Enforcing law and order after Hurricane Katrina

It was not until I started to see posts on Facebook this past week that I realised this was the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a horrendous storm which not only devastated the lives through which it tore, but also exposed a quagmire of public corruption and human depravity. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I would be in the thick it, but there I found myself, mere hours after the storm had abated, enforcing law and order on the streets of Louisiana.

I was definitely a stranger to hurricanes. Growing up in the most northern part of Ireland, I was no stranger to wild gales and rough weather, which constantly rolled in off the Atlantic. To say rough weather “rolled in” on the Inishowen Peninsula of Donegal is a gross understatement, for it bombarded us. But we became used to that environment. It is your lot in life and you accept it. Seeing houses submerged in water up to their rafters and cars stuck into the sides of houses, like some Picasso/Ford fusion, was not as easy to accept.

Around the last week of August 2005, I remembered hearing on the news that a hurricane was brewing off shore. I was scheduled to attend an investigators’ conference in Portugal at the beginning of September, and I fleetingly wondered if it would interfere with my flight from Washington DC.

On the 29th, I received a call from a corporate client asking if my company could provide armed security in New Orleans, to one of their clients. Hurricane Katrina had made landfall in Louisiana and within hours, 80 per cent of the city was flooded. The request was like nothing I had ever heard before. Their client was in the cash in transit business and had had tens of millions of dollars in a building in New Orleans, in which the first five floors were completely submerged. Apparently the building was being “cased” by a group of would-be bank robbers, and it would be our job to protect the cash from being stolen.

I thought it over for a moment. As the entrance was completely underwater (which meant that all electricity throughout the building would be cut off), the only feasible option was to air lift a team of heavily armed security personnel onto the roof of the building, and protect it from the top down. They would have all their supplies on the roof, and make that their “home” for as long it took.

I assumed the “bad guys” would enter the building using diving gear. Even if they got in undetected, they would have to surface when bringing out all that cash. So I contacted a high ranking police official I trusted down there. I asked him if he could do me a favour and drop a number of my guys on to the roof of a building in downtown New Orleans to thwart a bank robbery. He said he could loan me their police helicopter, but in return he had a favour to ask of me.

He wanted me to volunteer to police the streets with his guys who were under tremendous strain. There were gangs of armed looters roaming the streets and his officers were working long shifts. It was an insane period and my company was getting requests from several clients simultaneously. I had paying contracts in Louisiana and Texas. I left myself free to coordinate the various personnel movements from my base outside of Washington DC. I told him I could do it, but that I would need a day to gather sufficient supplies of weapons and ammunition. On September 1st, I boarded a flight from Washington DC to Baton Rouge. I couldn’t fly into New Orleans itself, as the airport had been shut down. A police van would pick up arriving volunteers and bring us from Baton Rouge into New Orleans. Before I left DC, I cancelled my flight to Portugal.

I got off the plane and made my way to an airport hotel, via their shuttle. I found myself a decent vantage point, plugged in my phone charger and waited for others to arrive. As I was one of the first police back-up responders on the ground, I was appointed as the senior member in charge and observed the newly arriving during the following hours. When we had reached the required number to make the journey back, a van driver appeared and we started to board. The drive to New Orleans was not long, but the sites we encountered along the way, spell bounded us. The television coverage could not properly convey the real-time devastation. It left us speechless on that inward journey. The police had shut down the Bridges into New Orleans. It felt strange to have the highway all to ourselves. The only vehicles to be seen speeding along the top of the city were police cruisers.

The police department had commandeered a function type of room for us at the Holiday Inn. The rest of the hotel was being occupied by refugees who had lost everything. I remembered thinking that in situations like this, “bad guys” often slipped through the “cracks”, so we had to be very diligent about safeguarding our weapons as we slept. The hotel had filled the room with metal army cots and there would be more than 20 of us sharing the same room and toilet facilities, by the time we had fully ramped up. Sleep consisted of three hours maximum in a 24-hour period and we always kept our semi-automatic pistols under our pillows, in case the place would be over-run during the night.

We were told that the local water supply was dangerous to use and was full of all kinds of bacteria from chemicals, dead animals and dead humans. Whenever we used water, it needed to come from a sealed bottle. But when working in 90 degree heat for 21 hours a day, you tend to forget what may be good for you. I found myself waking after a few hours sleep and walking zombie-like to the bathroom, brushing my teeth with contaminated city water instead of the bottles with which we were issued. Who thinks to take a bottle of water into brush your teeth after three hours sleep?

The following day I reported to police headquarters. I was informed that we were to be deputized with full police powers and that we would join in to supplement the current police (known and trusted) as needed. I was immediately assigned to a SWAT unit. My partner was a young cop, Tommy, with several years of service. We were to patrol the Canal Street area of New Orleans and also conduct high-threat level money escorts around the area. We were armed to the teeth.

“I can’t tell you how happy we are to have you guys come down and work with us,” Tommy confided. “Before you got here, we were working twenty three hour shifts.” These guys were operating on fumes. I asked him if his home had been affected by the hurricane. He didn’t know. When the evacuation was ordered, he had sent his wife and children to her relatives in Texas. His house was probably destroyed, but his main concern was keeping the people of the area safe.

My first shift there was 21 hours long. Tommy was thrilled at the prospect of working such a short day. The time passed quickly, as it did when we laid our heads down for a couple of hours at shift-end. Between the heat, lack of sleep and having to remain laser-focused due to the dangerous nature of our work, my mind started playing tricks on me towards the end of my third day there.

When you have worked in countries torn apart by civil war, or worked in war zones where death and destruction are a daily occurrence, you become so acutely aware of your surroundings, that you don’t have to give it a second thought. It is a matter of survival. I found myself in this frame of mind when patrolling the streets at night for looters. Martial law had been imposed and unfortunately society in some areas had deteriorated so badly, that normal “peace time” policing policies could not be relied on to keep us alive.

There was little to no room for community style policing as there were too many “bad guys” who intentionally added to the mayhem, so they would be free to thieve and murder as they saw fit. Utility men working on overhead electricity lines became targets for criminals to “pick-off”. Not all of the bodies being recovered had died from drowning. Many corpses were turning up with bullet holes in their skulls.

The first police casualty we heard about was an officer who had been working day and night to protect the public, and when he did get to check on his family, he discovered the bodies of his wife and child, drowned up in their attic. They had tried to climb as high as they could to escape the rising water, but even their attic eventually flooded. When he discovered their dead bodies, the poor man took his own life.

By the second week, more volunteer reinforcements had arrived. Our numbers had grown and our duties had increased. In addition to my special assignment of escorting money and protecting the lives of local dignitaries with my partner, I joined other colleagues on a dock which had become home to a relief ship, originally destined for Haiti. The ship was stocked with food and all kinds of aid, but when they learned of the disaster in the Gulf, they rerouted for New Orleans. Eight of us worked during the day, protecting the perimeter of the dock yard. It was feared that criminals would attack the ship and loot all the food, once word got out as to what was on board.

By a stroke of good luck, the old warehouse alongside which the aid ship was docked contained tons of rubber bricks. With them we built chest-high “machine gunner” type bunkers around the corners of the warehouse. The thick rubber bricks could easily be built like cement blocks and when reinforced, were sure to stop direct gun fire on our positions. In no time, we had several bunkers for protection. Our backs faced on to the Mississippi river, which was also patrolled by our team. We took turns at the various posts, spending an hour, before rotating. There was one exception - the “rotisserie”.

There was no shelter from the searing sun at the rear of the dock, so it was decided that the shift on the rotisserie post would be 45 minutes instead of an hour. It got pretty hot standing directly in the sun wearing work clothes and a bulletproof vest, with several weapons attached to your body and in your hands. Most guys could not wait for their 45 minutes to end. I was the exception.

Being a sun worshipper all of my life, I pretended I was on a beach. I opened the top buttons on my shirt over my protective vest, sat in my chair which had a 180 degree view of the river, rolled up my sleeves and roasted like a leg of lamb. I enjoyed it so much in fact, that when the next guy would come after 45 minutes to relieve me, I would wave him on and stay for an hour and a half. Every evening, we would be relieved by a West Virginia Police Department SWAT unit for the night shift.

About half way through the second week, our shifts were shortened, which meant we only worked nine or ten hours. Also around that time, one of my colleagues heard a rumour that a neighbourhood bar had opened, and that they had cold drinks. After we finished our tour, we decided to hoof it around the area on foot, in search of the elusive cold beer. We wandered around for about an hour in the still hot sun, until we accidently tripped across a bar, open for business with a lot of people inside.

We were in full civilian combat attire and fully armed. We had semi-auto pistols in tactical thigh holsters, pump-action shotguns, and my colleague even had a light weight, titanium frame 38 revolver in a front chest pocket of his bulletproof vest. We walked in not really knowing what to expect, so strong was the call of that cold drink, but at least we were well equipped to deal with any problem that might arise. The bar was jammed full of people.

We made our way into a corner, where we would have our backs to a wall and be able to see the front door. I handed my shotgun to my partner and went up to the bar to order a couple of ice cold beers. A guy sitting on a stool to the side of me asked me where we had come from. I replied that I had come down from Virginia and my partner had flown in from California. He asked me if I worked for the government. I advised him that I did not, that I owned my own security firm and we came down to help out the local police, some of whom had lost everything, even their police cars and stations.

He called to the barman, “don’t be taking no money from these boys. They left their homes to come down and help us when all the federal government could do was sit around on their asses and talk about help”. The whole bar hushed to hear what was being said, and broke into applause. I thanked our new friends and brought the beers back to the corner.

“I think we found our new spot,” I said to my colleague.

After we had dampened the Louisiana dust from our throats with three or four beers, we received a message from one of our colleagues from California. He asked us for our location and if we were alright. In our search for refreshment, it slipped our minds that everybody else would have returned back to base at the end of the shift and that we were noticeably missing. We probably missed the first couple of radio attempts, and they feared we may have been ambushed. He told us to stay put, and he would arrive shortly with the chief of police.

“Do you think the chief is coming to give us a commendation for finding the only open bar in all of Louisiana?” I asked my partner.

“I’d say it’s more likely,” he replied, “that he is coming to give us an ass chewing for causing them so much concern.”

Our colleague arrived shortly after. He was riding in an unmarked patrol car. We waved to him as he walked in.

“It’s good to see that you two are alright. Now, I need to take your guns.”

“We’re being disarmed?” One of us was as shocked as the other.

“The chief says this is a safe place and that the customers here are all pro-police. He doesn’t want you to be drinking and carrying all of these weapons. If you don’t want to give them up, you’ll have to come back with us in the car.”

It was just like a scene from an old western film when the sheriff tells the cowboys to turn in their guns, so they don’t try shooting up the town after they have been drinking.

It took him two trips to the car to load up the weapons. When he returned, I had one last question.

“I don’t fancy having to walk back through the streets unarmed, even if it is a friendly area.”

“We already thought that through,” he said. “When you are ready, radio us and we’ll come and collect you.”

“The chief is going to be our taxi as well, how cool is that?”

“I didn’t say the chief would pick you up,” he said, “besides, I don’t think you two should push your luck too far.”

“Sound advice,” I agreed. “You are a scholar and a gentleman - and so is the chief!”

JP Sexton is a former Detective Garda and a native of Donegal. He quit the force in 1995 to work for the United Nations in the former Yugoslavia. He has lived in Northern Virginia since 2000, where he runs his security firm, Sexton Executive Security, Inc. He is the author of a recently finished memoir The Big Yank - Memoir of a Boy Growing Up Irish, and is represented by the Folio Literary Management Agency in Manhattan.