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09-15-05, 09:55 PM
Federal Air Marshals: Heroes of New Orleans Airport Evacuation
By Annie Jacobsen
9/8/2005
"It looked like Somalia, not the United States of America… There were dead bodies next to the baggage claim. There were guys with machetes trying to protect their families. One guy had an AR-15… People were urinating in buckets… It was like the end of the world. Federal Air Marshals are supposed to be pretty tough, but some of us were breaking down."
Those are the haunting words of a Federal Air Marshal (FAM) with whom I recently spoke, a man just back from a five-day tour of duty as part of a team evacuating victims of Hurricane Katrina out of New Orleans via the Louis Armstrong International Airport. FAMs were among the first law enforcement officers on the scene, tasked with a nearly impossible job: restore order at an airport where thousands were trying desperately to evacuate.
It started early Friday morning (September 2, 2005) with a message on his PDA: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had ordered all FAMs within driving distance of the New Orleans airport to get there as quickly and as safely as humanly possible.
To do so, approximately 30 FAMs from the Houston, Texas, office set out on the six-hour journey traveling in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans with the lights flashing. One group drove in a rented RV -- a choice that would prove critical as this vehicle would end up serving as FAMs command post once the group got to the airport. It would also house the hundreds of weapons the FAMs would eventually confiscate from the evacuees before they boarded passenger planes.
Once the FAMs arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans and began to deploy, they found themselves playing every role imaginable. They handwrote passenger manifests, confiscated weapons that people were carrying to protect themselves, manned the jetways so passengers could get on board aircraft and even pushed the planes back from the gates.
One FAM in particular, a man with whom I have been in contact with many times in the past year (and who must remain anonymous because FAMs aren't allowed to talk to the press), shared his story with me.
War Zone
I asked the FAM what happened after the team arrived at the airport on September 2.
"When we got there, it was like a war zone. In the parking lot there were all these cars with the windows smashed in. All the radios had been stolen. It was lawless. No one was in control... There was trash and destruction all over the place. And then the airport doors opened and all these people came out. They looked like they had been through hell. Once we got inside, there were dead bodies everywhere. They were people that had evacuated the city -- they made it as far as the airport and then just died. It was total chaos. Total chaos… You know some of our guys [FAMs] are vets -- some just got back from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was totally unbelievable to them. It was rough -- we were loading the sick and dying out of 18-wheelers and onto planes. It was like a third world country. What we saw, it was lawlessness."
"Our main mission was to secure the airport. Then we had to start getting people on planes. It was so chaotic. There were 8,000 people needing to get on planes. People had been waiting in lines for 12, 15 hours and they didn't want to lose their place so people started urinating in line. We brought them buckets -- it was unbelievable. This one old lady with a walker slipped in the urine and we had to rush her over to triage. Sick people, old people, elderly, blind. Retarded people, and I'm sorry if that's not the correct word…There were mentally ill people -- they all came in by the busloads from who knows where. Fifty, sixty, sixty-five busloads of people just pulled up on Friday night. More people than you can imagine. Terrified people. There was this one family; the mother and the father were deaf and mute. They had a one-year-old baby and an eight-year-old son who wasn't deaf. The 8-year-old was trying to translate what we were saying to them with sign language. It was heartbreaking. Finally I just grabbed them and got them on a plane."
"We were evacuating sick people by military planes and everybody else by commercial aircraft. With the commercial planes, we had to check people for weapons. You wouldn't believe what kinds of weapons the evacuees were carrying. Guns, knives -- a lot of knives -- and a lot of machetes. You wouldn't believe how many machetes we took! Pistols, shotguns. People were carrying swords. People had Taser guns. A lot of these people were just trying to protect themselves and their families. These people were hurting. They'd been through hell getting [to the airport] and they were scared. This one guy had a gurkha -- that's a British contingency force weapon used to decapitate the enemy. We told them, 'We need to take the weapons. You're going to get on a plane and we're going to get you out of here.'"
Many FAMs, Many Talents
Federal Air Marshals are a diverse group with backgrounds that run the gamut. Many were EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) and Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs). Others were Customs Agents, worked Border Patrol or held positions with Immigration Services.
"We have so much to bring to the table as a group," the FAM told me. "At the airport, we did everything. There were all these Hispanic people in the parking lots just wondering where they were going, what they were supposed to do and how they were going to afford to fly. A lot of us speak Spanish. We explained to them that they were being evacuated. People were really grateful for finally understanding that. They had no idea what was going on."
With no flight attendants or airline employees at the airport, it was up to the FAMs to do just about every task -- from screening for weapons to getting passengers on planes.
"We'd get a plane in and we'd say, 'Okay we can take 150 bodies now.' So then we'd write down the passengers' names on these sheets of paper. We were doing the passenger manifests like that. Taking the names and then passing them on so that the shelters on the other end would know how many people to expect. We took the elderly and the sick and the families with small kids first. Some of our guys got out there on the tarmac and were actually pushing back the planes. We were operating the jetways. We were doing all the jobs until finally the Air National Guard showed up. There were even FAMs up in air traffic control tower. They weren't directing air traffic but these guys had experience in aviation and they were helping out because the FAA was overwhelmed."
Riot Averted, Lives Saved
Between early evacuation proceedings and the time when the FAMs showed up, just who, if anyone, was in charge, remains a mystery.
"There were maybe five or six police officers from Louisiana State police. There was one bomb-sniffing dog. And there were 8,000 people who'd been standing in line for 12 hours waiting to evacuate. Then suddenly Friday night around midnight, we get word that we're going to have to shut down air operations. The word was that we were out of planes. We were really worried about a riot. SWAT was sent out. We were waiting to make the announcement, 'No more flights.' I don't know what would have happened if we did. Somebody called Washington and suddenly we got more planes. We were back up and operational. If we had had to stop, there would have been a riot."
According to the FAM, the airlines that were involved included Air Trans, Continental, Southwest, Delta and JetBlue.
At some point, someone got the idea of utilizing the FAMs in yet another capacity: getting information on those left behind in New Orleans. This information would help in search and rescue operations.
"Someone gave us these notepads. We'd ask, 'Anybody left in your neighborhood?' And people would come up to us and say, "My daddy is stuck in our attic. He's a dialysis patient.' Or, 'My mom is diabetic.' They'd give us a street name or a landmark. Addresses. We got good specific information. We'd write down the information and pass it on to a command center. We saved a lot of lives that way. I don't know whose idea it was, but it was fantastic."
For some time, the pen and paper was as high-tech as it got.
"We drove up with satellite phones but they didn't work. It was unbelievable. Nothing worked. We had cell phones that didn't work. Once in a while, our text messaging on our PDAs worked and that was great because we would text our families. Then, finally, some FAMs took charge and suddenly we had some serious equipment from Washington. Finally, we could communicate with what was going on inside the planes."
"By Saturday, the National Guard showed up and by Sunday, the 82nd airborne came with 4,000 soldiers. It was great they finally got there but we sure could have used them Friday. Al Gore came in with a planeload of supplies. Rumsfield was there. There was this one senator, I don't know his name, he shows up with a thing [stethoscope] around his neck, four aides and a photographer. Boy, was he milking it, taking pictures of himself. I thought to myself, this is pathetic. People are dying."
The Federal Air Marshal I spoke with had worked with his fellow FAMs around the clock, in 15- and 16-hour shifts, for five days. He was home with his family for 48 hours of rest. Then he was headed back to the Louis Armstrong International Airport for another tour of duty.
Author's Note: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), who is also a physician, was at Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans on Saturday, September 3. He was photographed with a stethoscope around his neck.
Annie Jacobsen, author of Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again, writes about business, finance and terrorism for a variety of national and international magazines and webzines. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and two sons.
http://www.womenswallstreet.com/columns/column.aspx?aid=964
By Annie Jacobsen
9/8/2005
"It looked like Somalia, not the United States of America… There were dead bodies next to the baggage claim. There were guys with machetes trying to protect their families. One guy had an AR-15… People were urinating in buckets… It was like the end of the world. Federal Air Marshals are supposed to be pretty tough, but some of us were breaking down."
Those are the haunting words of a Federal Air Marshal (FAM) with whom I recently spoke, a man just back from a five-day tour of duty as part of a team evacuating victims of Hurricane Katrina out of New Orleans via the Louis Armstrong International Airport. FAMs were among the first law enforcement officers on the scene, tasked with a nearly impossible job: restore order at an airport where thousands were trying desperately to evacuate.
It started early Friday morning (September 2, 2005) with a message on his PDA: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had ordered all FAMs within driving distance of the New Orleans airport to get there as quickly and as safely as humanly possible.
To do so, approximately 30 FAMs from the Houston, Texas, office set out on the six-hour journey traveling in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans with the lights flashing. One group drove in a rented RV -- a choice that would prove critical as this vehicle would end up serving as FAMs command post once the group got to the airport. It would also house the hundreds of weapons the FAMs would eventually confiscate from the evacuees before they boarded passenger planes.
Once the FAMs arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans and began to deploy, they found themselves playing every role imaginable. They handwrote passenger manifests, confiscated weapons that people were carrying to protect themselves, manned the jetways so passengers could get on board aircraft and even pushed the planes back from the gates.
One FAM in particular, a man with whom I have been in contact with many times in the past year (and who must remain anonymous because FAMs aren't allowed to talk to the press), shared his story with me.
War Zone
I asked the FAM what happened after the team arrived at the airport on September 2.
"When we got there, it was like a war zone. In the parking lot there were all these cars with the windows smashed in. All the radios had been stolen. It was lawless. No one was in control... There was trash and destruction all over the place. And then the airport doors opened and all these people came out. They looked like they had been through hell. Once we got inside, there were dead bodies everywhere. They were people that had evacuated the city -- they made it as far as the airport and then just died. It was total chaos. Total chaos… You know some of our guys [FAMs] are vets -- some just got back from tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was totally unbelievable to them. It was rough -- we were loading the sick and dying out of 18-wheelers and onto planes. It was like a third world country. What we saw, it was lawlessness."
"Our main mission was to secure the airport. Then we had to start getting people on planes. It was so chaotic. There were 8,000 people needing to get on planes. People had been waiting in lines for 12, 15 hours and they didn't want to lose their place so people started urinating in line. We brought them buckets -- it was unbelievable. This one old lady with a walker slipped in the urine and we had to rush her over to triage. Sick people, old people, elderly, blind. Retarded people, and I'm sorry if that's not the correct word…There were mentally ill people -- they all came in by the busloads from who knows where. Fifty, sixty, sixty-five busloads of people just pulled up on Friday night. More people than you can imagine. Terrified people. There was this one family; the mother and the father were deaf and mute. They had a one-year-old baby and an eight-year-old son who wasn't deaf. The 8-year-old was trying to translate what we were saying to them with sign language. It was heartbreaking. Finally I just grabbed them and got them on a plane."
"We were evacuating sick people by military planes and everybody else by commercial aircraft. With the commercial planes, we had to check people for weapons. You wouldn't believe what kinds of weapons the evacuees were carrying. Guns, knives -- a lot of knives -- and a lot of machetes. You wouldn't believe how many machetes we took! Pistols, shotguns. People were carrying swords. People had Taser guns. A lot of these people were just trying to protect themselves and their families. These people were hurting. They'd been through hell getting [to the airport] and they were scared. This one guy had a gurkha -- that's a British contingency force weapon used to decapitate the enemy. We told them, 'We need to take the weapons. You're going to get on a plane and we're going to get you out of here.'"
Many FAMs, Many Talents
Federal Air Marshals are a diverse group with backgrounds that run the gamut. Many were EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) and Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs). Others were Customs Agents, worked Border Patrol or held positions with Immigration Services.
"We have so much to bring to the table as a group," the FAM told me. "At the airport, we did everything. There were all these Hispanic people in the parking lots just wondering where they were going, what they were supposed to do and how they were going to afford to fly. A lot of us speak Spanish. We explained to them that they were being evacuated. People were really grateful for finally understanding that. They had no idea what was going on."
With no flight attendants or airline employees at the airport, it was up to the FAMs to do just about every task -- from screening for weapons to getting passengers on planes.
"We'd get a plane in and we'd say, 'Okay we can take 150 bodies now.' So then we'd write down the passengers' names on these sheets of paper. We were doing the passenger manifests like that. Taking the names and then passing them on so that the shelters on the other end would know how many people to expect. We took the elderly and the sick and the families with small kids first. Some of our guys got out there on the tarmac and were actually pushing back the planes. We were operating the jetways. We were doing all the jobs until finally the Air National Guard showed up. There were even FAMs up in air traffic control tower. They weren't directing air traffic but these guys had experience in aviation and they were helping out because the FAA was overwhelmed."
Riot Averted, Lives Saved
Between early evacuation proceedings and the time when the FAMs showed up, just who, if anyone, was in charge, remains a mystery.
"There were maybe five or six police officers from Louisiana State police. There was one bomb-sniffing dog. And there were 8,000 people who'd been standing in line for 12 hours waiting to evacuate. Then suddenly Friday night around midnight, we get word that we're going to have to shut down air operations. The word was that we were out of planes. We were really worried about a riot. SWAT was sent out. We were waiting to make the announcement, 'No more flights.' I don't know what would have happened if we did. Somebody called Washington and suddenly we got more planes. We were back up and operational. If we had had to stop, there would have been a riot."
According to the FAM, the airlines that were involved included Air Trans, Continental, Southwest, Delta and JetBlue.
At some point, someone got the idea of utilizing the FAMs in yet another capacity: getting information on those left behind in New Orleans. This information would help in search and rescue operations.
"Someone gave us these notepads. We'd ask, 'Anybody left in your neighborhood?' And people would come up to us and say, "My daddy is stuck in our attic. He's a dialysis patient.' Or, 'My mom is diabetic.' They'd give us a street name or a landmark. Addresses. We got good specific information. We'd write down the information and pass it on to a command center. We saved a lot of lives that way. I don't know whose idea it was, but it was fantastic."
For some time, the pen and paper was as high-tech as it got.
"We drove up with satellite phones but they didn't work. It was unbelievable. Nothing worked. We had cell phones that didn't work. Once in a while, our text messaging on our PDAs worked and that was great because we would text our families. Then, finally, some FAMs took charge and suddenly we had some serious equipment from Washington. Finally, we could communicate with what was going on inside the planes."
"By Saturday, the National Guard showed up and by Sunday, the 82nd airborne came with 4,000 soldiers. It was great they finally got there but we sure could have used them Friday. Al Gore came in with a planeload of supplies. Rumsfield was there. There was this one senator, I don't know his name, he shows up with a thing [stethoscope] around his neck, four aides and a photographer. Boy, was he milking it, taking pictures of himself. I thought to myself, this is pathetic. People are dying."
The Federal Air Marshal I spoke with had worked with his fellow FAMs around the clock, in 15- and 16-hour shifts, for five days. He was home with his family for 48 hours of rest. Then he was headed back to the Louis Armstrong International Airport for another tour of duty.
Author's Note: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), who is also a physician, was at Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans on Saturday, September 3. He was photographed with a stethoscope around his neck.
Annie Jacobsen, author of Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again, writes about business, finance and terrorism for a variety of national and international magazines and webzines. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and two sons.
http://www.womenswallstreet.com/columns/column.aspx?aid=964