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Congressman, RTF, join efforts to succor South
By Billie Jo Jannen
The Alpine Sun
NEW ORLEANS, La. — East County Congressman Duncan Hunter is among the growing number of area residents who showed up in person to help succor storm victims in New Orleans.
The former U.S. Army Ranger spent several days this week variously toting and distributing supplies and patrolling flooded streets in New Orleans as a participant in a Rescue Task Force mission.
With him were retired football player Scott Turner and Arizona resident Roy Tyler, who used to own Tyler’s Taste of Texas in El Cajon.
Hunter is coming home with one souvenir he said he prizes almost as much as meeting the people of New Orleans: a U.S. flag, which he dug out of the mud and plans to take back to California, for cleaning and preservation.
“We picked it up and folded it in the proper way and we’re bringing it back,” Hunter said Tuesday evening in an exclusive interview with
The Alpine Sun.
Companion Turner had little to say about the dire conditions in the city, but plenty to say about the people of New Orleans itself:
“There are a few who are angry,” Turner said. “But most of them are very joyful.”
Turner attributed the attitudes to a combination of having survived and to seeing help arrive at last.
“It surprised me to see the joy,” he added. “Seeing that will last a lifetime.”
Tyler fed the alligators.
He explained that he thought it would be better for their stomachs to be full, since they — a 10-footer and a slightly smaller animal — were hanging out next to the airboat in which the group finally slept Monday night after being up for about 40 hours.
Tyler commented, “There are a lot of people here who will never be the same again....but it’s a strong city and I guarantee you it will be back.”
The group joined RTF’s Andrea Stone, who has been sending back regular reports to local media since she arrived in Louisiana last Friday.
As soon as their plane landed in Houston, the group immediately picked up a rented truck and raided a Texas WalMart, purchasing various supplies to supplement others already shipped. Those goods, along with a thousand airbeds were paid for out of monies contributed locally.
They then drove the night through, arriving in the city at around Monday morning. They distributed various supplies, including baby food, beef jerky, toys for children and coffee cups and coffee for adults, at the civic center in use as a shelter
Among the items that most pleased Stone were new backpacks and sack lunches handed out to to children due to recommence their interrupted educations.
Stone is the daughter of Rescue Task Force co-founder Gary Becks and is a seasoned veteran of such disasters as last year’s tsunami. Late Monday, they connected with Arthur, who Hunter called “...the best airboat pilot in the state.”
Arthur, Hunter added, “...saved 300 people yesterday.”
After sleeping on the boat, not-so-hungry gators notwithstanding, the crew spent Tuesday patrolling by water, checking in with The Sun only after evening forced a halt to activities.
The crew headed back to their respective homes late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
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the Editor
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Alpine man rests up after rescuing 75
By Chris Mac Kenzie
The Alpine Sun
ALPINE — As the water rose higher and higher in the streets of New Orleans, Christian Dodgens decided that he would not leave his apartment.
As he told his mother, Sandra Dodgens, here in Alpine, “I just couldn’t leave when the rest of the families bailed out. They were supposed to send help for moving their elderly relatives, 75 or so of them, some in wheel chairs or walkers. I couldn’t leave all those old folks here alone.”
The help never came and the families couldn’t get back. And with the multitudes to be evacuated from the Bowl and the Convention Center, the apartment building was ignored and forgotten.
Before the storm started, Dodgens had stocked up on some water and even a case of tuna fish for himself, so as the week dragged on, he rationed it out to his charges to make it last as long as possible.
When that was gone, he waded through the flood to the nearest relief station, using a large Rubbermaid tub for a floating basket and returned with precious water and
Powerade.
But some of his friends were failing rapidly. He had to get them out somehow. According to his mother, some Coast Guardsmen came by and provided him with a small paddle boat and so began an amazing and heroic evacuation process.
Christian, a 25-year-old oil pipe inspector, helped his elderly charges, carrying some of them, down three and four flights of stairs to the water, where he pushed the little boat through the putrid water to the nearest hospital several blocks away. There they could get medical help and be taken to the airport for transport to hospitals around the country.
Finally, with the help of the apartment manager, he put the bodies of those who had died into one room and covered them, so that when their families returned home, they could at least find their loved ones.
“That was the worst part,” he told his mother when he came home to Alpine. “These were my friends, people I saw every day in the elevator. Not just some strangers on the street.”
Christian, whose shoulders and back are scratched with claw marks inflicted by those frantic souls he was carrying down the stairs, is now trying to restore his strength and decide what to do next after his week-long ordeal. He is staying with his mother, who moved to Alpine in June, and his twin 12- year old brothers.
His mother, Sandra, struggles with a degenerative muscular disease, and must use a wheel chair.
As she explained, “His car is gone, his job is gone and he has no idea whether anything would be left in his apartment if he went back. He’d like to get a job here if he can find one.”
She is very proud of her hero son —
and very grateful that he is safe.
Alpine
men are off to join rescue forces
NEW ORLEANS, La. — Three Alpine men, all of whom work for the San Diego Fire Department, are in New Orleans this week as members of rescue teams working to save lives in the aftermath of Katrina. Gerry Brewster and Dave Williams are in charge of the incident support teams whose work they plan and supervise.
Brewster spoke by phone recently to the firefighters here in San Diego reporting on what the teams are doing in the stricken city. They move up and down every street, checking each house, looking for possible survivors, even breaking through into attics where people might have tried to find refuge from the rising water.
They expect to complete that phase shortly and move on to the next even less pleasant work of locating and bringing out the bodies of those who did not escape and were not rescued in time.
The third local man serving in New Orleans is Jim Cransfield who is with the water rescue teams which patrol the flooded areas and bring in lost and abandoned victims.
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