It was 3:00 a.m. and pitch black because the power was out, but Jennifer Lewis didn’t need to see to know exactly where she was.

She didn’t need a flashlight, or a map or compass to help her get her bearings.

The West Virginia University alumna could tell she was in New Orleans by using her nose.

Lewis is a May 2005 environmental protection graduate from Mt. Morris, Pennsylvania, who spent a month in the storm-ravaged city doing relief work with other Guard members from across the Mountain State.

The 31-year-old, single mother volunteered for hurricane duty. Her daughter, Caitlin, nine, stayed with family and friends as her mother drove a five-ton truck right into the heart of Katrina’s calling card.

“It smelled like a combination of rotten meat and raw sewerage, if you can imagine,” she said of the city’s post-storm assault on her senses. “You got a whiff of that and you just knew that New Orleans was in really bad shape.”

Lewis and her fellow Guardsmen arrived there September 2, just a scant two days after the Category 5 Katrina collided with the Crescent City, while pummeling other locales in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Florida.

Katrina’s delivery of destruction was unprecedented—even for an area used to dicey weather when hurricane season comes around.

Louisiana’s network of interlocking levees was breached by the storm surge.

Whole towns in that state and neighboring Mississippi were washed off their collective foundations.

Besides the grim wake of death wrought by Katrina—close to 1,300 as of this writing—at least one million people were displaced in the New Orleans metro area alone, and 400,000 jobs were simply swept away.

The city itself was absolutely inundated, as the Gulf of Mexico roiled in to claim what it rightfully owned in the first place, since several of New Orleans’ neighborhoods were originally built below sea level.

It was just 48 hours after the Big One in the Big Easy, where laissez les bon temps roulet —“let the good times roll”—is both a credo and a zydeco call to arms.

Lewis, who put in time in Bosnia and Kuwait during six years as an active-duty solider, let it roll, too, as she held her nose, and her emotions, to square off for a major mission.

“When the West Virginia Guard is called out,” she said, “we go there to work. This was big. We knew we had a real job to do.”

She wasn’t the only Mountaineer who felt that way.

An Oasis of Aid . . . On Higher Ground
Thousands of miles to the north in Morgantown, WVU officials began casting a watchful eye toward Katrina, as its eye vectored in on the Gulf Coast.

Katrina wasn’t going to dwindle to a tropical depression, they noted. She was gathering steam out over the water, and when she hit land, one thing was going to be certain: she was going to lash out.

A contingency plan quickly took shape between the state National Guard and WVU.

And “Operation Safe Haven” was born at Camp Dawson, an Army Guard training facility 30 miles east of Morgantown and high up in the hills of neighboring Preston County.

The organization of the whole effort was prescribed in part to Dean of Medicine John Prescott, himself a former emergency room physician who worked in both military and civilian hospitals before joining WVU.

WVU Hospitals is under the Homeland Security umbrella, as a member of the National Disaster Medical System, and when Governor Joe Manchin made the offer to house storm victims, six Air National Guard C-130 transport planes rose off the tarmac at Charleston’s Yeager Airport, bound for New Orleans.

That was the Friday after the storm, and just hours after Lewis and her convoy rolled into the Crescent City.

By the time the hollow-eyed hurricane survivors were breathing in Preston County’s pristine mountain air that Sunday afternoon, WVU-led emergency triages were in place at Dawson, processing paperwork, tending to the tired, hungry, and injured, and assessing medical histories.

A total of 324 survivors would go through Dawson’s gates before the operation officially closed down September 30.
It was the WVU community and a good portion of the north-central West Virginia community, really, reaching out to the Katrina community.

WVU’s doctors, nurses, counselors, and other health professionals gave up evenings, weekends, and other off-hours to go where they were needed, which was at Dawson’s on-the-fly medical facility.

But it wasn’t all clinical.

West Virginians have a reputation of reaching out to those in need, and that’s why Dawson was full of delightful, welcoming touches designed precisely to help people feel at home, at least for a little while, in the hills of northern West Virginia.

That’s why a local beautician was among camp volunteers, employing her comb and scissors to style a little normalcy back to a group of people for whom life was anything but.

That’s why job counselors were there, to help the people who were considering a permanent move to higher ground.

That’s why WVU drama students staged puppet shows for the youngsters and other students hosted a campwide party for the Katrina residents celebrating September birthdays.

And that’s why a few people from the Big Easy got to see Big East football up close and personal, by way of free tickets to WVU’s home football opener against Wofford on September 10.

The state’s flagship University extended a hand in other ways, too. WVU took in five displaced students from the hurricane area while joining with several colleges and universities across the country to offer accelerated online courses so that other affected students might salvage their semesters.

WVU students and staffers mobilized to hold emergency blood drives, and a student-led “Dollars for Disaster” fund drive raised some $65,000 for relief efforts in the Gulf.

WVU students also volunteered for relief trips to the region over Thanksgiving break.

A series of forums to encourage discussion of the social and political lessons learned from Katrina were also held on campus.

West Virginia may be thousands of miles away from the storm area, both in terms of geography and culture, but most of Katrina’s community members found themselves right at home in this community.

“Well, I have to say it’s a welcoming place,” one man told a local radio reporter. “The people here are as beautiful as the scenery. I’m telling everybody we had to go through hell to get to ‘almost heaven.’”

Knocking on Doors and Punching Through Attics
Lewis’ days in New Orleans, meanwhile, “literally just all blurred together,” she recalled with a rueful chuckle.

Besides that searing smell, there was “outrageous” heat and humidity, she said, not to mention the slow, simmering frustration of not being able to do anything . . . at least not right away.

“The water was still high so we couldn’t do anything for a week,” she said. “We unloaded trucks and airplanes and we were pretty grouchy and grumbly about that. We didn’t feel like we were accomplishing anything until we were able to get out into the parishes.”

Lewis steered that giant, five-ton truck through swamped neighborhoods as Guardsmen and Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives assessed the damage, helped survivors, and sadly, located bodies of people who didn’t live to tell about Katrina’s fury.

“There were lots of door-to-door rescues,” she said. “They pulled a lot of survivors out of their attics.”

In one amazing, seven-day period, the task force checked out 24,000 homes.

Even though the work was rewarding, it was still a treadmill, she said.

“We’d get up at 4:00 a.m. and spend two hours getting the trucks ready,” she said. “We’d leave out at 6:00 a.m., go until 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., then spend three hours decontaminating the trucks. We’d collapse into bed at 11:00, then start all over at 4:00.”

Lewis said she appreciates the work WVU and the north-central West Virginia community conducted while she was in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.

The University, she said, is especially understanding when it comes to its students fulfilling military obligations. She was still in school during the September 11 terror attacks of 2001 and her unit was deployed several times—but the academic disruptions were minimal, all things considered.

“Once I got back from Kuwait on a Saturday and classes were starting that Monday,” she said. “But I was all registered, and everything. My advisors took care of it. They were always right there.”

Caitlin Lewis has been right there, too, and Lewis said her daughter, and all the families of soldiers in today’s uncertain times, should be hailed as heroes.

“That little girl is such a trooper,” she said. “When my phone rings and somebody asks for ‘Sgt. Lewis,’ I know I’m in for it. Caitlin can see it in my face. She says, ‘O.K., Mom, is it in-country or out, this time?’”

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