Keith Sharon recalls his experience when he was embedded with an Orange County Fire Authority team sent to New Orleans in 2005.
Tree branches crushed cars. Boats smashed into rooftops.
I saw a coffin floating down the street in floodwaters.
Streetlights didn’t work. People drove the wrong way on the Interstates. Packs of wild dogs ran through downtown New Orleans.
It smelled like wet rot and despair. The air was hot and angry. The wind blew chaos into everything. Nothing resembled the civilization that had been there three weeks previously.
Twenty years ago, I spent 15 days embedded with a rescue team called California Task Force 5 after Hurricane Katrina. Photographer Bruce Chambers and I (we were working for the Orange County Register) rode along with a 90-member team, mostly comprised of first responders from the Orange County Fire Authority. We went by bus to the scariest, saddest and most shocking place on earth during August and September of 2005.
I remember the level of frustration as the rescue mission began. Our bus brigade stopped in Dallas, awaiting instructions from FEMA about where we should stop in Louisiana.
FEMA didn’t make a decision about our destination for four long days. A team of rescuers sat around the hotel lobby getting angrier as its members watched tragic images on television of people stranded on their rooftops (because the water had risen so high), calling out for help.
I got to know Nick Sanchez, a firefighter who was the father of then-USC quarterback Mark Sanchez (who later became an NFL veteran). Nick was so motivated to help, he left the hotel and volunteered to hand out water to people who had come from New Orleans to Dallas with nowhere to stay.
When we finally got permission to move our buses, we went as close to downtown New Orleans as we could get.
See more: Pasadena Star-News photographer Keith Birmingham spent 10 days in and around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit. See his images from 2005.
We camped at the New Orleans Saints’ practice facility in Metairie, Louisiana. My cot was on the 10-yard line. Chambers and I wrote stories and transmitted photos in a tent in the parking lot.
