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September 14, 2005
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By Nathaniel R. Helms
Devastation like what is shown here on Dauphin Island was widespread for at least 90 miles along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. |
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Mobile, Ala. - A lot of folks have been complaining about the care the victims of Hurricane Katrina received after the storm had passed over the Gulf Coast and blew or washed away just about everything they owned except the pathetic little bundles of possessions they were pointlessly lugging about.
At least at first glance it certainly seemed that way. It looked as if the entire world had forsaken those folks and the only hope they had was fleeing before the storm. It was as understandable as it was incorrect! There were people helping, they were just invisible in the huge throng of bewildered, befuddled people starving for help.
That isn't to say there won't someday be a reckoning for the ham-handed manner with which senior federal and state officials providing emergency services to their constituencies did their job... in fact that process is already underway. As one fellow who survived Katrina noted "it just didn't matter too much when the Grim Reaper was just over the horizon."
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What was left in some places ( L: Road on Dauphin Island after Katrina ) after Katrina could have been on the terrible road to Tuzla , Bosnia in the miserable winter of '93 except for the lack of dirty ice and snow. Nothing worked, the air stunk of death, and catastrophe was tapping on everyone's shoulder. Even without the wet white blanket of sadness there were plenty of bedraggled, dazed people with grey faces and trembling mouths looking vacantly about with hopeless eyes. Helplessness was epidemic and misery was the reality of the moment. Near the epicenter of the storm long lines of Americans some remarkably insensitive observers were labeling "refugees" were walking slowly out of harm's way watching the convoys of first responders heading in the other direction. Some of them wondered out loud why the soldiers didn't stop to help.
"Ain't I somebody," one of them yelled helplessly after a convoy of passing Wisconsin National Guardsmen heading south on Interstate 55.
Despite the imminent threat endangered people watched pickups heading north full of dogs and lawnmowers and four-wheelers and furniture that somebody else thought was worth more than the lives of their bedraggled neighbors. Entire families trudged down the sides of the roads with little kids whining and dads growling impotently and mothers looking on mournfully because they had just lost everything important in their lives except their children and what were they going to do about them?
After hours of muddling detours and roadblocks manned by badge-heavy cops with tired eyes and worries of their own it was possible to reach the places visited by the astounding devastation Katrina brought on her long dance across the warm Atlantic. What remained in her wake was straight from the disaster-etched Third World except the people were Americans and Americans don't lie down for too long.
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Among them were men like Chief Warrant Officer 2nd Class (CWO2) Daren Hooks ( L.), a twenty-year Alabama Army National Guard veteran and his handful of comrades who rushed to the killing zone just as soon as they could and began saving folks and giving them help and hope and a reason for hanging on just a little longer when it seemed like the entire world had forsaken them. Standing tall with Hooks and his 20 volunteers was a team of police officers from Florence, Alabama in the far northern part of the state who rushed down to devastated Dauphin Island, Alabama just as soon as Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) allowed them so they could start searching for missing people and making sure survivors got off the island and on to somewhere safe.
It was the same for the men and women at the U.S. Coast Guard small boat station at Dauphin Island who were there just as soon as the wind slowed down enough for them to walk upright. None of them knew or cared if there was a problem with moribund FEMA officials or a painfully slow response by the rest of the Federal government. They were in it from the beginning and they were still there a week later pulling 18-hour-a-day, seven-day a week watches making sure the rest of the country was as safe as they could make it.
Even so Hooks deserves special mention and not because he sought out the press to toot his own horn for awhile - no sir! Hooks didn't even want to talk to the press because he was too busy delivering food and water all over an Alabama county so devastated and completely dysfunctional that when he arrived there folks were actually on the verge of dying from dehydration while drowning in the slowly receding water. The only reason Hooks gets special mention at all is because the cops from Florence guarding Dauphin Island thought he was doing such a fine job they wouldn't let things rest.
Hooks, although in the ALARNG, is usually a full time civilian technician with the state's National Guard bureau. When not on active duty he runs the 900th Maintenance Company, an independent ordinance company assigned to the ALARNG's 731st Maintenance Battalion. It is located near Troy, Alabama in the central part of the state. Until two years ago Hooks was a staff sergeant. Then he was selected for the state's Warrant Officer Program and spent a month in Fort McCoy, Wisconsin earning the right to be called "sir."
Florence Police Department Captain Marty Dodd, a 23-year veteran of law enforcement, encountered Hooks almost as soon as he got to Dauphin Island, he said. The other officers in the area, Alabama state troopers, fish & game folks, and the local police, were all talking about the innovative National Guard officer who set aside FEMA's remarkably complex and unworkable disaster relief plan for the region and set up one on his own. According to Dodd and about twenty other witnesses and recipients of Hook's ministrations the original FEMA relief plan left most of the victims it was intended to serve without the means to take advantage of the aid, they said.
Despite their criticism Hooks refrained from bad mouthing FEMA or the original disaster relief plan he was supposed to execute.
"The problem was the magnitude of the disaster," Hooks explained. "The FEMA folks just weren't ready to cope with what had happened."
What didn't happen as a result was almost as much of a threat to the locals as the hurricane that preceded it ( L.: Unattended water pickup point at dawn near Bayou La Batre ). After the storm the roads were impassable – washed out, covered with water, or simply gone – and the means FEMA had anticipated for people to reach the aid centers were unavailable. The FEMA plan depended of survivors getting into cars, buses, trucks, and boats and hurrying on down to one of the 12 "to-be-announced" disaster relief centers around Mobile County to pick up their relief supplies.
Unfortunately that was impossible because every conveyance that survived the hurricane needed fuel and there was no gas or diesel because there was no electricity to pump it or because the fuel supplies had been contaminated with water or otherwise destroyed. Incredibly, FEMA didn't have a backup plan, county officials acknowledged.
It seems like FEMA might have taken something like that into account it its planning, but that is a question for another time!
Regardless, Hooks and his 20 ALARNG volunteers set up their own relief program using three "five-quarter" ton pick-up trucks, 2 HUMVEEs, and a five-ton cargo truck to make their rounds, Hooks explained.
"We noticed right away people just couldn't carry the stuff. We were giving them either three eight-pound bags of ice or one twenty-pound bag, three trays of water with 24 bottles on a carton, and a case of MREs every day. Now that is a lot to carry for a frail old lady or a kid or some woman with a couple of little kids who has to walk two or three miles. It can't be done. These people were suffering."
Hooks said he and his men simply changed where they dropped off the emergency supplies, begged and borrowed more supplies from anybody who could help and then asked the local police where the best place to deliver the supplies might be.
"It wasn't that hard to figure out," Hooks said. "So we just started doing it that way. We didn't ask anyone, it just seemed the right thing."
The people of Bayou La Batre, ( L. destroyed fishing fleet at Bayou La Batre ) a small fishing village about 11 miles south of Mobile , Ala. was especially grateful to Hooks and his men, one local Bayou La Batre officer said. The town, which gained its fifteen minutes of fame as the mythical home of "Bubba," Forrest Gump's shrimp-loving Army buddy who dies in his arms in Vietnam , was almost completely wiped out by Katrina.
A 12'4" tidal surge took out homes and vehicles, snapped telephone poles ( L. ) and destroyed the fishing boats of hundreds of families. Many residents were still without power and some still didn't have running water or sewer service a week after the storm in a place where city officials estimate that up to 80 percent of the homes are no longer habitable.
Police there said Hooks and his Guardsmen showed up and simply began dropping off desperately needed ice, food and water right in town, by the town center several miles closer than the designated FEMA relief point.
"It was a Godsend," said one local minister in the Mobile newspaper.
"He didn't have to do that," Dodd added later. "There is a guy who just did his job and got things done. He went way above and beyond. People like that deserve recognition."
Indeed, Captain Dodd!
So here's to you CWO2 Daren Hooks, to you and your brave and resourceful band of merry men of the Alabama Army National Guard, and all of the other unsung men and women who stayed put and did their jobs when everything was on the line.
©2005 DefenseWatch.Contributing Editor Nathaniel R. "Nat" Helms is a Vietnam veteran, former police officer, long-time journalist and war correspondent living in Missouri. He is the author of two books, Numba One – Numba Ten and Journey Into Madness: A Hitchhiker's Account of the Bosnian Civil War, both available at www.ebooks-online.com. He can be reached at natshouse1@charter.net. Send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
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