Students at the Frenchburg Job Corps Academy have served in some pretty stressful places while doing relief work, but they had seen nothing like New Orleans' Louis Armstrong International Airport after Hurricane Katrina.
"We rolled into the airport at about 8 o'clock at night on Sept. 3, and there must have been at least 2,000 people just huddled up on the sidewalk out in front," said Job Corps student Kent Bannister.
"They all seemed to be kind of confused and didn't know what was going on. There was a lot of garbage laying around, a lot of people were sick. Everything was just a complete mess, and it kind of smelled a little bit too."
Undeterred by the conditions, the Frenchburg group would spend the next two weeks at the airport, which served as a staging area for the massive Katrina relief effort in New Orleans, as well as a triage site for evacuees who needed medical treatment. During their tour, the students unloaded trucks, cleaned bathrooms and generally helped do whatever was needed to keep the staging area operating.
More than 2,400 patients -- many of them elderly and very ill -- were processed through the Louis Armstrong Airport during the Labor Day weekend. And Lt. Col. Anne Conwell, mission commander for the Air Force's 43rd Air Medical Evacuation Squadron, credited Job Corps students with helping make the system work.
"We couldn't have done it without them," Conwell said in a statement.
Altogether, the Frenchburg center sent five crews to help in the aftermath of Katrina, and one crew of nine students is still on duty in New Orleans. In addition to the Frenchburg students, crews from the Pine Knot and Great Onyx Job Corps centers in Kentucky, plus a center in Coeburn, Va., worked in the Katrina relief effort.
On Friday, some other students from the Frenchburg center were sent to Texas to help out, if needed, in Hurricane Rita.
This is not unusual. Job Corps students, who range in age from about 16 to 24, often are called upon in emergencies. They're frequently dispatched, for example, to help fight forest fires in Eastern Kentucky. In 2003, some Frenchburg students even helped out in recovery efforts following the breakup of the space shuttle Columbia over Texas. Among other things, the students searched through rural areas to recover debris from the spacecraft.
But Frenchburg center director Steve Lenzo says Katrina dwarfed previous student call-ups.
Rosemary Howard, who led the first Frenchburg team sent to the New Orleans airport after the storm, said that shortages and confusion reigned for the first few days.
For example, Bannister and Che Borders were assigned to do carpentry work, building wooden steps to help people getting in and out of vans and trailers and constructing bulletin boards where information could be posted. At first, however, they lacked proper tools.
"For the first day or two we were trying to cut two-by-fours with a sheet rock saw, and that didn't work very well," Borders said.
Everybody had to pitch in, however, because the airport was inundated with evacuees for the first few days, many plucked from rooftops of flooded homes, often sick and in need of treatment. They were checked over, treated when necessary, then placed on planes to be flown to shelters around the U.S.
Frenchburg students unloaded trucks and helicopters, cleaned up trash and helped wherever needed. They worked from 7 in the morning to 10 at night in sweltering conditions.
"You needed to drink a bottle of water at least every 20 minutes," Bannister said.
Their first night at the airport, the students slept on the floor. After that, they were given cots and bedded down in a waiting area on one of the airport concourses.
Meanwhile, three other crews from Frenchburg were assigned to a naval air station in Meridian, Miss., which also was serving as a staging point for hurricane relief. They too did whatever was needed, whether it was unloading trucks of bottled water or keeping the place clean for the relief workers on duty.
"Everything was very contaminated, so you had to keep washing your hands all the time," said Ray Mobley, who worked at Meridian. "We just about lived on sanitary wipes."
There were some tense moments as well.
Jeff Melkulcok, who led one of the teams at Meridian, said that large amounts of supplies were delivered to the base for distribution to various relief points in other areas. But some Meridian residents felt that the supplies should be distributed directly to people in the city. Melkulcok said that led to some friction between residents and officials at the base.
Back at the Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans, the Frenchburg students were excited when President Bush flew in several times to visit during the relief effort. However, they never got to see the president.
"All we ever saw was Air Force One taxiing past," said team leader Howard.
There were compensations, however. The students at the airport ate well, feasting on everything from steaks and pork chops to cookies and ice cream, provided by a private contract company.
In contrast, the students at the naval base in Meridian had to get along on ready-to-eat military meals and mess-hall food.
Nevertheless, many of the students said they'd leap at the chance to go on another relief mission. One of them, Borders, was selected to go to San Antonio on Friday.
Participation in relief efforts is voluntary, but Lenzo says there's usually no shortage of students who want to go. Students earn extra pay while on relief duty, but most of that money goes into savings accounts which individual students can't tap until they graduate from the Job Corps program. The idea is to give each student a cash reserve to meet financial needs when they leave the program, Lenzo said.
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