The Katrina Diaries | Emergency Preparedness | Forums

Interesting read

Introduction

There have been dozens of books written about Katrina, the Category 5 hurricane

that leveled long stretches of the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and decimated

the city of New Orleans in August 2005. The story has been told countless times by

survivors, politicians and journalists who were there on the front lines, witnessing

the devastation as it happened. Their stories express the unimaginable horror of seeing the bodies of dead men, women, children and animals ?oating in the putrid

?oodwaters. They tell of personal loss, grief and devastation. They shine a harsh

light on poverty and politics. It has been ?ve years since Katrina, and most of us

have heard it all.

But this story is different.

We are the paramedics, EMTs, doctors, nurses, administrators, support staff and

volunteers who were on the scene before, during and after Katrina. We were present from the pre-storm evacuations, during the storm, and throughout the surreal

and unexpectedly tragic aftermath. The accounts you will read in these pages are

told ?rst-hand by healers...the people who treated the wounds of the traumatized

and injured, held the sick and dying in their arms, and did their best to create a haven of safety in the midst of terror and chaos.

Katrina gave us an extraordinary new perspective on the work we do. We are accustomed to school bus accidents, murders, heart attacks, suicide attempts and

human suffering of all kinds. We are used to pulling mangled bodies out of multivehicle car crashes, but we never imagined that Katrina would require us leave our

ambulances and of?ces and face the unknown to care for a sea of suffering New

Orleanians. We also could not anticipate that some of the people we were trying to

help would end up shooting at us, or that we would run short of supplies, medicine

and equipment.

http://www.rossjudic.....iaries.pdf