[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 143 (Wednesday, November 2, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Page S12230]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 SUPERB PERFORMANCE OF THE COAST GUARD

  Mr. KENNEDY. The October 31 issue of Time magazine contains a brief 
and extraordinary article about the Coast Guard's brilliant efforts to 
assist the devastated people of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane 
Katrina, when the Federal agencies were so incompetent in their efforts 
to provide relief.
  As one local official noted, the Coast Guard ``was the only Federal 
Agency to provide any significant assistance for a full week after the 
storm.''
  The Coast Guard deserves great credit for its superb performance and 
I ask unanimous consent that this article may be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  [From Time Magazine, Oct. 31, 2005]

                   How The Coast Guard Gets It Right


where did those orange helicopters come from, anyway? the story of the 
                        little agency that could

                           (By Amanda Ripley)

       Wil Milam, 39, is a rescue swimmer for the U.S. Coast Guard 
     in Kodiak, Alaska, which means he spends most of his time 
     jumping out of helicopters to help fishermen who break bones 
     and pilots who crash their private planes. ``We're pretty 
     much the area ambulance service,'' he says. Before he was 
     dispatched to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane 
     Katrina, Milam had never been called out of Alaska for a 
     mission and had never done urban search-and-rescue work. But 
     like thousands of other personnel, he was brought to 
     Louisiana to do what the Coast Guard does best: improvise 
     wildly.
       Milam made his first rescue late one night near a warehouse 
     outside New Orleans. After dropping him into the black miasma 
     below, his helicopter did something he had never seen in his 
     entire 13-year career: it flew away--so that he' could hear 
     the cries for help. He looked around through his night-vision 
     goggles and saw what looked like caskets--in fallen trees, on 
     porches. Yes, they were caskets, dislodged from a nearby 
     cemetery. That night Milam found a man and four dogs and 
     helped hoist them all safely into the helicopter when it 
     returned. The man's pig, however, Milam left behind. ``No way 
     I'm taking a pig. The pig will be O.K.,'' he says. And so it 
     went for 11 days, with Milam experiencing such firsts as 
     flying over a semitrailer sitting on the roof of a house, 
     seeing alligators undulating in the water below and finding 
     himself surrounded by four men with shotguns in a dark, empty 
     hospital. (They were security guards, as it turned out, and 
     just as frightened as he was,) ``I'm like, man, they didn't 
     teach me this in swimmer school.''
       In Katrina's aftermath, the Coast Guard rescued or 
     evacuated more than 33,500 people, six times as many as it 
     saved in all of 2004. The Coast Guard was saving lives before 
     any other, federal agency--despite the fact that almost half 
     the local Coast Guard personnel lost their own homes in the 
     hurricane. In decimated St. Bernard Parish east of New 
     Orleans, Sheriff Jack Stephens says the Coast Guard was the 
     only federal agency to provide any significant assistance for 
     a full week after the storm. Coast Guard personnel helped his 
     deputies commandeer boats and rescue thousands. So last week, 
     when two representatives from the U.S. Government 
     Accountability Office came to ask how he would fix the 
     Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), he had his answer 
     ready: ``I would abolish it,'' he told. them. ``I'd blow up 
     FEMA and ask the Coast Guard what it needs.''
       In one sense, that has. already happened. After the 
     implosion of FEMA director Michael Brown, President George W. 
     Bush placed Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen in charge of 
     the federal response to Katrina. Before Hurricane Rita even 
     hit land, the Administration placed a Coast Guard rear 
     admiral in charge of that recovery. These are essentially 
     urban-planning jobs--not something men and women who spend 
     much of their professional lives on water are exactly trained 
     to do.
       So how is it that an agency that is underfunded and saddled 
     with aging equipment--and about the size of the New York City 
     police department--makes disaster response look like just 
     another job, not a quagmire? How did an organization that, 
     like FEMA, had been subsumed by the soul-killing Department 
     of Homeland Security. (DHS), remain a place where people took 
     risks? And perhaps most important, can any of these traits be 
     bottled?

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