House to house with flashlight, ax
Posted: Thursday, September 15 at 03:11 am CT by Kari Huus
Experience the sights and sounds of the house-to-house searches, as firefighters Jeff Dees and Marty Kreil describe their job.
MERAUX, La. -- It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. Someone needs to check every one of the 20,000 or so evacuated homes in St. Bernard parish to see if there are survivors or bodies inside before residents are allowed back into the area.
That’s what six firefighters from Illinois signed up for. As we follow them today, there are more than 100 firefighters from around the country taking on this exercise: Slogging through the muck left behind by the storm surge, sweltering in the Louisiana sun, climbing over heaps of rotting furniture in rooms where mold coats the walls -- checking room by room, house by house, street by street.
Firefighters from the Chicago area who are helping with search and recovery in hurricane-stricken St. Bernard Parish, from left: Marty Kreil, Jeff Dees, John Swanson, Tom Seay, Mark Kuzmicki and Don Jernberg. (Jim Seida / MSNBC.com)
“It’s incomprehensible,” says Lieutenant Don Jernberg of North Palos, Ill. Fire Department, who has worked through a lot of disasters. When I ask if this compares to anything in his experience, he shakes his head wearily. “This takes the cake.”
Most of the homes in the Meraux neighborhood they’re searching are still standing. The trappings of middle- and upper middle-class comfort are piled up, and reeking of rot. After breaking down the front door, the firefighters still struggle to push the doors open against the heaps of debris and mud.
Despite the total disarray of the houses, the firefighters step carefully over the personal items in the houses.
“Please tell people we are treating their homes with utmost respect,” says firefighter Tom Seay. “We aren’t breaking anything we don’t need to.”
There was an earlier sweep through these neighborhoods, but we’re told that early military recovery personnel were not allowed to break into homes that were not open, so many are now being looked at for the first time.
Over the last week, recovery teams like this one have discovered 24 bodies. Since finding a man in his truck in the carport, they are always careful to check in cars. They look in attics where people may have crawled as the flood waters rose. Looking at the rooftops, we can see homes with holes in the roof, where people crawled out on the roof hoping to be rescued. Many were, but some were not. After checking a house, they spray-paint a code on it, to indicate the date checked, the number of bodies inside, and any hazards, like a leaking gas line or an angry dog.
The local incident commander at the fire station, Leon Lea, says he hopes teams will complete checking most houses within a week. Separately, he’s looking to contract outside for hazmat people to go through homes in the part of St. Bernard affected by a 22,000-barrel oil spill from Murphy refinery.
For these firefighters, there are bizarre and macabre discoveries along the way, like fish in the attics of houses. Sometimes they come across snakes and eels. There are cars standing on end. Inexplicably, a bowling ball balances on the eave of one house.
“That’s what you call a gutter ball,” says one of the Illinois firefighters in a moment of dark humor. It’s understandable. In this wasteland, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.
Firefighters move on to the next home to be searched. (Jim Seida / MSNBC.com)
'Tired, aggravated and disgusted'
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