Copyright 2005 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer
New Orleans Times-Picayune
These New Orleans firefighters spend their days sifting through the rubble of the Lower 9th Ward knowing that no one left beneath Hurricane Katrina’s wreckage is coming out alive.
“This is a pretty thankless job,” said Steve Glynn, Fire Department chief of operations, minutes after a pair of cadaver dogs came up empty at 1628 Gordon St. “We’re not going to bring anybody good news. At least we can let them know a loved one has been accounted for.”
Since Oct. 10, Glynn and a dozen other firefighters have drawn the terrible, necessary job of searching for dead bodies in the ruined Lower 9th. The count is up to 30, including eight found last week alone. Almost all the victims were elderly.
Citywide, authorities have worked up a list of 1,459 missing people, but it hasn’t been updated recently and may include people already found and some false alarms, Glynn said.
The firefighters pick their way through flood-ravaged homes along the city blocks along the Industrial Canal and North Claiborne Avenue. Sometimes a house can’t be found right away. It either washed away or was pushed blocks away. Some houses are filled with 3 or 4 feet of mud.
“Nothing is where you’d expect it to be,” Glynn said. “Everything is distorted.”
The search crews, managed and led by the city’s Fire Department, include teams of dogs trained to smell out the dead. On Thursday a German shepherd named Buddy and a chocolate Labrador retriever named Radar were working on loan from the Maine state game warden.
Nearly every home in the Lower 9th has been searched at least once, first by rescue teams and again by other crews as the months wore on after the storm. But conditions inside make the searching painstaking and slow. It can take a half-day to search some homes, because firefighters have to practically excavate many of the felled buildings.
Firefighters also have come upon some homes that are simply too dangerous to search.
“We’re not going to enter those. They’ve been searched by dogs,” Fire Department Capt. George Delpidio said.
A few ministers also were part of the squad, there to give last rites to any victims found and moral support to firefighters who never thought their days would be filled with so much destruction.
“We’re a rescue team. There’s no rescue to be done here,” Glynn said Thursday at the corner of Gordon and North Derbigny streets in the section of the neighborhood still heavily restricted almost three months after Katrina hit the region. “We’re trying to clear houses. Sometimes we have to take the house apart piece by piece.”
The city plans to finally reopen the lake side of North Claiborne on Dec. 1, allowing residents to freely walk or drive around their neighborhood. Until then, steel police barricades and National Guardsmen block the public from roaming the tract closest to the levee breach off Florida Avenue.
It’s just too dangerous, with the falling debris and mangled houses and cars, city officials keep saying. But the search for bodies also has kept the barricades up.
Firefighters Gabe King, 27, and Haden Brown, 41, searched the 1628 Gordon St. address, a brick-fronted one-story home with a chain-link fence. A pair of sneakers hung from the dead power lines above, the universal signal for illegal drug sales.
The firefighters wore somber expressions as they talked about the searches. Most homes still reek from spoiled food in refrigerators. If a house hasn’t dried out, it is heavily moldy. The floodwaters rocked living rooms and kitchens, upended furniture and left muck everywhere. Ceilings fell through. Whatever was in the attic also is on the floors.
“You have different layers you have to go through,” said King, a Cut Off native who worked as a firefighter in Baton Rouge for four years before coming to New Orleans a year ago.
This search detail is far different from the first wave of rescue teams.
“They were looking for living victims,” Glynn said of the first responders, who left spray-painted orange codes on front doors. “If they didn’t find them, it wasn’t for a lack of effort. The task is too overwhelming.”
For several firefighters, the work is all too personal.
“I’m looking at all my families’ houses,” department spokesman Greg Davis said Thursday.