On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, 18-year-old Laura Russell was glued to her television as she watched first responders converge on the devastation in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. following one of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
Though she was currently in college to study public relations, as she watched the search and rescue efforts, one thought was going through her mind: “I’m gonna be there when the next thing happens.”
Four years later, Russell was a new EMT with New Orleans EMS, preparing for her first activation. As Hurricane Katrina circulated in the Gulf of Mexico, her colleagues shared their adventure stories of deploying in EMS.
“Get a disposable camera,” they told her. “It’s gonna be great. When it’s downtime, you just walk the streets and take pictures.”
At some point after Katrina made landfall, Russell was indeed walking the streets with her colleagues. But instead of taking pictures, she was fearing for her life.
‘The whole mood changed’
Russell was stationed with several other medics and EMS dispatchers, as well as a few New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) officers, at Louisiana State University’s School of Dentistry facilities when Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane with 125 mph winds.
Despite the intensity, the storm was slow moving at 12 mph, which allowed it to dump catastrophic amounts of rain over a long period of time.
But even as Katrina pummeled the city, there was no indication from the other responders that this storm was out of the ordinary.
“It wasn’t any different than my coworkers’ previous experiences at that point,” she said, “so I didn’t think anything was off. I fed off them; they weren’t nervous, and neither was I.”
It wasn’t long until the nerves kicked in, though — for everyone.
“When the water started rising, that’s when the whole mood changed,” Russel recalls. “Panic mode started to set in.”
Without the benefit of smartphones in 2005 and amidst a communication breakdown, information was scarce and unreliable at best.
“We would catch word from the NOPD officers, who had more communications than we did because they’re a bigger department, about a news story claiming this area of the city is completely gone,” Russell said. “These stories were just rumors being spread around.”
When they were flooded in at the dental school, “It turned scary fast, especially being fed information and no real leadership to tell you this is what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”
The ‘boom’ of a levee breaking
The hours were blending together as Russell and her team waited to be rescued from the dental school when they heard a low boom.
“At first, we thought maybe a building around us collapsed, since nobody had ever experienced anything like this before,” she said. It quickly became clear that the sound was actually a nearby levee breaking.
“We slowly started seeing the water get higher and higher,” Russell recalls. “It wasn’t like a fast rush, like a tsunami in the movies. It just started gradually increasing, and now we’re really trapped.”
With the water slowly rising, Russel and her team gathered all the supplies they could carry and their personal belongings and walked through the water to I-610 where they waited for high water trucks to take them to a safer location.
“We didn’t know when the next high water was going to come for us,” she said. “It could come much later because if it was needed for something else, if somebody was literally dying, that took way more precedence over us.”
Once Russell and her colleagues were pulled from the interstate, they made their way in the high water truck to get additional supplies at the Superdome, where nearly 30,000 people sheltered during the storm.
In the days since Katrina’s landfall, conditions inside the Superdome had deteriorated into widespread violence and chaos.
“It was like zombies walking around with people disoriented,” Russell said. “If you saw somebody acting this way out in public, you would think they were having a medical emergency — running, screaming, hollering — but that was how everybody was acting.”
The damage to the Superdome was extensive, she said: “It was horrible; everything was destroyed.”
Once it was clear there were no additional supplies to be obtained, Russell and her team returned to the high water trucks and were then taken to a Hampton Inn hotel, where members of the NOPD had established a camp. The hotel was near the New Orleans Morial Convention Center, where 25,000 people were sheltered in place from the storm and waiting to be rescued.
‘We were told we were fixing to die’
Amid the confusion and chaos of the Superdome, the hotel — even without electricity or traditional amenities — seemed like a spa to Russell and her team. NOPD informed them they had found a grill and planned to have a cookout that evening.
Russell and several other medics washed their clothes in the hotel bathtubs and draped them over the balconies off the rooms for them to dry overnight.
The hotel had better reception than the dental school, which allowed more communication with others in the area, but you never knew if the information you were receiving was reliable or who you could trust: “Everything was gossip at this point,” Russell said.
Until it wasn’t.
One communication came through: another levy had broken. With the downtown area at a lower elevation than the dental school, the anticipated rising water wasn’t manageable: it was deadly.
“We had no choice,” Russell said. “You gotta go. It’s already broken, the water’s coming now.”
As one of the youngest providers on the team, Russell had been relying on the emotions of her older colleagues to remain calm in the face of uncertainty. But now, even the more experienced among them began to panic.
At this point, their only option was to get to higher elevation — quickly. “Nobody was coming, there were no resources, and we were told we were fixing to die,” she said. “So, we just started walking.”
The group began making their way up the highway on-ramp near the hotel, hoping their pace was faster than the water was able to rise as they came to terms with the gravity of the situation.
“It was numbing, hearing everybody’s cries,” Russell said. “It was kind of like being led to your death. We were just like, we’re going to die. This is how it’s going to happen.”
There was no destination, no plan, no strategy as they walked. Then, suddenly, the group was flooded by the headlights of an approaching vehicle.
“We didn’t know who it could possibly be, because nobody’s supposed to be out,” Russell said. “There’s no way Joe Blow is out driving his truck right now unless you’re up to something not good.”
The group of nearly 50 stopped and waited as the vehicle slowed to a stop and the driver rolled his window down … and began calling out people by name.
The driver was one of several New Orleans firefighters who’d heard about the levees breaking and had gone to retrieve their personal vehicles from a nearby parking garage, placing him in the path of the doomed EMS group at the exact moment they needed a miracle.
“The universe did this,” Russell said. “The universe lined it up like this.”
The firefighter called others for backup and began evacuating the EMS crews in small groups to a nearby makeshift headquarters at a nursing home.
“He said, ‘You’re gonna come stay with us. We have all the resources we need, there’s plenty for y’all, this is where you’re gonna stay,’” she recalled.
To this day, Russell doesn’t know the firefighter’s name, but in her mind, he was Clark Kent — a superhero in their hour of need.
Finally — a mission and a purpose
Once they arrived at the nursing home, the team was integrated into the organizational process and assigned shifts. The providers raided drug stores in the local area to prevent narcotics from being looted and set up a makeshift pharmacy run by Russell’s medical director, who had made her way to the nursing home.
Russell was assigned to a security detail in coordination with U.S. troops who were working to evacuate the thousands of people from the convention center. She was tasked with frisking the refugees as they lined up to load into helicopters.
“That was the first day we all felt like we were alive, like we were there,” she said. “It wasn’t just surviving; we were actually doing stuff and helping people.”
The routine repeated until everyone had been evacuated. A victory after days of confusion, chaos and fear culminated in a makeshift celebration back at the nursing home, even as the gravity of what they lived through began to manifest as numbness in Russell.
Reflecting on what happened during the storm, Russell credits her survival to her team.
“If it wasn’t for the people beside me, I wouldn’t have known what to do,” she said. “They taught me how to be serious and when to jump in.”
The emotional scars from the ordeal have slowly faded over time, but not completely, Russel said. Sharing the story of her team and how they came together for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and persevered is important to her.
“I want everybody to know how hard we worked, and how much we cared,” she said. “There were opportunities that if somebody really wanted to desert, they could have, and nobody did. Everybody wanted to stay.”
In 2001, Russell watched the heroic efforts of first responders rushing to help the victims; just 4 years later, she was the helper she dreamed of becoming.
