Members
of TEEX’s Texas Task Force 1, pictured, and the TFS Lone Star State
Incident Management Team assisted with rescue operations in New Orleans.
(College Station)—Texas Task Force 1’s urban search and rescue and water strike teams, coordinated through the Texas Engineering Extension Service, received demobilization orders from the Hurricane Katrina response and returned to their College Station headquarters Sept. 7 following a week of search and rescue operations in New Orleans.
The two teams were involved in approximately 7,000 rescues and evacuations in the downtown New Orleans area. Texas Task Force 1 has had 129 personnel involved in the Katrina response, including 80 with the urban search and rescue team, 41 with the water strike team and additional personnel serving in various capacities with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Homeland Security and the Texas State Operations Center.
Texas Task Force 1’s urban search and rescue team was initially deployed on Aug. 27 in advance of Katrina’s landfall the following Monday. The Task Force is one of 28 national urban search and rescue teams under FEMA. Texas Task Force 1’s water strike team was deployed Aug. 29 by the Governor’s Division of Emergency Management as a mutual aid agreement with Louisiana.
In Hammond, La., Texas Forest Service’s Lone Star State Incident Management Team by Sept. 6 had distributed 396,625 gallons of water, 360,750 eight-pound bags of ice and 1,269,059 Meals Read to Eat (MREs) in four days of operation from six distribution centers near New Orleans.
These six centers are open to the citizens remaining in the area of Louisiana affected by Hurricane Katrina and have seen an estimated 193,552 people.
The Lone Star State team is headquartered at and is charged with the operation of the only Regional Staging Area in Hammond, which currently houses 558 responders. FEMA has tasked the 67-member team with receiving and distribution of all food, water and ice for the entire area south and east of Baton Rouge that was hit by the hurricane, which includes New Orleans. In addition to the receiving and distributing of supplies, the team has now been tasked with establishing a system to track the drivers and trucks, as well as the routes taken, in delivering the ice, water and MREs.
Seven incident management team personnel are stationed in the Houston Disaster District Office of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is supplying security and traffic support for the evacuee effort in Houston. This effort will be ongoing for an unspecified period of time.
In total, Texas Forest Service has 85 personnel in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Texas in support of the Hurricane Katrina rescue and recovery effort.
The USNS Sirius, the 524-foot training ship of the Texas Maritime Academy at Texas A&M University at Galveston, will leave Sept. 10 for New Orleans and assist in disaster relief work.
The ship will be used as a supply ship and possibly house city officials, school officials have been told.
“The ship will be used for what it was designed for—to carry dry stores, refrigerated stores and possibly to house some New Orleans police and firemen,” said James McCloy, superintendent of the Texas Maritime Academy.
“All of this is subject to change, of course, but these are the plans FEMA has given us.”
Capt. Sam Stephenson, master of the ship, said about 50 officers and crew will be on the ship when it arrives in New Orleans.
The ship is owned by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration and before coming to the Texas A&M at Galveston campus was used extensively as a supply ship for troops in the Persian Gulf. Five merchant vessels, including the USNS Sirius,have been deployed to aide in the restoration of the infrastructure of the areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
The Sirius, originally built by England as a Royal Navy ship, served as a replenishment ship and carried supplies and equipment for U.S. Navy ships around the world. The ship has a top speed of 18 knots and displaces about 16,800 tons.
For updates, see Texas Engineering Extension Service and Texas Forest Service