By TOM LOCHNER
Contra Costa Times
Rodeo-Hercules Fire Chief Gary Boyles and three mates made history last month as part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s first-ever nationwide call-up of firefighters in response to Hurricane Katrina.
The physical devastation Boyles saw was “beyond your comprehension,” he said. The logic behind the workings of the relief effort was often difficult to understand as well.
Boyles experienced one of the largest traffic jams, if not the largest, in American history; people passing out from the heat as they waited hours in line to register with FEMA; a hurricane -- Rita -- though his group did not take a direct hit; and many tragic moments along with some joyous ones.
On a day off, he visited the gator capital of Texas.
The Rodeo-Hercules delegation was split into two. Capt. Steve Trotter paired up with Boyles. Engineer Nick Ronchetto and firefighter Skye Johnson left a day later.
During an almost-month-long stint, Boyles learned something about the vagaries of federal bureaucracy.
He and Trotter reported to the FEMA reception center in Atlanta on Sept. 3, eager to go out in the field and save lives. But first, they had to take a few classes: on sexual harassment, diversity and basic-level incident command.
“All federal employees, by law, must receive very basic training before they hit the field,” FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney said by e-mail.
FEMA did not differentiate between experienced firefighters and volunteers who had taken 18 hours of Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training, Boyles said. He was in a group of 100 people, half firefighters, half CERT graduates. “Everyone took every module.”
Moreover, Boyles said, FEMA had people in management roles who had little or no emergency deployment background.
“The individual in charge of our 100 was a CERT member who had been deployed for the first time last year during the hurricanes in Florida. That was his experience.”
That individual, having been plugged into the FEMA system a year ago, had seniority over FEMA first-timers like Boyle and the other professional firefighters.
The day after classes ended, Boyles and Trotter were grouped with duos from San Diego, Michigan and Pennsylvania. They waited all day for an assignment but none came down. The following day, Sept. 5, they flew to Houston.
“At the Astrodome, people were just worn out,” Boyles said. “They came from (New Orleans’) Superdome. Most of them were in shock.”
He heard stories of people stuck for days at the Superdome, “no air-conditioning, no running water, sewage not working, the roof blown off.” One woman told him a friend had committed suicide at the Superdome.
There were also moments of joy at the Astrodome, “people who saw their family members for the first time (after the hurricane), running into one another by accident.”
Once they were dispatched to a part of Texas that was virtually depopulated. Other times they went where help had previously arrived.
On Sept. 17, his first day off, he went to the Gator Fest in Anahuac, the self-billed Gator Capital of Texas. There he touched a live alligator and listened to zydeco music.
He spent the next few days driving around looking for displaced people in Texas and Louisiana.
Soon, Hurricane Rita approached; it would make landfall on Sept. 24.
“One day, we spent on I-45 with some public works workers just fueling cars up. For two days, all of the roads out of town were essentially stopped.
“Something like 2.8 million people were evacuated all at once,” Boyles said. “There was gridlock for days.”
By then Ronchetto and Johnson were already back in the East Bay. They had been assigned initially to Galveston, Texas, to assist evacuees from Katrina onto a cruise ship, Boyles said. “However, the New Orleans evacuees didn’t want anything to do with the cruise ships or water. So, that plan was scrapped.”
For several days, Ronchetto and Johnson helped evacuees in the Austin, Texas area. Next they were sent to Orlando, Fla. where FEMA offered to train them in IA -- individual assistance -- for evacuees.
“They opted not to take the IA training and instead demobilized and came home,” on Sept. 14, Boyles said.
When Rita finally hit, Boyles and Trotter declined evacuation to Dallas and opted to shelter-in-place in Houston.
“It was a ghost town. The fourth-largest city in the nation. Everything was shut down for two days.”
After several more days spent mostly waiting for assignments that never came, Boyles and Trotter flew back to Oakland Sept. 28.
Would he do it again if there was another FEMA call-up?
“I probably would -- if I thought that FEMA would have more active assignments, without the time lags,” Boyles said.
“There was a lot of waiting for assignments,” Boyles said. And while the firefighters did what FEMA asked, “we didn’t do what we were capable of. I would say that, to a person, the firefighters were frustrated.”
Kinerney said FEMA had already deployed its own urban search-and-rescue teams to assist local authorities on life-saving missions by the time it issued the nationwide call for firefighters.
“It was made extremely clear to the fire service that these positions were to assist disaster victims by providing them information,” he wrote. “This was not a life-safety or rescue mission.”
He said FEMA chose firefighters for the task because firefighters have background checks in place; the physical stamina to operate in harsh conditions; first-aid skills; and the ability to recognize dangers such as hazardous materials and structural weaknesses.