Oral Histories

Preparing for and Responding to Hurricane Katrina

Here is a list of all the Katrina related oral histories featured as part of the 20th anniversary of the Coast Guard’s response to the effort.  Visit each interview for full length audio, abstracts, and transcripts

CAPT Frank Paskewich, USCG

“Captain, we need to talk. You need to see the latest trajectory. Hurricane Katrina is coming off of Florida and the revised trajectory shows that it’s going to impact Louisiana.” At that point, I had to change plans for the crew and cancel that liberty. We immediately implemented our hurricane plan. From that point on it was ready, set, go.

Read the full interview: CAPT Frank Paskewich, USCG

BM2 Ronald Mancuso, USCG

“While we were evacuating all these people, everybody that was a part of this flotilla didn’t know how their house made out and their families. Some people were still worried about their families so that was the most challenging thing that we had. At the end of the day we were just kind of venting to each other and that kind of helped us out a lot because we’re here helping and that’s our job and that’s our mission, and we felt really great at the end of the day but then it started hitting you, well you know we may not even have a home to go home to.”

Read the full interview: BM2 Ronald Mancuso, USCG

CAPT Bruce Jones, USCG

“Immediately upon making a right hand turn to the south over Lakefront Airport, I observed for the first time all of East New Orleans under water, up to one-story rooftops. As we slowed to view the damage, we began to see persons waving for assistance from rooftops in all directions.  We quickly prepared our SAR gear for hoisting.  We attempted to triage informally by looking for children, elderly people or those whose situation appeared more precarious.”

Read the full interview: CAPT Bruce Jones, USCG

CAPT David R. Callahan, USCG

“People realized how big this was going to be, and Atlantic Area Command started channeling forces into ATC Mobile. We shut off the training and turned our instructors into operators. They knew what had to be done and they started doing it. We very quickly became the forward operating base for the entire Coast Guard. At times we had over 40 aircraft and over 1,500 personnel working out of here, which is unprecedented.”

Read the full interview: CAPT David R. Callahan, USCG

EM2 Rodney Gordon, USCG

AIRSTA New Orleans had been heavily damaged. To get the power back on, CAPT Jones turned to EM2 Rodney Gordon. The Navy’s nearby fuel farm also lost power – a major issue, since it provided fuel for all of the National Guard, Air Force, Air Guard, Coast Guard, Navy/Marine Corps, Army Reserve units at the base. “It was Petty Office Rodney Gordon from the U.S. Coast Guard who went over and got that thing working again,” CAPT Jones said, “thereby providing fuel to hundreds of aircraft over the next week.”

Read the full interview: EM2 Rodney Gordon, USCG

AST3 Lawrence Nettles, USCG

Before Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, we were just running around with our heads cut off. Everyone at the station was just packaging and boxing anything and everything that we could and tying it down, and at home I grabbed all my personal stuff. We took our cats to Baton Rouge to my wife’s parent’s house and then I went back to base and flew to Lake Charles and my wife went to Tulane Hospital. She was going to ride out the storm there and I was going to be on the ready crew. Everyone said that the West Bank would flood before anything else, so I left the house pretty much accepting the fact that I was going to lose everything. 

Read the full interview: AST3 Lawrence Nettles, USCG

Hurricane Katrina: Storm of a Lifetime

Twenty years ago, the U.S. Coast Guard demonstrated its enduring role as America’s maritime first responder.  The disaster tested the strength of survivors, responders and the very fabric of our nation. This historical multimedia project is dedicated to those responders’ devotion to duty, courage, humanity, and most of all their selflessness during and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.