Due to the amount of destruction caused by Wednesday’s deadly tornado, fire departments from New Orleans, Shreveport, Monroe, Jefferson Parrish, Bossier, Baton Rouge and East Baton Rouge have partnered with the Tuscaloosa Fire Department as part of the Urban Search and Rescue.
“We are appreciative to give back to the people after so many people gave aid to the State of Louisiana when we needed it after Hurricane Katrina,” said Paul Martory, Deputy Search Manager of the New Orleans Fire Department.
Since the search efforts began, firemen from the Tuscaloosa Fire Department have been working 48 hours every three days, eight hours more than the typical 40 hour work week for an average citizen.
“This is their city,” Martory said. “We are just here to assist them by providing the resources, specifically manpower, they don’t have.”
During a mission on Wednesday, two cadaver dogs alerted a search and rescue team that they found a body at Chastain Manor Apartments, an active senior living community. But after an extensive search, no bodies were found.
“It’s rough when you come up empty handed, but its part of it,” Sam Liggin of the Monroe Fire Department said as he began searching for bodies in the nearby woods, where two bodies were found just days ago.
“It has been seven days since the tornado,” Liggin said. “It’s sad but now we have to go off the smell the bodies put out.”
With the sound of fire alarms still ringing in the background, Lane Company Property Manager Merri Thorn explained how she made it out of her Chastain Manor office just 35 minutes before the roof collapsed.
“It looks like a bomb went off,” Thorn said. She compared the destruction she has seen to the images of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is the worst thing I have seen in my life,” she said. “The pictures on TV don’t do it justice; you have to see it for yourself to believe it.”
Wayne Farmer was on the construction crew that built Chastain Manor just five years ago and is now the complex’s maintenance manager.
“I was here when it went up and now I was here when it went down,” Farmer said.
Farmer has been standing guard for looters and helping returning residents collect what clothes, medicine and pictures may be left.
“I’m here from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. just doing what I can,” he said.
Fire Chief Thomas Stone of the St. Bernard Parish Fire Department, the liaison between the Tuscaloosa Fire Department and the fire departments from Louisiana, commended the city of Tuscaloosa and its fire department.
“They are really doing an excellent job,” he said.
