Life-saving is at the heart of our Service, and was our primary focus during the initial response to Hurricane Katrina. But the Coast Guard’s role went well beyond search and rescue.
The Louisiana and Mississippi region of the Gulf Coast is one of the most important maritime economic areas in the country. It is host to four of the nation’s top 10 ports, and serves as the maritime economic gateway to the nation’s mid-west.
Katrina disrupted this gateway, creating global economic ripples and significantly threatening the heart of the nation’s economy.
So even before Katrina made initial landfall, the Coast Guard was closely coordinating with local vessels and the region’s maritime industry in order to help reduce loss of life and property – as well as avoid environmental impact.
Beyond lifesaving, here are some of the ways the Coast Guard helped the nation recover after Hurricane Katrina.
Maritime Stakeholders
Coast Guard Sector Commanders serve as Captain of the Port for all the ports located within their area of responsibility.
Capt. Frank Paskewich was the New Orleans Sector Commander during Hurricane Katrina, so he and his team paid close attention as the storm developed in the Atlantic Ocean.
On Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005, as the hurricane moved closer to landfall in Louisiana, Capt. Paskewich not only had to take care of his own people and assets – he had to make sure local mariners and industrial stakeholders were taking the storm seriously.
“I got word out to the industry that it’s time for them to hunker down, to take necessary precautions,” Paskewich said. “I told them that by Sunday, if the storm continues on its track, I’ll shut down the entire river to vessel movements and cargo operations.”
Vessels were instructed to head out to sea until the storm passed. Ships unable to do so were ordered to find a safe anchorage and double up their lines.
As the storm bore down on New Orleans Sunday morning, Paskewich closed the Mississippi River from its mouth to Natchez, Mississippi. He also closed the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the ports of New Orleans and Morgan City and “all bridges, floodgates and locks” in the vicinity to all traffic on Sunday.
Restoring Waterways
As Katrina ripped through the region, it impacted 255 miles of the Mississippi River and more than 200 miles of the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway.
The storm swept away over 1,900 – or 80 percent of the aids to navigation (ATON) – below New Orleans. ATONs are essentially road signs for vessels traveling along a waterway. They mark isolated dangers, help vessels follow the channel and avoid running aground, and provide a continuous chain of charted marks that captains rely on to pilot through a waterway. ATONs include buoys, day beacons, lights, lightships, radio beacons and fog signals. Imagine driving to work with 80 percent of your road signs suddenly missing!
As search and rescue transitioned into recover, the desperate need for ATON work began to take precedence. Capt. Frank Paskewich, the Katrina incident manager, said he was under a lot of pressure to open the river and ICW up as soon as possible.
“Even if the waterway was clear, we had a lot of aids to navigation assets go down – so you can’t move big ships in because the ships don’t know where they’re going,” said CAPT Paskewich.
Once the storm passed, he said, “we started doing surveys of the channel with our aids to navigation teams, NOAA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and some of the harbor tug companies in the area who were pre-positioned along the river. We mobilized probably one of the largest assemblages of aids to navigation assets ever undertaken.”
On Sept. 5, Pamlico, Greenbrier, Clamp and two 55-foot ATON boats, the 55114 and 55108, were released to Sector New Orleans and ordered to begin ATON restoration.
With the nation’s grain harvest ready to move from the heartland to New Orleans and then onto the world, restoring waterways was a national priority. And it wasn’t just the ATON that had to be addressed. Hundreds of barges, fishing vessels, and other floating craft were sunk or grounded, with some blocking safe navigation while others had been tossed inland like so many toys.
First, Paskewich focused on restoring the ATONs most critical to getting ships moving.
“We opened up the upper part of the river first because there was no damage and that allowed barge traffic to head up north into the Heartland and from the Heartland down through the Morgan City area,” Paskewich said. “Then we opened up the Inter Coastal Waterway within the city of New Orleans. Then we opened it up for deep draft traffic up-river but that doesn’t do you a whole lot of good if you can’t get out of the river. Then finely on the third or fourth day we opened it up to deep draft traffic.”
Coast Guard members also removed all the vessels and wreckage that impeded vessels’ movement and caused an environmental hazard. The service flew over the region, collaborating with the U.S. Environmental Protection agency to identify the locations of sunken boats, barges and other debris that would need to be addressed in order to get the waterways back to normal.
Remarkably, the Coast Guard opened the Mississippi River to surface traffic within 5 days of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. All of the aids to navigation that were destroyed were rebuilt or replaced within six weeks.
Environmental Safety
There were hundreds of oil spills, including seven “major” and five “medium” spills, totaling over 9.4 million gallons from storage tanks, refineries, pipelines and marine facilities across 130 miles of area waterways. Of the 2068 oil and gas platforms in the Gulf, 52 were reported lost and another 58 were damaged.
To deal with these catastrophes, the Coast Guard established the Maritime Recovery and Restoration Task Force (MRRTF) in Saint Louis, Missouri, to coordinate and oversee the service’s response. Within a little over a month after Katrina and Rita, the Coast Guard completed shoreline and waterway assessments throughout the region. They deployed more than 31,300 feet of boom and recovered more than 3.3 million gallons of oil as well as supervised several controlled oil spill burns.
By December, they resolved 4,225 out of a total of 4,984 pollution cases reported to the Coast Guard and the EPA. They assessed the condition of a total of 504 vessels that were grounded or had been deposited inland to determine if they were discharging fuel. They recovered or disposed of 17,000 hazardous material containers and assessed the condition of more than 200 refineries or processing plants.
The Coast Guard’s efforts to restore the region’s maritime safety and security helped limit Katrina’s impact on the nation’s economy, and helped mitigate damage to the region’s ecosystems.
