Cover story: Hometown heroes -- Weary Menlo Park rescuers get a hero's welcome upon return from New Orleans mission Cover story: Hometown heroes -- Weary Menlo Park rescuers get a hero's welcome upon return from New Orleans mission (September 21, 2005)

By Andrea Gemmet

Almanac Staff Writer

With tired eyes, sunburned cheeks and big smiles, members of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District's Swift Water Rescue Team enjoyed a hero's welcome when they returned last week from New Orleans.

In two and a half weeks, team members boated through flooded streets, dropped from helicopters and plucked stranded victims of Hurricane Katrina from rooftops, freeway overpasses and damaged buildings.

Wives, children, parents, colleagues -- even a couple of family dogs -- milled around outside of the team's warehouse in Menlo Park's industrial district on Friday, September 16, awaiting the bus that brought the team home. Sped from the airport by a police escort, team members emerged from the bus and were enveloped in a flurry of hugs, joyful tears and enthusiastic kisses.

It was a homecoming of the best kind -- no one on the team was seriously injured and it had excelled at the comparatively happy task of conducting live rescues.

The 14-member team, which includes 12 Menlo Park firefighters, took part in the rescue of nearly 1,000 people, said Division Chief Harold Schapelhouman. They weren't involved in the grim business of retrieving dead bodies, although they found quite a few as they searched through houses for survivors, he said.

The 70-member, Menlo Park-based Task Force 3, one of 28 urban search and rescue teams in the country, is still in New Orleans and is expected to come home sometime this week, said Menlo Park fire Division Chief Jimmy Lichtenstein.

"You did a fantastic job," fire district director Bart Spencer told the assembled team members. He directed them to spend time with their families and friends and get some good rest.

"You made us proud, and you made the rest of the country proud," Mr. Spencer said.

Much like the hurricane victims, rescue team members endured sweltering heat, primitive living conditions and water shortages. They stayed at the New Orleans Saints' training stadium with as many as 1,000 other rescue workers, and slept on the floor.

"We had 14 five-gallon buckets for bathrooms. For showers, we went outside when it rained," Mr. Schapelhouman said. "But we weren't complaining. The people we rescued had it much worse."

"We knew it would be bad, but we didn't know how bad," he said.

Seeing the vastness of the devastation from a helicopter -- people gathered on highway overpasses, fragments of people's lives reduced to piles of trash strewn everywhere -- was one of the most revealing moments, said John Preston, one of the two team members who is not a Menlo Park firefighter. He is a civilian employee of the U.S. Army at the NASA-Ames Research Center and a member of its Disaster Assistance Rescue Team.

"Emotionally, for me personally, it was not that bad dealing with it, because we were working the whole time rescuing live people," he said.

Niely Hunt, the team's only female member, was sporting flip-flops on her feet. Boots, along with other gear, got so contaminated from contact with New Orleans' toxic water that they had to be thrown out, and there wasn't a spare pair small enough to fit Ms. Hunt.

"A couple of us took a couple of dips in the drink," she said lightly.

Although there were news reports of rescuers coming under fire, Ms. Hunt said no one ever shot at the Menlo Park team. On the team's second day in New Orleans, they had to stand down because rioting in the city made it too dangerous to conduct rescue missions.

"That was frustrating, because there was so much to do," she said. "Any time it felt like our movement forward was being curtailed, that was definitely the most frustrating part."

Firefighters said they had no idea where the people they rescued ended up going, since there were so many different shelters opened for hurricane victims.

"There's still a lot of kids missing parents," said firefighter Eric McGlennon. "I talked to a lot of husbands who took their wives and kids out of the city and then stayed behind to help their communities."

Due to all of the confusion, they were having trouble finding each other, he said.

Rescue team members were forced to ignore the hurricane's animal victims, for the most part, as they concentrated their efforts on saving human lives.

"It was like Noah's Ark out there," said Mr. Schapelhouman. "There were tons of animals. We could hear them in the houses, but we didn't have time."

Mr. Schapelhouman fostered a dog he nicknamed Scruffy while he was there, but left him with the SPCA. Mr. McGlennon, on the other hand, brought home a stowaway -- a tiny black lab puppy with the incongruous name of "Stallion." The puppy was found in an abandoned apartment building and was rescued in a Stallion helicopter, he explained.

"Hopefully the SPCA in Louisiana will find his family, but until then, he'll have a good home," Mr. McGlennon said.

When they arrived at San Francisco International Airport, team members were pleased to learn that rescued animals had been taken in by local animal welfare groups, including the Peninsula Humane Society.

Yelping and barking from abandoned pet dogs and the thrum of distant helicopters were often the only sounds in the abandoned city. There were a few times, Mr. Schapelhouman said, when he found himself alone in an eerie, Twilight Zone-like scene -- empty streets, abandoned buildings and once, next to a cemetery littered with caskets that had washed up out of the ground.

A veteran of numerous disaster scenes, including the September 11 World Trade Center attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Schapelhouman said he saw things in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath that he's never seen before. It was the first time he's been on a mission where rescuers had to be escorted by machine-gun toting police officers - "We called them our gunships" - who could provide cover if their flotilla of rubber boats came under fire.

"I saw a tank traveling through downtown New Orleans. When would you ever think you would see something like that in America?" he said. "I hope to never see that again."

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