On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history, brought the Coast Guard into unprecedented rescue, recovery, and coordination roles. Crews rescued over 33,000 people and nearly one-third of the Coast Guard’s fleet was dedicated to the response.
From evacuating stranded survivors to reopening critical waterways, the Coast Guard (USCG) performed heroically, but the widespread disaster exposed operational limitations that soon served as lessons learned. 20 years after Hurricane Katrina, the Coast Guard has undergone sweeping changes in readiness, technology, and interagency collaboration.
Operating in an Urban Environment
The Coast Guard’s standard search and rescue (SAR) tactics were suddenly inadequate as rescue teams faced debris-filled flood waters and rooftop rescues. Members had to improvise in real time.
Coxswains navigated “johnboats,” aluminum hulled vessels, through flooded city streets with cars and other debris often lying unseen just below the surface. Unpredictable water levels often grounded the boats, forcing crews to wade into shallow, polluted waters – under a blazing sun – in order to carry the heavy vessels until they reached deeper water. Heat exhaustion was an ever-present concern. After Katrina, the Coast Guard introduced lighter, inflatable boats that were far easier to carry when necessary.
Katrina also revealed the need for tools not typically carried by aircrews. To escape the rising water, many New Orleans residents raced up to their attics, where they found themselves trapped. One of the most gripping and well-documented rescues was when Aviation Survival Technician 2nd Class Joel Sayers responded to a woman on her home’s roof – her husband wasn’t able to fit through a hole and she had to leave him behind.
As Coast Guard Aviation History wrote, “After several failed attempts to widen the hole and free the man using the helicopter’s crash ax, Sayers knew he needed something with more weight and strength if he was to save the man trapped inside.”
Sayers borrowed an ax from a local fireman and returned for the husband, widening the hole and rescuing him.
Word quickly spread. Coast Guard rescue swimmers started asking firemen for their axes when they landed to offload their rescued passengers. And as they came back to the station, crews reported all this up their chain of command.
“The extraordinary thing about it was that we realized, ‘Hey, we’re in a new ballgame here. We’re going to have to change our tactics,’ said Capt. David Callahan, who was in command at Aviation Training Center (ATC) Mobile, in an interview a few weeks into the response. “And I’m not sure who it was, I think it was the XO [Executive Officer], ordered folks to go out to Home Depot and that night we bought every wood ax and saw. . .we could find and started outfitting our rescue swimmers with those to adapt to this new urban rescue environment that we were in. So I may go to jail for buying all those axes and saws, but I don’t think so.”
“We bought every wood ax and saw we could find”
“We found out the first night out there that people were being trapped in their attics and we had no way to get into those attics,” CAPT Callahan said. “So we had crews out there who adapted on-scene by borrowing fire axes from fire trucks and by using crash axes to cut through rooftops from the aircraft. And the extraordinary thing about it was that we realized coming back that night that, ‘Hey, we’re in a new ballgame here. We’re going to have to change our tactics,’ and we did. And I’m not sure who it was, I think it was the XO [Executive Officer], ordered folks to go out to Home Depot and that night we bought every wood ax and saw. . .we could find and started outfitting our rescue swimmers with those to adapt to this new urban rescue environment that we were in. So I may go to jail for buying all those axes and saws but I don’t think so.” Trust within the chain of command in both directions and a willingness to do whatever was necessary to save those in need in an unfamiliar and dangerous environment was a critical aspect of the success of the Coast Guard’s response.
Hardships like these tested Coast Guard crews in new ways. They also drove a remarkable transformation of the service’s SAR training. After Katrina, the service developed simulations so members could learn how to do SAR in flooded urban environments. Members now practice navigating through debris-heavy environments and building rooftop extractions under controlled but realistic conditions.
Coordination Complications in Search and Rescue
The scale of Katrina’s devastation posed an overwhelming challenge not only for the Coast Guard, but for all first responders. High winds and floodwaters crippled the Gulf Coast’s communications network. Critical infrastructure was destroyed, radio towers were toppled and phone lines were completely severed. Quick action by Coast Guard personnel and pivotal support from Coast Guard Auxiliarists kept operations running as they sourced satellite phones and portable radios to maintain what comms they could.
However, interagency coordination proved far more difficult. Multiple organizations launched overlapping rescue operations, with the Coast Guard and Louisiana National Guard each running separate search and rescue command centers in New Orleans. Further complicating matters, the National Response Plan and the National Search and Rescue Plan were not fully aligned, resulting in inconsistent guidance and occasional duplication of effort. The failed collaboration between agencies emphasized the need for integrated emergency planning well before disaster strikes.
The Lessons Learned report from the White House wrote, “During the Federal response to Katrina, four critical flaws in our national preparedness became evident: Our processes for unified management of the national response; command and control structures within the Federal government; knowledge of our preparedness plans; and regional planning and coordination.”
Improving Communications and Personnel Tracking
The storm also revealed gaps in personnel tracking. After the storm passed through the region, leaders had trouble recalling staff who had evacuated out of the danger zone. The Coast Guard needed a far more robust system to track personnel’s location and then quickly deploy them into disaster zones—a push toward becoming more “expeditionary” in posture. This realization led to the establishment of the Coast Guard Personnel Accountability Assessment System (CGPAAS). CGPAAS is a system of record for personnel accountability, providing an automated means to reach all members simultaneously and report on their status.
Katrina also made the Coast Guard confront the limitations of its communications infrastructure. The service now uses the Rescue 21 system to make sure rescue crews can maintain contact even when local networks are destroyed. Satellite communications kits and portable command centers are also now pre-positioned for rapid deployment to disaster zones.
Revising ICS
Katrina response required an immediate surge of personnel and equipment into the disaster zone, specifically personnel with Incident Command System (ICS) qualifications. The challenge? Doing so without hollowing out homeport operations across the country. Before Katrina, the nation’s emergency responders had developed the Incident Command System (ICS) to organize the efforts of multiple agencies under a single organizational structure during a disaster. But few people responding to Katrina had gone through ICS training. Since 2005, the Coast Guard has invested considerable time training members on ICS, updating the qualification standards and establishing a Training Management Tool (TMT) to track members with ICS qualifications. The changes ensure that leaders can quickly identify staffing and training needs when people report to a disaster.
Emergency Management Reform
The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 clarified the Coast Guard’s roles (search and rescue, port reopening, pollution response, logistics) during disasters. The Response Act also gave the Coast Guard the authority to preposition assets for faster responses. When Hurricane Milton threatened the Gulf Coast last year, the Coast Guard quickly identified and staged available assets well ahead of impact.
LCDR Brian Dykens, a current Coast Guard interagency liaison, says the relationship between the agencies is built to be proactive: “We can deploy members to regional response coordination centers to ensure resources get to the disaster areas as soon as there is a need.”
The Act reshaped the Coast Guard by tying its missions into the nation’s capability-based planning system. Coast Guard units began participating in national-level exercises with federal, DoD, and state responders, aligning with the National Preparedness Goal and setting clearer readiness benchmarks.
What started with rooftop-rescue training after Katrina evolved into a broader shift in how the service prepares and operates. Moving beyond improvisation, the Coast Guard now emphasizes integration, readiness, and interoperability with federal, state and tribal partners. LCDR Brian Dykens emphasized, “Emergency management is always changing, no disaster is ever the same, so it’s important to take the lessons learned and build on that to become better responders.”
Looking to the Future
Looking forward, the Coast Guard continues to adapt its Urban Search and Rescue capabilities to meet the demands of increasingly frequent and severe weather events. Future operations will likely leverage unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for rapid damage assessment and take advantage of the service’s modular, rapidly deployable rescue teams.
The Coast Guard’s success in saving lives during Katrina wasn’t the product of luck – instead, it was the result of a culture of readiness, improvisation under pressure, and an unyielding commitment to the mission. Yet, the lessons learned show that preparation is a living process, one that demands constant adaptation to meet the next storm head-on.
