Riley said about the rescuers. “I felt so good. We stuck it out as long as we could. No one had come by before.”
The couple were airlifted out by a military helicopter. Nearby, a body wrapped in trash bags also awaited removal.
The type of search that found the Rileys will probably continue for two more weeks before the focus turns to recovery of bodies.
“After a certain point, we need to recover the bodies,” Chestnut said. “We have to do that. These are the bodies of people’s loved ones.”
