NEW ORLEANS – As hurricane floodwaters gushed into New Orleans, the 911 calls pouring in to police were desperate and, in a heartbreakingly Southern way, unfailingly polite.
One woman thanked the operator for her time. Another apologized for calling so much.
"I'm stuck in the attic, and me and my little sister are here, and my mom, and we've got water in our whole house," said a woman who was trapped with eight others in the low-income Ninth Ward, one of the hardest-hit areas of the city. "We don't have nothing to get out on the roof."
"OK, ma'am, we're getting somebody out there ... OK?" replied the woman who identified herself as "Operator 1-6."
"OK, thank you," the woman replied.
"You're welcome," Operator 1-6 said in a comforting voice.
The first hurricane-related 911 tapes released by New Orleans reflected the horror of Katrina, not so much in the panicked voices of the dying as in the calm and utter helplessness of victims with no escape.
But as the water rose, so did the frustration and anguish of the operators, who could do nothing. They offered often-futile advice – "get to higher ground" – and painfully empty assurances – "We're trying our best to get out to everyone."
On the other end of the line, despairing operators were forced to listen to what they later described as "death calls," the terrifying sounds of mothers crying for help while holding their babies out of rooftops for air, succumbing to the waters and dropping to their deaths while horrified operators listened. Callers were stranded in burning apartments with no way for trucks to get to them.
"And then we'd get another call just like it," said New Orleans police Capt. Stephen J. Gordon, commander of the 911 communications department. "My poor ladies who work here, they're my family, I love them. And they're getting these death calls. We're in the business of helping people, and we're listening to their last words. We're not used to just listening to people die."
Trying to help
One woman was trapped in her attic when the operator said, "OK, ma'am ... is there any way you can get to the roof if need be?
"That's the problem," the woman replied. "We're looking out the window but we need to get to the top but, um, I don't, I don't know if we can make it or not because ..."
"OK, you don't have anything in the attic that you can use to get up to the top?"
The caller replied that "we don't have anything strong enough to like break it through or anything like that."
"OK, we're trying our best, ma'am, we're trying our best ... We're trying our best to get out there to you to rescue you."
Throughout the ordeal, 120 operators were getting so emotionally distraught that they were shifting out every 15 minutes.
"We'd get these calls ... all 15 [lines] at the same time, they'd last three or four minutes, and then they'd start over," Capt. Gordon said. "That went on for two or three hours."
Meanwhile, floodwaters overtaking the police station forced them to evacuate to a makeshift City Hall in a downtown hotel.
One woman called from the second floor of her house, trying to find the source of a natural gas smell emanating from the rising waters. Her brother had gone into the water to shut off the house's gas valve.
"I just want to know if there is a little gas leak, along with ... we're trying to let fresh air in ... will everybody be all right?"
"OK, I think if you let fresh air in, everybody's going to be all right," the operator said. "But, right now, we can't send fire out, because we cannot come in this kind of weather."
"I know," the caller answered.
"All right ma'am, all right. Thank you. Bye-bye."
After the winds died down and water stopped rising, rescuers spent days plucking people off roofs, fishing them out of the water or tying down the remains of people who had not survived Katrina's rage.
A few days later, with 911 calls still pouring in from people stranded and waiting to be rescued, the radio system broke down and calls had to be relayed by walkie-talkie.
All but about 15 operators were gone, having evacuated with their families.
"We're all going to need counseling," Capt. Gordon said matter-of-factly, his own family safe with relatives in Dallas. "I think we're all going to break down."
Now, two weeks later, local police and officials from agencies around the nation are working through a backlog of hundreds of 911 calls that they couldn't respond to during and right after the storm because of high winds and floodwaters.
About 100 calls are coming in a day, but they're mostly from people checking on the welfare of their families or people reporting looters.
The communications system is back up and running, said Capt. Gordon and Mayor Ray Nagin, and they're getting help with the backlog from agencies including the U.S. Border Patrol in Texas and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcementin Dallas.
"They had a whole backlog of calls, and there was no way the New Orleans Police Department could handle it," said Robert Haldeman, a supervisor for the Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement's special response team.
Checking houses
On Monday and Tuesday alone, the Border Patrol contingent checked about 200 houses that had been recorded as incoming calls during the storm. Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement checked a dozen in the first few days.
What they found ran the gamut between triumphant and tragic.
In some instances, agents arrived to find only roofs poking out of the water. Or they found holes punched in roofs where people had escaped. In a few cases, they found only bodies.
Roy Cervantes, a Rio Grande Valley agent for the Border Patrol, said his agents tried to get into one house where a body was awaiting discovery but were held back by burglar bars. They marked the house and notified teams charged with removing victims' bodies.
For the most part, agents found evidence of looting and rescues.
In one case, Border Patrol agents found a stash of automatic weapons and looted goods, which they turned over to New Orleans police.
At another address, a 70-year-old woman had called during the storm but was nowhere to be found when officers went to her house this week. She had escaped, and agents were able to recover thousands of dollars that she apparently had been stashing for years, Mr. Cervantes said.
At one house a few days ago, agents found an elderly woman sitting on her couch, unable to move around on her own, living alone with her dog, subsisting only on water and peanuts. She said she had been doing that for five days, and officers didn't know when she made the call to 911. Paramedics whisked her to a hospital and treated her for dehydration.
The incident illustrated to officers that even though some of those calls were two weeks old, answering every single one of them held the potential of saving someone's life.
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