u.s. coast guard oral history program - lcdr shannon gilreath

8/8/2019 U.S. Coast Guard Oral History Program - LCDR Shannon Gilreath

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U.S. Coast Guard Oral History Program

Katrina Archival & Historical Record Team (KART)

Hurricane Katrina, 2005

Interviewee: LCDR Shannon Gilreath, USCG

Commanding Officer, Marine Safety Unit Baton RougeInterviewer: Not Mentioned

Date of Interview: 17 October 2005Place: Sector New Orleans

Abstract:

LCDR Gilreath was deployed to Zephyr Field after three of his crews had already been deployedto New Orleans. He served as the Coast Guard representative for the Unified Command. Therewere approximately 600 people operating from Zephyr Field; of these 600, approximately 60 to 65were Coast Guardsmen. When Gilreath arrived, SAR operations had been temporarily suspendeddue to reports of shots being fired at law enforcement officials and rescuers. The Unified

Command had two principle players, the Coast Guard and FEMA. According to Gilreath, bySeptember 8, more than 12,000 people had been evacuated from Zephyr Field. He said that hewould not be surprised if that number reached 13,000 because the FEMA report did not cover theCoast Guard numbers for the first several days.

For Gilreath, the biggest challenge was logistics. He had never been involved with an operationwhere he had to build everything from scratch. “If you did not bring it with you, you did not have it.” Ittook a week before supplies started to reach them. The other challenge was communications.Communication was extremely difficult. Phone lines were jammed, cell phones were not working,and the satellite phones were undependable. The only complaint that he heard from the Coast

Guardsmen was that they wanted to do more.

Quote: “They gave 100 % everyday.”

Q: Okay, could you please state your first name, your last name, and spell your last name out?

LCDR Gilreath: First name is Shannon, last name is Gilreath, and that’s spelled G-I-L-R-E-A-T-H.

Q: And your rank in the Coast Guard?

8/31/2010 Katrina Oral History: LCDR Shannon Gil…

uscg.mil/…/GilreathShannonoralhistory… 1/22



LCDR Gilreath: I’m a lieutenant commander and I’m the Commanding Officer of Marine SafetyUnit Baton Rouge.

Q: Okay. Could you briefly give us an overview of your career that led to you being stationed atBaton Rouge?

LCDR Gilreath: I graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in ’91 and I went to a 270 in Virginia;the Northland . Then I came here to MSO New Orleans in 1993 where I was a marine inspector forfive years. After that I got picked up for law school and stayed here in New Orleans at Tulane. Iwent there for three years. Then I went to District 8 Legal Office for the next four years and then Italked to Captain Paskewich who was CO of MSO New Orleans and some other folks and wasfortunate enough to get picked up for the job of CO of MSO Baton Rouge. So that’s kind of how Igot here.

Q: Now just prior to Katrina coming ashore what were you doing; what kind of preparations wereyou making at Baton Rouge?

LCDR Gilreath: Our preparations really started in earnest on that Saturday morning beforeKatrina; they really kind of started Friday night. I happened to be on leave at the time in Florida. MyXO called me and said the storm was turning towards New Orleans and there was going to be ameeting that next morning, so I drove back all night to get back to Baton Rouge for that morningmeeting. I sent my wife and daughter to Georgia with my family so that I wouldn’t have to worryabout them and then we started kind of going through making sure that everything was tied down,inspecting our fleets, going to our facilities giving them the word on what was going on, getting allour vehicles gassed up; fueled up, parked properly, kind of following a hurricane plan at that stageand making sure our people had the stuff they needed to take care of themselves during the storm.

Q: Okay, and after the storm blew through what did your unit decide to do; what was your tasking?Did you have some people come to New Orleans, some people stay there?

LCDR Gilreath: What we did originally, as the storm was still kind of going through I got a phonecall from Commander Rawson of the ICP wanting to know about what our waterway status wasand whether or not we could open up the river again, so we were kind of on the back end now ofthe tropical storm force winds at that stage. So I got a team of four people together, we came intothe office and we started basically going from downtown Baton Rouge towards New Orleansrunning the levees as far as we could go to try to get a waterway assessment for him; to find out

what was going on in that sense. So we did that the first night until nightfall because after that itwas too unsafe to keep going after dark because nobody had power. There were downed treeseverywhere. I was concerned about safety of our people after dark. So we came in and that’s kindof when we started hearing the stuff. We also had two boats, so we checked on our boats to makesure - one of them was CASREPed but one of them was operational - and we wanted to makesure of their status so we could use that. I reported that in. The next morning; about 4 in themorning, I got - communications were very hard; to get a hold . . . because the phone lines in BatonRouge were jammed and cell phone service didn’t work very well - but about 4 that morning I got ahold of Commander Duckworth up at ICP and he said that the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisherieshad taken over or was doing the SAR ops for the state and he said, “Send any SAR assets youhave there.” So I called my boat crew; three people. I called my senior coxswain at the moment;





BM2 Ryan McKay, and then he called BM1 Gonzales and MST2 Forte and got them together, gotin our 24-foot UTLT and sent them to New Orleans, or sent them first to Baton Rouge to theWildlife and Fisheries headquarters and then from there, with orders, to go to New Orleans to helpdo SAR work for Wildlife and Fisheries. And then if they couldn’t find a place to stay that nightthey’d come back that night. So that’s kind of what we did SAR-wise. The rest of the unit webrought in and reconstituted that morning and we started still doing the waterways managementstuff. We didn’t have any power, our phones didn’t work, any of that kind of stuff. So we just tried togo as far as we could south along the river. We continued where we started the day before and wemade it actually into New Orleans, I think to mile 105 on one side of the river and 115 on the otherside before we couldn’t go any further, kind of just surveying the facilities, the river conditions, theboats that we could see and what was going on and trying to pass the information back to thesector. So that’s kind of what we did on that day.

That night we were at the state OEP office and I was trying to check on my boat crew because Ihadn’t heard back from them, because we didn’t have comms with them and they weren’t able tocall back to us apparently. Later when I got back from the state OEP office I was coming by theoffice to check on some things and saw some of my reservists there, and what had happenedapparently was the coxswain had gotten a hold of one my reservists who was also one of mycoxswains and said, “Look, we’re broken down. We made it out of the city but we’re broken downand we need help. We need another tow vehicle. Our vehicle is shot. We need another one” - notshot literally but the transmission was ruined in it – “and we need body armor because we were ina riot.” rioting around us and that kind of stuff. “We need our guns and body armor.” So thatreservist did call us. His name is MST1 James Wood. He had called two other reservists; a PettyOfficer Shelton (Donald “Scotty” Shelton) who’s a PS3 and an MST2 Beau Braswell, all reservists,and they got a team together with all the body armor, all our weapons that we had, with some extrasupplies, and drove into Gramercy at night. They got down there after midnight sometime becausethey didn’t leave our unit until probably before almost midnight. They found our original boat crew,changed vehicles out and then they went to a fire station there near Westwego and slept on thefloor down there. So that’s what they did on the first day.

Q: Okay.

CDR Gilreath: Day 2 or 3, that Wednesday; August 31, they got up and they started to go back toWildlife and Fisheries, again, their headquarters at the causeway and I-10, and they can tell youmore about what they did after that. But they went back to the same area they’d operated the daybefore. They couldn’t launch the boat because the water had risen too much to safely launch theboat without destroying the tow vehicle. This was down off St. Claude Avenue down in the lower9th Ward. So when they couldn’t do that they went back to Wildlife and Fisheries. Wildlife andFisheries wanted them to guard some of their vehicles for them because of the rioting and stufflike that and I had given them direct orders to not do that. They could not do any law enforcementat all. They could do SAR but no law enforcement inside the city. So they told them they couldn’t dothat. They were kind of cursed at and so they went and found another job. So they went over to theWest Bank where they had a vehicle casualty to their boat trailer. So they had to park the boat;found a place to park it at the Naval Support Activity Algiers and then they made their way toAlgiers ferry landing. I don’t know how they found that but they found that ferry landing and they sawpeople that were there that were coming off the ferries. I think the Coast Guard Cutter Pamlico waskind of helping run that operation. They helped offload about 4,000 people and after about 1700 orso the National Guard folks and Wildlife and Fisheries folks that were with them providing the





transportation and some of the law enforcement presence left and abandoned them; left them with just the, well six other Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Officers and two New Orleans Police Departmentofficers with 2,000 people there that had no transportation, no shelter, no additional food andwater, any of that kind of stuff, there at the ferry landing.

Q: So the local officials just left?

LCDR Gilreath: Well it was getting . . . I guess they had a curfew at some point. I mean it reallywasn’t safe to be out at night. It was not safe at all to be out at night. Really it was not safe to be outunarmed and our folks were armed at that point in time. But they kind of made a pact with the otherparish; Calcasieu Parish, and said, “Look, if you won’t leave and you help us, we’ll help you.” Andso they, together, worked to find transportation for those 2,000 people to get them out of there andto Baton Rouge. So they somehow found, they commandeered some buses on the West Banksomewhere, probably buses that were designed or designated to go to the Superdome. Andprobably those bus drivers, although I don’t think that our Coast Guard folks did it - I think the policedepartment did it - said, “We’re commandeering these buses on behalf of the Coast Guard”, orsomething. But they got them somehow. They got 20 buses and loaded up the 2,000 people thatwere remaining, got them on those buses and got them out of there, which I thought was atremendous accomplishment, because some of those same folks had been near a riot the daybefore that broke out when the National Guard folks pulled out leaving those folks abandonedwithout any other shelter. They’d moved them out of their houses to save them from the floodwaters. . .

Q: And left them.

LCDR Gilreath: . . . and then at dark or before dark at 1700 they just stopped their operation andleft, and now these folks have got no shelter, no nothing, so they rioted. They were angry and theyrioted. So I think our folks showed tremendous judgment in recognizing that we’ve got to get a wayto get these people out of here or some of the sick and wounded and hurt people that were thereweren’t going to live throughout the night, particularly if they started rioting again. So they foundtransportation for them and got them out of there.

Q: And they took them to Baton Rouge, is that where they went?

LCDR Gilreath: They sent the buses to Baton Rouge. Our folks didn’t go with them.

Q: Yes.

LCDR Gilreath: They just loaded them on the buses. Those 12 people or 14 people loaded 2,000people. They were the only security for them, everything; loaded them on – first aid, everything – got them on those buses and got them out of there.

Q: And do you know where they went to once they got to Baton Rouge?

LCDR Gilreath: I don’t know which shelter those folks went to, I just know they got them on thebuses and sent them to Baton Rouge.





Our folks, after that, they tried to go to a fire station or a police department to get showers and theycouldn’t do it there. They wound up on the floor of the gym at the Naval Air Station there inBellchase and slept there.

Then at the same time; on that Wednesday, I had a second boat crew, or my MKs, my engineers;boat engineers, were working, we have a 23-foot UTLT that had been CASREPed for more thanfour months awaiting parts and hadn’t been run or anything because we needed parts to fix it. Isent them to work working on that boat trying to get it operational because I felt like we were goingto need more boats because by now we were hearing stuff on the radio about the need for boatsand stuff in New Orleans. They worked throughout the day and they took the boat to, I think it wasBoats Unlimited in Baton Rouge where those folks did a tremendous job helping us because theybasically found parts for our motors by taking them from brand new motors they had there to sell tothe public. They took those boat parts off, put them on our motors to get our motors back up andrunning and I think they just charged us for parts. I don’t think they charged us labor or anything. Youknow they just did all that for us to get us running. We got that boat together and they staged for thenext day to come to New Orleans. So on that Thursday morning I sent my second team down – wellactually it’s my third team - into New Orleans; three more people. This time it was Petty OfficerLeger leading the team; an MST1, MK2 Jack Smith and MK3 Courtney Thibault who went down toone of the other boats with orders to meet up with our other boat crew and do what was needed tosave lives, and they happened to run into them trying to get fuel. They called them. They had apersonal cell phone they were able to reach them on and they then diverted and went to ZephyrField.

That same Thursday morning I got a call from Commander Paradis from the ICP there inAlexandria and he told me, “Go to Zephyr Field”, and so that’s when I went to Zephyr Field afterthat. So I took Lieutenant (jg) - he goes by Levin but his name is Daniel - Brown with me and wewent to Zephyr Field, and I wasn’t really sure what I was going to find at Zephyr Field and then I got

there.Q: And what were you tasked to do there?

LCDR Gilreath : My orders when I left were we needed a strong command presence at ZephyrField. So when I got there, there was another Lieutenant Commander there; LieutenantCommander Darryl Schaffer, who at that time was the Coast Guard’s rep to the UnifiedCommand. He had done a lot of work trying to set all this up. He, I think, was emotionally spentbecause I think he had lost his house and wasn’t sure about the status of his family, and he was

just overwhelmed with everything that was going on because there was a whole lot going on with

that, and SAR ops had been suspended and everything. So I basically saw where he was at anddecided that I needed to relieve him because he needed to get out of there. So I relieved him andkind of took over as the Coast Guard rep to the Unified Command.

At that time Zephyr Field had about 600 folks working this Unified Command of which about 60 to65 folks were Coast Guard and the other 600 or 550 folks were USAR teams, and that’s UrbanSearch and Rescue Teams that work for FEMA. They come from around the country. There wereteams there from Texas, from California, Florida, Tennessee, Missouri, Montana - I’m sure I’mleaving off some - New Mexico and Arizona at different points in time. Those teams are 70 to 80people. Some of the larger teams might be 100 people and some of the smaller teams might be





50 people and it kind of varied in size. But they are trained teams and they primarily do rescuework for like say earthquakes, building collapses, structural damage and things like that. Very fewof those teams had any boats. They were great paramedics, firefighters and all that stuff but theyhad no boats. So we had our Coast Guard boats that were there. The Coast Guard contingent;there were 36 folks and 12 boats from the St. Louis area; from MSO St. Louis and Group Upperthat sent their DART teams down. Then we had some flatboats; two large flatboats, and some ofwhat they call TANB Boats, and forgive me if I don’t know the exact terminology of how to tell youexactly what team the boat is but it’s a 21-foot or so Deep-V diesel-powered aluminum boat, okay,used to haul ATNs, and we used them a lot but they weren’t really good boats to use inside of thecity, just like our UTLT wasn’t the best boat to use inside the city. It’s too big. We had three ofthose from them and then I think ANT New Orleans had a boat there to help out as well. So we hadthose boats and there were boats from EPA, U.S. Wildlife and Fisheries and the U.S. GeologicalService had some boats there as well. We were supposed to have boats from Wildlife andFisheries but they were kind of doing their own mission somewhere else.

These USAR teams, like I said, there were about 600 of them. They were kind of represented bywhat they call a blue - the acronym was IST and I think it stood for Incident Support Team, whichare FEMA trained but aren’t necessarily all FEMA employees. They are a team. They drilltogether. They work together at these accidents and disasters and stuff like that, so they had someexperience working together. They kind of were in an ICS structure already. They were led byDave Webb who was a FEMA employee, a tremendous man, who did a wonderful job there. Hewas kind of their leader. Their kind of deputy was a guy by the name of Paul Strickland who I thinkwas a FEMA employee but I’m not certain. After that, all the rest of those folks; the chief ofplanning, the chief of ops, the chief of logistics, were all non-FEMA employees but were a part ofthis team. They may have come from other areas and their teams may not have actually been therebut they were FEMA trained in this role; to serve in the jobs that they were in. They kind of formedthe nucleus of our ICS structure there as far as our staff positions, as far as that goes.The Unified Command, there were really two principle players: that was the Coast Guard andFEMA who was representing the USAR teams. We had some other local agencies that were withus but in reality they didn’t do a lot. They didn’t provide much in the terms of resources or people orinfo or guidance. Wildlife and Fisheries was supposed to be there. I didn’t see them very often.Jefferson Parish; not their sheriff but one of their chief deputies was there and he was there fairlyoften. And then later we brought in some folks from New Orleans Fire Department who wererepresented and the New Orleans Police Department would sometimes come in, so that was kindof our unified command. But again, the principle players were the Coast Guard and FEMArepresenting the USAR teams. The other federal agencies that were there providing boats weren’tpart of the unified command structure as far as making the command decisions, they just providedassets. I’m really not sure why. You know in hindsight maybe we should have had them in theremore playing in that role but their role was just to provide boats for us.

Q: Well were you able to utilize their assets?

LCDR Gilreath: Oh absolutely. We used their assets in the daily planning because, like I said, theUSAR teams themselves didn’t have, or very few of them had boats, so when we went out to thedifferent areas we had to use our boats and their boats to transport these folks on the waterside.

I probably should - I don’t know if this is a good time to explain it or stop me if I’m going too fast. I





don’t know what direction you want me to go in - the way that, I think I’ve told you the generaloverview structure of how it was set up. What we tried to do, or what we did was, we’d divide thecity up into sections, okay, and they were based on some of the primary streets, then we wouldsend these teams from Zephyr Field to these parts of the city. And we would do three types ofsearches. The first type of search is called a hasty search, the second was a primary search andthe third was a secondary search. The hasty search was designed to get into an area, find thepeople using bullhorns or whatever - you know usually you could find the people. They would seeyou and wave you down or flag you down or whatever - and get them to come to the boats or we’dbring the boat to them and get them on the boat and pull them out of there. That was kind of thehasty search and you kind of went block by block by block in this area to try to find the people andget them out. The primary searches were when you actually went up to a house and you physicallytouched the house. You either knocked on the roof because the water was flooded up to theroofline, okay; you knocked on the roof or you knocked on the door if the water was only up to thedoor or to the porch or wherever. You’d knock on the door or a window or whatever but youphysically would knock on the house and listen for a response. If you heard a response then youwould access the house and try and enter it and try to find the people and where they were at.Those were the primary searches. The last search was a secondary search and that’s more of the,in fact it was going room by room by room by room doing a complete search of the entire house.That was not something that we were involved in early on and it’s not something that we needed tobe involved in, in my opinion, at that time because we were still just trying to rescue as manypeople as we could. That secondary search was used later on or it was used when you had Intelthat there was somebody in a particular house. Maybe we got a 911 call routed to us at somepoint in time or someone had come up to us and said, “There’s somebody in this house.” That waskind of when the secondary search techniques were used. Otherwise that was for way down theline after I left that and I think we didn’t need to be involved in that secondary search because bythe time you got to do doing those you’re talking body recovery and we did not want to do bodyrecovery. That was not one of our missions there, at least from the Coast Guard side. I think itbecame a mission later from the FEMA side of the Unified Command. But what we did was wewould try to send those teams out, set up and go to these areas. We’d pick areas that were basedon where we thought people were at, where we could get to and launch our boats and areas thatwere not as threatening, at least to begin with.

The thing that I need to explain is that to get from Zephyr Field to anywhere inside the city that wasflooded you had to go by convoys, okay, and there was only one way to get to the flooded part ofthe city and that is to leave Zephyr Field, which is on the Airline Highway or Highway 61, it’s justkind of about in the middle of, well it’s just east of the airport and west of the parish line, kind of inthe middle there. You had to leave there, go to the Huey P. Long Bridge, cross the Huey P. LongBridge, go across the West Bank on the West Bank Expressway, go across the Crescent CityConnection, and then from there, depending on where you would go, you’d spread out becauseyou could go on I-10 towards the City Park exit but you couldn’t get all the way because that waswhere it was flooded out. So I-10 was underwater there and you could only go a little bit in thatdirection. You could take I-10 east toward the High Rise. Right before you got to the High Rise youcould get off on 610 but you could only go less than a mile on 610 before it started to dip and itwas underwater. Going east in the city you could cross the High Rise but then the I-10 wasunderwater so you had to get off on what’s called Chef Mentour Highway which is Highway 90, andyou could go up Highway 90 for a ways and then Highway 90 was underwater and it wasimpassable. And then the final way you could go is you could get off somehow in the city and kindof snake your way along close to the river, either towards St. Charles Avenue or towards the





French Quarter, okay, snaking your way around to get places. But everything else was underwater.So logistically speaking, to get from point “A” to point “B” it took about an hour to get from ZephyrField to finally get over into the flooded part of the city and then you had to find a place to launchyour boat in your assigned area.

To launch your boats, that was a real challenge as well because it depended upon the type of boatyou had and it also depended upon where you could launch it from. Boats that were on their owntrailers needed to kind of be launched from boat ramps or you could use the down ramps oronramps from the interstate to kind of launch it and back it into the water. The little flood punts thatwe had, the great thing about those is you could launch them just about anywhere. So they couldpick them up, sometimes they picked them up and set them on the water off a down ramp off aninterstate. Other places they’d have to launch them from the roadway because there was no downramp off of the interstate anywhere. So that was kind of how you launched boats.

Q: And were there any kind of hazards in launching boats that way that they relayed back to you;the teams that went out, or were they just pretty much . . . ?

LCDR Gilreath: There were hazards everywhere. I mean I can try to tell you the hazards that I’maware of but there are security hazards. On those first few days that we were launching the boatsthe security hazards were even larger because a lot of the folks had made their way to theonramps. Some rescue ops would take them back and leave them on the onramps. I mean therewere lots of civilian rescues going on out there as well and they weren’t coordinated as to wherethey took them and all that, so you take the people and put them on the onramp. So you had justmobs of people on the ramps, on the interstates and on the highways so that was an issue.Launching them from the interstate; everything was flooded. I mean I over-flew it. I’ve lived in thisarea for 12 years. I was shocked, amazed. The pictures that you see on TV cannot do it justicebecause everything was underwater, everything. And when you see a picture on TV you think,“Okay, well that’s one little area.” It doesn’t just register automatically in your mind that it’s not justthat one little area that you’re seeing, it’s everywhere is like that.

Q: It keeps going.

LCDR Gilreath: It keeps going and going and going and going and going, it’s all underwater. Andthe houses, you’d have houses that were flooded to the roof line. You’d have houses that it wasflooded just in the street, you know, but it was all flooded. You know if you drew a line from St.Charles Avenue and went north to the lake everything in that area would be underwater. Andeverything in East New Orleans was underwater and everything in Chalmette was underwater

except for maybe a mile at different places along the river, which is the very highest ground, buteverything else was all underwater. So when they launched their boats, you know, you’d havevictims that were floating in the water. You’d have dead animals floating in the water. You hadbroken gas mains. You had downed power lines everywhere. You had submerged vehicles. Youhad submerged street signs and fences. And the water level would vary depending on where youwere at because the terrain, although it’s still a bowl, varies in New Orleans as well. So there areall kinds of obstacles that you have when you go to launch your boat and then navigating it getseven worse.

Q: Yes. And the teams; were they integrated with FEMA or it was like a FEMA team and a Coast

Guard team, how did that work?





LCDR Gilreath: The way we did it is it changed through time. On that first Thursday that I got thereon the 1st there were no SAR teams out at all because our ops had been suspended because ofthe threats of violence that had gone on and there were reports of helicopters that had been shotat. We knew about at least one National Guard individual who had been shot there at theSuperdome. We had been told that there were New Orleans Police Department folks that hadbeen shot and we also had been told that there were shots fired at a rescue worker, so all thoseops were suspended for that day. On that Friday when we started them back up again we hadcombined teams of Coast Guard folks and then we had teams that had no Coast Guard folks in itat all that went out from Zephyr Field that went to other parts of the city. We’d use those assetsfrom other agencies for transportation.

Q: Did you configure these teams so that you’d have medical; I mean how were the crewsconstituted? I mean did that have a lot to do with whether it was all FEMA or all Coast Guard?

LCDR Gilreath: No, it had more to do with the boats and transportation about how we divided itup, at least initially. All that changed as we were able to get additional security folks in from theMSST teams that had come in. Lieutenant Commander Sean Regan had provided us a bunch ofhelp in that regard. I mean that happened really . . . the first MSST operation that I was involved inhappened on that Saturday. But to try to answer your question; when we were able to get MSSTsupport, PSU support, TACLET, they then became the security for all of our FEMA teams thatwent out. We had six guns between the 65 people that we had there at Zephyr Field, Coast Guardwise, and those were the only dedicated law enforcement, or at least guns, that we could dependon everyday for the entire 600 people we had there to do these SAR ops. So we developedtactics to try to protect at least the Coast Guard teams that were going out as best we could. Sowhat we did was we talked to the folks from St. Louis. I talked to, there’s a Lieutenant JohnGoebel, Lieutenant Alfred Jackson and Lieutenant Chris Pisares and then there were some otherfolks there, and I asked them, “Hey, you’re the DART experts. These are your teams. We’ve got sixguns. How are we going to make this work to protect you the best we can, because priority one iswe need to do ops and we don’t have body armor for you. We don’t have any more guns. We don’thave any of that kind of stuff. We need to do operations. I want to keep you as safe as possible.We’re asking for this stuff. We’ll get i t eventually but if you don’t feel like we can do this safely wecan’t do it.” So we worked with them and what we did is we set up a command and control kind ofidea where you’d have one DART boat that would have two armed individuals on it, not a coxswainbut two armed individuals with body armor and they would kind of be the boat that would controlthree other DART boats, and that way we split up our six guns between our 12 boats and sentthose teams out. It worked pretty well because the communications were very difficult everywhereand it was even difficult in the field when those boats had radios because they were basically lineof sight. So when those boat folks were, let’s say up underneath a house or a porch pulling peopleout, they couldn’t really talk to the person a block away or two blocks away so they had to try to staytogether as best they could and that kind of command and control structure kind of worked forthem where you’d have that one boat kind of being in charge with those two security folks, and theother boats would free up so they could carry more evacuees and more people that were rescuedout of there. So that’s kind of how we did that. And then we would put a USAR/FEMA person withthem as well to help with chainsaws and other stuff like that to help access the houses. There weremedical personnel with them as well. The DART teams came with two HS’s, or at least the onesfrom St. Louis came with two HS’s. So they had those back at the launch points and so they wouldtreat the people as they got out. The FEMA teams all had paramedics; top individuals working with





them as well. Sometimes those folks would be in the boat. Sometimes they would be at the launchpoint to help the individuals when we pulled them out there. And then the final way we got themmedical help was we would eventually be able to call and get medevacs for them. We worked thatout with the air station where we got a dedicated channel, at least from the Coast Guard side,where we could get a hold of our helos that were doing tremendous work and get a hold of themand help us medevac folks. And then some of the other USAR teams were able to hook up withother National Guard folks or other DOD department folks that were out there and arrangemedevacs. And then beginning on Sunday - it might have been Saturday now - September the 3rd;I think it’s September the 3rd or September the 4th; that Sunday, FEMA was able to obtain acouple of helos for us to use to do medevacs and so then we had those available to us as well thatwe could call using the FEMA teams and the FEMA radios to get back to our command post andtell us, “Hey, here’s an individual”, and we would then plot it and get them out there to him; get himhelp that way.

Q: Now were you coordinating the other Coast Guard assets from your location; like the Pamlicowas here?

LCDR Gilreath: No.

Q: Okay, so that wasn’t coming from you. You just were coordinating the teams that were at ZephyrField?

LCDR Gilreath: I was in charge of coordinating the Coast Guard teams at Zephyr Field and beingthe Coast Guard representative to the Unified Command. So I drove the Coast Guard asset partwhere we sent our Coast Guard assets from Zephyr Field and I, as the Coast Guardrepresentative, helped say where we were going to send the whole USAR teams that weren’tCoast Guard related or Coast Guard teams themselves.

Q: Yes.

LCDR Gilreath: The other operations that were ongoing, I didn’t really know what else was goingon other than I could see the air station because they were flying and I was able to arrange over-flights with them going back through the state OEP office. There were Coast Guard folks in theSAR side of that that we were able to call and could get into them using SAT phones occasionallyand they could arrange and pass information to the air station for us. The Pamlico folks, they wereon their own for the first several days. On that Friday I think the Spencer, maybe that Thursday, theSpencer came up and I think the Spencer then kind of took control of that operation at that point intime. I saw the Spencer on my over-flight on that Friday morning. She was anchored in the middleof the river there in downtown so they were kind of doing their own thing. We were involved withthem only to the extent that as we were transiting the river we would hear back from them at times,and because they were ATON folks (PAMLICO’s teams) and I had ANT folks with us, they kneweach other, and so we were able to use the TANBs to supply them with food and water and MREsand stuff like that that were there at Zephyr Field. We were able to take them stuff that way. But asfar as what they actually did and where they were sending their teams, I didn’t control that at all.They did all that on their own. The same with the station . . . .

Q: Station New Orleans?





LCDR Gilreath: Station New Orleans here; they did tremendous work here. Dan Brooks and thefolks here did just tremendous work. They were kind of working from the lakeside, I think, in,whereas we were kind of going from the inside out because we had the littler boats; the smallerboats, to get inside of the city and they faced the same thing I was facing with the larger boats isyou’ve got levees that are still intact. You can’t get across those levees with those larger boats. Sothey were kind of working their own operation as well and they all did tremendous work. Everybodyworked just . . . I mean I can’t say enough good things about every Coast Guard person that washere. They gave it their all everyday, 100% all the time. They never stopped working. I mean theliving conditions that these folks were in and under . . . and you know the only complaint that I evergot was, “I want to do more.” I mean they didn’t complain about no showers or not porta-potties orno decontamination stations, or any of that kind of stuff. Stuff that they absolutely had to have theydidn’t complain about that. They only complained when you couldn’t use them from dawn to duskworking their tails off. That’s the only time they ever complained and then they didn’t complainmuch. You know it was just like, “Hey, we want to do more.” They worked hard. Everybody workedhard.

Q: And you really didn’t have communications with these various units, did you?

LCDR Gilreath: We didn’t have communications with anybody. I mean it wasn’t just the units. Thebest communications were face-to-face but even with our own units that were working for us, what Idid Coast Guard wise is, I said, “Here’s my expectations. Here’s what I want you to do. You’re allresponsible people that I have in charge of them. Go do the mission. If it’s unsafe don’t do it, pullout and get back with us.” But I couldn’t talk to them very well, at least initially, when they went out inthe field. I had to trust them to do their job and they did it phenomenally. I mean they did stuff ontheir own. They solved problems on their own out there because I couldn’t talk to them and theycouldn’t talk back to me. By the same token I couldn’t talk to Alexandria or the state OEP officevery well at all because the SAT phones were unreliable and they didn’t work. I think part of ourproblems with the SAT phones were there was a helo base that they set up right in Zephyr Fieldright beside us, and so when you were finally able to get on the phone with somebody and getthrough via a SAT phone and you’re waiting on hold to try to reach the individual, a helicopterwould go across and it would cut you off; it would drop you off. So everybody was trying to getcommunications but it was pretty much nonexistent. I mean I was able to get through to Alexandriaat night after about 11 o’clock. From about 11 o’clock to probably 5 o’clock in the morning youcould get through to Alexandria because the phone lines weren’t jammed during those timesusually. During the day the phone lines were always jammed when you were trying to call intoAlexandria or you were trying to call into the state OEP office. By the same token I’m sure that theywere trying to call me and they couldn’t get a hold of me either because the cell phones normallydidn’t work. Our unit cell phones didn’t work at all. And like I said, the SAT phones just didn’t workwell at all. It was just very, very difficult to get comms with anybody.

Q: So what was the most effective means of communication, just face-to-face?

LCDR Gilreath: Face-to-face without a doubt.

Q: And did you use the Nextel text messaging; that seemed to . . . ?

LCDR Gilreath: We didn’t use Nextel text messaging down here. Our phones that we had, hadthat capability with Alltel, that had the Nextel stuff, but the Alltel was out at least initially down here





so we didn’t have that at all. Plus, you know, in hindsight maybe we could have gotten some moreof those phones and brought them with us; different phones to use, that might have done better.The communications that seemed to work best at all were from . . . the people from St. Louis had afew cell phones that you could reach St. Louis because those numbers weren’t jammed. If you hada cell phone provider whose tower was still up somewhere in here and you were trying to dial wayout of state somewhere else, you could get though to them sometimes but you couldn’t get throughto area code 504 numbers, 225 numbers or 318 numbers. Any of those numbers you could neverget through because those lines were always busy or almost always busy when you tried to callthem.

Q: Now how were you able to communicate with your chain of command? I mean what were you . .. ?

LCDR Gilreath: Probably not to the liking of my chain of command because I mean I tried to callthem . . . .

Q: You were basically on your own?

LCDR Gilreath: They let me run with stuff on my own, which I was very fortunate because there’sabsolutely no way that . . . first of all I’m not sure how we were able to get the job done as we didbut there’s no way I could have done that job; maintaining our folks, keeping our folks headed inthe right direction and continually briefing someone at the same time about what we were doingbecause there’s just too much happening, going on, trying to get all this working. So I was fortunatein the sense that I was kind of free to do what I thought needed to be done and then get a hold ofthem and tell them what I could, and they didn’t give me a hard time about that which, “Thank youvery much for letting me do that Sir because I never would have gotten it done otherwise.” So Iwould just try to call back at night and tell them, “This is what we’re doing”, and it got better as itwent along because our comms slowly got better. We got more staff there; more people there andwe kind of grew to the point where now I had regular contacts with folks who I could call up and tellthem, “Hey, this is what we’re doing today”, in advance so they would know this is what our plan isfor the next day, you know, and try and tell them what’s up next, so to speak, and where we’reheaded.

Then Captain Mueller came down on several occasions to talk to us and find out what was goingon. We had other folks from Alexandria come down and talk to us. We had folks from OEP thatwould fly down. They’d get overflights down to see us every now and then and we’d tell them, “Hey,this is what we need. This is what’s going on. This is kind of where we’re headed.” And we got

better organized as i t went on but in the first couple of days it was very chaotic dealing withanybody or talking to anybody.

Q: Well do you have any ideas on how communications could be improved in a situation like thisin the future, I mean now that you’ve actually been through it?

LCDR Gilreath: Well here’s what we did for Rita based on what I learned from Katrina: we wentout and bought a cell phone from every cell phone service provider that we could find so that whenthe towers went down we would at least have some cell phone from somewhere that would work.We obtained Nextel’s from the state police because they had gotten a new shipment in so that we





could use Nextel’s if we needed to, to call people if the cell phone service went down, and we stillhad the SAT phones. I mean it was possible that you could find a place where they’d worksomewhere. The ones that we had just didn’t work for us. So we tried every form of communicationI could think of and I had gotten one of those Treos to try to use the internet to text somebody aboutwhat was going on if we had to have that. So we tried that as well to be prepared for the next timearound.

The other thing that I think might work is to make it more cost effective. If you can buy the cellphones where you get the calling card to call in or prepaid minutes or something instead of havingto sign a contract because that makes it a lot cheaper for you in the end, especially if you don’twind up using it because of the storm. But that’s what I would say; that and face-to-face are thebest ways to do it because in this kind of atmosphere there’s no Coast Guard message traffic thatyou can set up to do things with. We didn’t really have email; to be able to email stuff and reports,to get to other people. It was pretty much face-to-face, get a hold of who you could send . . . wesent people to Baton Rouge occasionally to pass messages for logistics, supplies and stuff likethat, but it’s pretty much face-to-face, and that’s the best way that I think worked for us.

Q: Okay. Working in the unified command structure, how was that; did things go smoothly or couldthings have been improved in interfacing with FEMA and the other people that were reportingthere at Zephyr Field?

LCDR Gilreath: It got . . . just like everything else except for the water, okay, things got better as itwent along and as we got more experience working in it. I think one of the challenges that we hadwas that we had not worked with this blue IST, or I’d never done anything like this before. But I’mnot sure if the Coast Guard had ever drilled with the blue IST team before so I’m not sure that theyreally truly understood what we could bring to the table, and we started integrating into theirstructure more. And like I said, they had their planning staff. They had their ops staff. They had theirlogistics staff. So I tried to embed people and we tried to embed people in the planning side andembed people into the ops side so that they would understand kind of what our capabilities were alittle better and that we could get involved in that and help them. So when we got enough people toactually have a little bit of a staff there putting them together seemed to help us work bettertogether overall. I will say that despite the fact that the FEMA often seems to have gotten a bad rapin the media, there was not a FEMA person there that I saw that did not work their tail off the entiretime they were there. I mean I am proud of the Coasties because I think the Coasties dideverything I could possibly ever ask from them and a lot more, but the FEMA folks worked very,very hard also and everybody tried their very best as far as I’m concerned. I mean I didn’t seeanybody not working hard or doing the best they could with what they had.

Q: Well did you interface with local law enforcement? What kind of relationship did you have withthem?

LCDR Gilreath: On the local law enforcement side there was the one Jefferson Parish- not thesheriff but the chief deputy or whatever and I’m sorry I can’t remember his name right now - he wasthere. He was coming to our daily meetings or at least the evening meeting. He would usuallycome to that. Wildlife and Fisheries; we were supposed to be working for Wildlife and Fisheriesfrom what the state plan said. Under the state plan urban search and rescue was supposed to beled by Wildlife and Fisheries and I think before I got there they may have done that a little bit morebut by the time I got there on the first day it had stopped altogether and they would just occasionally





come and provide us some support. So we got very little guidance, tasking or intel from them at all.The New Orleans Fire Department came to help. Eventually when they had been rescued fromother places they kind of came in and provided some local knowledge in places. The New OrleansPolice Department never really came very often, if at all, so we didn’t really know too often fromthem. The state police did show up some, especially later on in that week. They would start comingto some of our meetings and at least one or two days they had folks there to help us do theconvoys and do the escorts for the convoys, but that was never consistent. It was never, you knowwe would plan one day. For example, that first Friday that we started SAR ops again, we plannedfor all these other local law enforcement folks to come help us and they weren’t there. There wasnobody other than the Coasties and a few folks they found from somewhere to escort peoplearound. So when the MSST folks came and the PSU folks came, that was just tremendous helpbecause now we had dedicated folks that we could rely on for security for us during this time. Icould call them each day and say, “Hey, here are these folks”, we could say.

Q: Were any of these units involved in any law enforcement actions or any instances . . . ?

LCDR Gilreath: Well our Coast Guard folks were under direct orders from me not to engage inlaw enforcement at all, period. They could engage in self defense if needed but no lawenforcement. So for example, I told them, “I don’t want you going out there stopping looters.” I doknow that there was law enforcement out there that were involved in doing that kind of stuff butweren’t really involved in the SAR stuff, and they came across local law enforcement in their dailymissions. They came across the New Orleans Police Department doing things, telling them, “Hey,there was a murder that just happened over here. You don’t want to go in this particular part of thearea yet”, or, “Yes, we’re investigating a murder over here”, or, “This is very bad over here”, or,“This is a little bit better over here.” We did that. On one occasion we had a conflict with them, withI think it was the Kenner Police Department. It may have been Jefferson Parish but I think it was theKenner Police Department now. We were taking - this was that Friday night on September the 2nd- we had teams from St. Louis; the DART team from St. Louis along with, I think it was ArizonaTask Force. They’d worked late in what we call the Canal Street area which is what New Orleanslocals would know as Mid City. They had taken about 200 people that they had rescued andbrought them back. They were taking them by convoy because we had no transportation. I haven’ttalked much about transportation but there was absolutely no dedicated transportation to takeevacuees anywhere, at least from Zephyr Field. We had planned for it, we were told we’d get it, butwe never got it. So they had to think on their feet, find ways to put them in the back of trucks or onthe back of what we had to get them there, and they took them to the airport because at that pointin time the airport was the only place we thought you could physically take evacuees becauseJefferson Parish; the sheriff, had basically passed to us that they didn’t want any evacuees broughtinto their parish. Well the only place that you could go from Orleans Parish to get them out isthrough Jefferson Parish, so the airport we knew were taking people, we could evacuate themthere. So they took them to the airport. They got to the airport and they were met by this policeofficer who said, “Turn around, you can’t take your evacuees here”, and we told him, “Hey, this iswhere we were told we had to take them.” It was the only place they’d take them. And the guy tooka shotgun out, jacked around the shotgun, pointed it at our folks and said essentially, “You’re goingto move now or I’m going to shoot you.” He actually chambered a round, pointed it at them. I hadfolks that were near bullets being fired in the city at other times and stuff like that and I think theywere more upset and more concerned about that particular incident where someone pointed ashotgun at them from law enforcement and said, “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t turn aroundright this very second”, than they were concerned about anything else that went on as far as threats





of violence against them personally. We found out about that. I think our Coast Guard folks calledAlexandria and passed the word to them via cell phone. They had a cell phone that workedsomehow. They got the word to them. They worked it to the state office. We got the word fromsome of the FEMA folks there what was going on and we passed the information back to the stateOEP office, worked through it; through the ESF9 contingency there. They got a hold of the ESF9rep at the airport and said, “Yes, bring them back.” They brought them back and the same thinghappened. I don’t know if they had the shotgun pointed at them this time but at that time threatenedthat they were going to arrest everybody in the caravan. I don’t know how they would’ve done it butthey were going to arrest all 100 of these rescue personnel and the ESF9 rep at the airport if theydidn’t turn around and take these people somewhere else. So they took them to the I-10 andCauseway and dropped them off on the interstate there. I’m hoping there was somebody there thathad some kind of receiving station for them but that was ultimately the only place we could takethem because we didn’t have anyplace to put them at Zephyr Field. So they took them to I-10 andCauseway which is probably . . . if I could, that’s one thing I wish there was a way to changebecause I don’t think that was the right thing to do; take them and drop them off on the interstatesomewhere. These are people that you’re rescuing from houses and then put them on theinterstate instead of taking them somewhere where you know that they could get out of there andgo somewhere else. But that was the only choice we had. I mean we didn’t want our people shot.

Q: And how was this resolved eventually so you could take them there?

LCDR Gilreath: Well we tried to, again, put pressure back to the state because I don’t control theJefferson Parish Sheriff and the federal government doesn’t control the Jefferson Parish sheriff,but hopefully the state could exercise some influence on them. So we went back to the state OEPoffice and screamed and said, “We’ve got to have help here”, and then somehow, maybesomeone had their signals crossed or whatever, but the next morning we were taking people backto the airport again. So the airport was open again the next morning. So that’s how it got resolved Ithink is someone from the state or maybe it was a Coast Guard higher up had talked to them. Imean all we could do was plead, “We’ve got to have a place to take these people”, because thatwas a huge . . . I mean you could save them from the water, get them to dry land and then you hadno place to take them or no transportation to take them in. And so even if we had been somehowmore efficient to save more people at one given time it just would have exasperated the problemeven more because you had no place to take them.

Q: No shelter?

LCDR Gilreath: There’s no shelter . . . .

Q: No medical?

LCDR Gilreath: No medical. Well we had medical treatment initially but I mean that’s first aid,that’s not dialysis machines and all that other kind of stuff you need for all the people who are reallytruly sick. The airport was the place that I think that they did a lot of treatment eventually. But wehad zero coordination with the National Guard, as far as I know, about that they would take folks forus.

Q: They never came down to Zephyr Field?





LCDR Gilreath: The National Guard was at Zephyr Field but they were doing somethingcompletely different. They were resupplying places that had evacuees I guess or their own crewsdoing operations, and they did tremendous work too. I don’t want to belittle anybody. I meaneverybody worked hard but it seemed like to me that we couldn’t get any help when we needed thehelp for buses, okay, for example. And we plead daily, we asked for buses for, I don’t know howmany days in a row, “Please send us buses. Please send us buses”, and I was told that if youdidn’t have 200 people in one location waiting to be picked up by a bus you couldn’t get a bus.And even if you got a bus, that would only hold 100 of those 200 people. They would not send youa bus anywhere else. So even though we said, “Give us a bus to do a round robin run to all ourplaces”, we couldn’t get buses. So our folks just had to figure out ways on their own to findtransportation; flag people down, find people who . . . you know National Guard troops may beheading somewhere else, put the evacuees on them or put them back in their own vehiclessomehow and carry them back to wherever we could take them.

Q: So at what point did evacuation become a more coordinated effort to where you were actuallysending them to a place instead of a highway or just wherever you could drop them?

LCDR Gilreath: It didn’t become better organized until our numbers had dropped way off. Thenumbers of people that we were rescuing each day . . . I think on that Friday and Saturday wereabout 2,000 folks. Sunday our numbers were about 800 folks and when I say that that’s total fromthat entire task force there at Zephyr Field; Coast Guard and FEMA both, those numbers. By thatMonday we were down to probably 200 people or less and so at that point in time thetransportation side, we could fit them still on the back of our own vehicles if we had to. And then aswe started working with DOD we got a lot better support at that point in time than with getting helosin for airlifts for people who needed medical evacuations. And I think the plan, as of when I left onthat Thursday, was when we found people we’d get them concentrated and we’d call in, then they’darrange a helo to actually come pick them up instead of having them on a bus or carry themsomewhere else, or wait in the hot sun all day before we could transport them out of there. But theproblem was only solved because we finally got less people, not because someone magicallyflipped a switch and said, “Here’s more transportation for you.” We got more transportation whenall the Superdome stuff was all cleared out and when we got more DOD assets in to help. We hadmore transportation available then but I think it was really a combination of just maybe more of thatbut less people to move at that point.

Q: Do you know how many people in total that you evacuated through Zephyr Field?

LCDR Gilreath: Through Zephyr Field and the folks that were attached to Zephyr Field whoweren’t at Zephyr Field the first couple of days but working on their own - like my unit was workingon their own and the DART folks – as of that Thursday on the 8th of September, over 12,000. Iwant to say - in fact I can look – my estimate would be 12,310 people as of September the 8th.And then after September the 8th, talking to the person who came behind me and all that, therewas probably another, you know, three to four hundred to five hundred folks. So I would not besurprised if the total numbers - if someone was able to finally calculate it - would approach close to13,000 total throughout that entire effort because I’m sure there were some folks that we don’thave counted yet that were helping out on those first couple of days that we don’t know how manypeople they rescued. I will say that the numbers that the FEMA folks were keeping did not includethe Coast Guard numbers at all for the first five days or six days of it, so none of those numbersmade it in, so that when you see a FEMA report and the FEMA report says 6,500 or 7,000 and I’m





telling you it’s 12,000, i t’s because they didn’t include any of the Coast Guard numbers for the firstseveral days of that. They just didn’t include them.

Q: Alright. Well could you tell us a little bit about Coast Guard policy and what I’m trying to get atis, is there anything about the Coast Guard and the way the Coast Guard works that made this amore manageable situation in the fact that we’re more flexible, I think, than the other services?

LCDR Gilreath: I’ll give you two specific examples or try to give you . . . I mean it’s hard to giveyou . . . there are so many things that I want to say that it’s hard to narrow it down. But the twothings I’d top off, I’d say first of all the Coast Guard trains its folks to make decisions and we givepeople responsibility very early on in their career and we let them take that responsibility, and sotherefore when people encounter a problem or an issue they try to solve it without necessarilyhaving to call the next person up the chain of command and say, “This is what I want to do Sir”, or“This is what I want to do Ma’am.” You know they generally do it and then call up and say, “This iswhat we did”, unless they find a problem that they know they can’t deal with on their own and thenthey call up. And I think ingrained thought process really played out here because there were nocomms. I couldn’t talk to the people in the field very well. They couldn’t call me up and say, “Hey,we’ve got this situation here, what do want me to do?” It was, “These are your general orders. Godo it and find a way to solve it, find a problem solving skill”, and they did that and they didextremely well at that. The place that that really becomes evident that doesn’t happen necessarilyeverywhere else is when you bring in DOD, and I don’t want to slam DOD at all because they dotremendous work but they plan things much further in advance than we plan things. So when westarted doing joint ops with them they had some tremendous people working but they basicallysaid, “Look, we’ve got to plan longer range than what you’re planning in”. And the whole cycle, Imean we would plan the day before for the next day’s events but in reality, because we had verypoor intel initially and we couldn’t get better intel until late at night, what you planned for the first daythe day before was totally changed the next morning at 6 o’clock when you did your morning opbrief. So you scrambled around for an hour and a half to two hours putting everything backtogether, sending the teams out different places and stuff like that, “This is where you’re going togo now. This is who you’re going to go with.” All that we did almost by the seat of our pants everymorning putting everything back together to go out there, and I don’t think that other organizationscould do that that well when they are stuck with these planning things. “I’ve got my assets stagedhere and there, wherever” and our people are trained and flexible enough to do that. So thosewere the areas I’d say that we definitely excel in, in that ability to do that kind of stuff.

Q: Well are there policies or procedures that you could see that could be improved upon; CoastGuard policies?

LCDR Gilreath: With regards to something like this, probably not. This is so . . . I mean we . . . no,I don’t want to go out on a limb and say that, yes, I definitely could find a huge Coast Guard policyprocedure, to say to change that, because I mean we tried to follow Coast Guard policy as best wecould with what we had and what we were able to do. But I’ll be very honest with you, there was nottime to physically - and there’s no way to do it - to go pull up each Commandant instruction to verifythat exactly the way you’re doing it is in accordance with Commandant instructions, and we tried tofollow everything the best we knew. And an example was, we would not arm anybody unless youcurrently were a qualified boarding team member or boarding officer with current weapons quals.We wouldn’t arm you unless you had that. But I’m sure at times I put people out there in bodyarmor, when we finally got body armor, that didn’t have guns or didn’t have weapons and I sent





them unarmed with people who did have weapons, and that may not exactly follow Coast Guardpolicy but that was what I felt like had to be done at the time in order to try to keep our people assafe as I could with what we had available and still do this job and still do this mission. So if Iviolated Coast Guard policy on that I’m sorry but that’s what I did to get it done.

Q: Well what would you say was the most challenging, aside from the communications, the mostchallenging aspect of your position over there at Zephyr Field?

LCDR Gilreath: Logistics; without a doubt, logistics. I have never been involved in an operationwhere you had to build everything from scratch but you had to build everything from scratch here.The only thing that FEMA had available for you when you got there was food. If you didn’t bring itwith you, you didn’t have it. There were no . . . I mean I was under this impression that when yousent some people to one of these disasters there’s a camp set up and there’s a cot for you andthere’s a place for you to eat and sleep and all that kind of stuff. That’s not there. FEMA expectsour teams to go with 72 hours worth of stuff to live on their own and with a disaster of this type ittook a week of some of the best Coast Guard people we have working for us, logistically-wise, tostart getting us logistics to keep this thing running. So other than food there was nothing else. If youdidn’t bring it you didn’t have it. So the thing that bothered me the most when I got there on thatThursday was the people I’d sent down here, they were sleeping under the stars in borrowed cotsfrom . . . I don’t know how they got them. They scrounged them. I mean they just, like a lot of otherthings we just kind of scrounged it. We begged, borrowed, pleaded and we didn’t steal anythingbut we begged, borrowed and pleaded an awful lot from other people that, “Hey, can we have this?Can we use this?” We got a lot of stuff that way. But you had about a day’s worth of supply of fuel.How do you get fuel? You had to find fuel. You had to find clothes for people because you’re in thiscontaminated water and there’s nowhere to wash your clothes. There’s no place like that. Wedidn’t even have decontamination stations for these folks. So they’re going out in this water with allthese chemicals in it, with all the oil in it, with the bodies in it, with the dead animals in it, all thatkind of stuff, and we don’t even have stuff to clean them off with when they get back and they can’ttake a shower, yet they voluntarily go do this everyday to try to save lives. You know you tell them,“Don’t get wet.” Well you can tell them not to get wet but that’s pretty much a joke because you’regoing to get wet. You either have to get out of your boat to pull it over stuff, wade through stuff – hopefully you had waders – but to pull it through stuff. The people you’re picking up are wet soyou’re getting water on you from there. An airboat goes by and it sprays water all over you. A helocomes down to do a medevac and it spreads water all over. I mean you’re going to get wet. Sothese people are getting wet.

Logistically we could not support them with everything that we needed. We didn’t have porta-potties, didn’t have toilets, didn’t have showers, didn’t have laundry and didn’t have a place forthem to sleep. I mean to sleep; there was a building there at the facility there at the Saints campwe were at where there were five or six hundred folks sleeping in it and you’re working in 95degree heat everyday and it’s probably almost 100 degrees at night in there, you know that’s noway for your body to recover. So logistically that was the hardest part was trying to build fromground zero up when there’s no manual for it that I know about and I didn’t know how to do it, so wekind of just worked through it. I assigned some people to start working logistics.

I had some great people working for me: Lieutenant (jg) Brown, Chief Dillon from Galveston, ChiefDavis from ANT New Orleans. We had other folks working from St. Louis helping us out on all that





just trying to figure out what it was that we needed because you needed everything. Figuring outwho to talk to to get it and then get that process in motion was by far the most challenging thing tokeep that running because everybody wanted to go out into the field and start to rescue peopleand save lives but if you didn’t have fuel for them and you didn’t have a place for them to sleep andyou didn’t have anything else for them, they couldn’t do anything. So that person that was workinglogistics was probably, in some sense, more critical than the person actually in the boat pulling theperson off of the house because that other person working logistics found ways to get them outthere and get fuel for their vehicles. I mean all that was a challenge.

Q: Well when did the supply chain start kicking in; when did you start receiving the cots and porta-potties and things like that?

LCDR Gilreath: I’m not sure we ever received cots. We eventually got some tents from workingback through my parent command there at Baton Rouge. We were able to get some tents and itstarted rolling down from there. And then talking to some of the other parent commands they wereable to send additional tents and solar showers and stuff like that and send their people in RVs,which was absolutely critical because the RV gave you a place to sleep at night that wasprotection from the elements. Thank God it wasn’t raining because if it had rained more we wouldhave been really hurting. That was a blessing. That was a miracle and all that. But they startedsending supplies when those teams started showing up probably on that Saturday. We got our firstreal good shipment of supplies, I would say coming out of Alexandria, probably on that Monday.We might have gotten some radios, I think we got some radios on Sunday. So we got someradios to help with comms on that Sunday, so that came Sunday. But the porta-potties andshowers and laundry and all that stuff started kind of really showing up Monday, Tuesday, intoWednesday. Wednesday was a huge day because Wednesday we got, by then had laundry nowand we had showers for everybody so everybody could take hot showers. So that was atremendous help, both sanitation wise and all that to help out there. And then I think Wednesdaywe finally got body armor after asking for body armor for . . . I guess it was hard to get becausethere were so many people asking for it. I know everybody needed it but I think Wednesday - itmay have even been Thursday; Wednesday or Thursday was that September the 7th or 8th when Isay Wednesday – was when we finally got body armor in for our folks that didn’t come fromsomewhere else. I mean we were hot-racking body armor that entire time, which is nasty stuff, witheverybody’s sweat in it and stuff like that, but that was the only thing you could do. You had to try todo the best with what you had and the Coasties did. I mean our folks did tremendous work withwhat they had. They just did . . . you could not ask somebody to work harder than they did, and theydid. They gave everything they had all the time. Nobody left anything on the table. I mean they gaveit their all, all the time.

Q: Now how long were you folks there at Zephyr Field? When did you return back to BatonRouge?

LCDR Gilreath: My folks and myself; meaning my people from MSU Baton Rouge, we left on the8th.

Q: Okay.

LCDR Gilreath: I sent my team back on the morning of the 8th because our boats were no longeruseful. I mean frankly the 24-foot and 23-foot boat, after the first few days and some missions to





Chalmette that we were able to do and a couple other things, really you couldn’t launch them inthere. It wasn’t worthwhile. My people were burnt out. I sent them back because I couldn’t use them.What we needed were flat boats and we had some of those coming but they weren’t there yet. So Isent them back and then I got relieved. Lieutenant Commander Brad Wallace from PSU 307came in to relieve me on that Thursday and we passed information along and I left that night;Thursday.

Q: Were you able to go out on one of the missions to survey what was out there?

LCDR Gilreath: No, my surveys were done via overflights. That’s how I did my survey. I did not getto go out physically in the boat. It would have been nice to do that, but as I said earlier, everybodywanted to go on the boat. The harder thing to do, in my opinion, was keeping everything running.And plus there was no way I could get away from all the decisions we were trying to make from theunified command to do that. So I did overflights. I did get out a few times to go to some meetings.Captain Mueller brought me to a meeting which was very helpful for me with DOD and reallyhelped the unified command out tremendously because it positioned us instead of the unifiedcommand just totally going away. It positioned us so that DOD knew what we were doing and theycame into our organization and said, “We kind of want to work for you instead of us having to takeall our assets out of there and throwing them somewhere else.” They came in and plugged into us,which I thought was just remarkable that they were willing to do that but it made sense because wehad the right plan in place to say that the whole city had been covered. I mean everybody else waspretty much just doing great things but there was not a lot of coordination between those greatthings they were doing and how do you know that every part of the city was covered. How do youknow that you went every place you needed to go because that ultimately had to be done to saythat we got everybody out that we could rescue. And that plan; the unified command offered thatstrategy, you know with the hasty and primary and secondary searches, it offered a way so that itall had been done and we had that data kind of built. So when they plugged in that was big.

Q: Now when your folks came back from the field was it a difficult thing to focus people, you knowpsychologically, when they went out there they saw a lot and then to come back, what was theirmood and how did you deal with them psychologically?

LCDR Gilreath: Psychologically; everybody, including myself, wanted to go back. Nobody wantedto leave. We were all tired, we were all beat, but everybody wanted to go back because we hadthis rescue mentality saying, “We want to go back and save lives”, and they felt guilty about notbeing back out there. So they were really mad when I sent them home and I was really mad when Icalled up Alexandria the next morning and wanted to go back. I wasn’t that mad but I wanted to goback and I wanted to go back. I kept trying to go back and I kept being told, “No, someone else iscovering it.” Everybody wanted to go back and do more because they saw what was going onthere and they saw all the work that was being done. We kind of worked through that by tellingthem the good things they had done, by saying, “Look, there’s another thing that we’ve got to do.”What I tried to emphasize to them; to my crew, was, “This is a marathon. We’ve just gone out thefirst mile but there’s a lot more of this race that has to be run and when everybody else that is herehelping us and doing tremendous work is gone, we’re still going to be here dealing with the sameproblems that are still in existence, helping with the sector; rebuilding the sector, helping with ourmarine safety missions, all that kind of stuff.” We kind of tried to focus that way.

And then the other thing that helped was our pollution mission had gone way up at that time so we





were able put people into that. And then we brought in CISM folks. On that first full Tuesday that wehad been back we had CISM training come in so they did like an initial CISM training foreverybody at that stage.

Q: Okay.

LCDR Gilreath: Which I think helped some.

Q: Now is there any instance or memorable moment that you would care to share with us in theoverall mission that you participated in; a person that you encountered, a story that you heard fromone of your crew members that you’d care to share with us?

LCDR Gilreath: There’s one that I will share but before I share it I will say that there are thousandsof stories that came out of this, and so to pick one story is very difficult; to pick one over theanother, because people did tremendous work. But I think the story that got to me the most was astory from Sunday; September 4th, and that was a very hard day because we had tremendousheat that day. People were falling out with heat stress and it was a really difficult day. They told uson that Thursday; the doctors had come in and said, “Anybody that was in their attic after Thursdayis probably not going to be alive.” So we had some DART teams out in the section of town not farfrom the ISC. They were down in there. They were in a very heavily flooded section. They turned offtheir motor to their boat to listen and they heard like a little faint tapping sound from somewhereand it was an elderly man in his window, tapping on his window, on the second story. There arebars over the window so they can’t get out and he’s tapping on the window because he sees andhears them out there. They’re able to go over there. They get somebody to cut a hole through theroof. They go in and they find this man with his 80 – this is an elderly man - but he has his 87-year-old mother with him. She’s bed-constrained. She can’t get out of bed. She’s lying in water up toher neck just about. He’s in water up to his waist or chest or whatever, and they’d been trappedthere since the storm had come in and had flooded, so they’d been trapped since sometime eitherMonday or Tuesday, flooded like that. And they were still alive through all that time and there’s noway they would have been rescued had they not been out there and shut off their motor and heardthat little faint tapping. And these people shouldn’t have been alive and yet they were. And youknow that, to me, is a tremendous rescue story, you know the effort that went into that to get outthere; to get those people there, to find them, locate them, and then save them, pull them out, andthat was tremendous.

Q: Now were you personally affected by the storm; did you have any property damage?

LCDR Gilreath: We’re fine. That’s another part of that factor. Very few of the folks that wereworking in Zephyr Field, except for the ANT New Orleans folks, had any kind of personal damageas a result of the storm. We were very fortunate in that regard; very, very fortunate, because thefolks that did, did tremendous . . . I mean I don’t know how they did what they did under that strain.

Q: Now is there anything you’d care to share with us that we haven’t covered?

LCDR Gilreath: I’ll repeat that it’s the people that made the difference. It’s wasn’t me. It wasn’tindividual lieutenants or whatever. It was the people there that made the difference. They are theones that saved the lives and did the work and found what needed to be done and did it, and they

did tremendous work and I couldn’t be prouder of them. I’d do anything in the world for them that I





could to thank them for what they did because they just did awesome. I mean they worked theirtails off with very little support, at least initially, you know, doing tremendous work, doing everythingthey could. I couldn’t be prouder of them.

Q: All right, great, thank you Commander.

LCDR Gilreath: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW

NOTE: After reviewing this I failed to mention all of the units that participated in Coast Guardoperations at Zephyr Field while I was present during the course of the interview. This is notindicative of the value of their contributions but rather a failure on my part to adequately cover thisduring the course of interview. In addition to the DARTs from MSO St. Louis and Group Upper, wealso had DARTs from Sector Ohio Valley (includes Sector Office as well as MSU Pittsburgh, MSUHuntington, and MSU Paducah), and we had a DART from Sector Lower Mississippi River. Otherunit’s that provided key personnel or boat crews with boats at Zephyr Field while I was present

included ANT Galveston, ANT Sabine, ANT New Orleans, ISC New Orleans, Station New Orleans,Station Sabine, National Data Buoy Center, MLCLANT, FIST New Orleans, and Air Station CapeCod. Coast Guard forces providing security for our joint teams operating from Zephyr Fieldincluded MSST New Orleans, MSST Galveston, MSST Miami, Taclet South, EMSST and PSU307.


u.s. coast guard oral history program - lcdr shannon gilreath

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