Nevada medical team returns from disaster site

Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005 | 11:12 a.m.

Two nurses and two paramedics from the Las Vegas Valley were at the Louisiana Superdome from the time it was declared a "shelter of last resort," just before Hurricane Katrina came ashore, to the time the last victim was moved out of the trashed stadium.

When they returned home Tuesday night after nine days in New Orleans, the rescue workers said they had witnessed suffering unlike anything they had ever seen.

Nancy Newell stood shouldering her backpack with tears in her eyes as family and friends hugged her at McCarran International Airport.

Newell and her three colleagues are among the 70 members of the Nevada 1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team. Although they were thankful to be home, the four caregivers said their thoughts remained with a Las Vegas Valley doctor whom they had left behind. He stayed because he has the mental health expertise to cope with the trauma unfolding on Gulf Coast, they said.

Together the team had tried to help many of the thousands of victims in the Superdome after the hurricane's fury in the pre-dawn darkness of Aug. 30.

"We were there from Day One," Newell said.

After the storm surge poured filthy floodwaters into the stadium, "it was like fighting a war you couldn't win. People needed so much," she said.

About two hours after the flooding started, looters began firing guns in the streets of New Orleans. Most shots rang out at night.

"I never feared for our lives," Newell said. "The people around us were in the same boat, so to speak, as we were in."

People without food, without water, without clean clothes became desperate.

"Imagine how you would feel if you had lost everything," said Newell, who works at Cardiovascular Consultants of Nevada.

Many of the people who poured into the Superdome carried children in their weary arms. Many begged for help finding a son, a wife, a daughter.

"We became their family," she said.

Babies were born inside and outside the Superdome, said Karen Strutynski, a volunteer with the Clark County Fire Department and with Metro Police's Search & Rescue Unit.

Strutynski said her five-member team had trained on helicopters a day before they left for the Gulf Coast.

"Two days later, we used the training," she said.

Strutynski said she flew in darkness across the pitch-black Big Easy and saw hundreds of moving lights below.

"There were hundreds and hundreds of people waving flashlights on their rooftops as we flew over them," she said.

The Nevada medical team ran out of food and water before they left the Superdome Thursday.

There was no dry surface, no resting place. Toilets overflowed.

"You went where you could find a place to squat," Strutynski said.

A 30-year veteran volunteering for the American Red Cross, Strutynski said that as military helicopters unloaded food, water and supplies for those in the Superdome, the Nevada team prepared and loaded patients onto the empty choppers.

"I have never seen anything like this before," she said of the human suffering.

The Nevada 1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team members stayed at the Superdome until the last person was placed on a helicopter.

"When they were all gone, I cried," Strutynski said.

For Melody Reid, a registered nurse, miracles occurred often, every time a doctor or a nurse pulled from the fetid floodwaters an unconscious baby who had slipped out of someone's weary arms, for example.

"Thirty minutes later they've got a strong grip and you know they're going to be all right," Reid said.

Reid's 11-year-old son, Zach, hugged his mother as she cried into his hair. He had started his first day at middle school on the day after she left, Reid said.

Nevada 1 team chaplain Jim Coyle said for the next few days he would counsel the members individually and as a group.

"First of all, we're glad they're all back safely," he said.

Coyle said he expected the medical staff to be "pretty fatigued" after the ordeal.

"This one is pretty tragic, because they ran into another obstacle -- human nature. It was kind of a war zone," he said.

Newell said the team's families suffered as much as those at the disaster site.

"My people were in the worst of the worst," she said. Yet the courage and the cooperation between rescuers and victims shines in Newell's memory.

"People decided to stay and stay longer," she said of other rescuers remaining in New Orleans.

As for her team, members are already planning to return to the stricken area in a couple of weeks.

The team is looking for volunteers from local doctors and nurses. Those who wish to join the NV-1 DMAT team can call 263-7778 for more information.

"We're a small team, but we're mighty. We put Nevada on the map," Newell said.