Sumner students hear Katrina rescue worker

SULLIVAN – For days after Hurricane Katrina swept through Mississippi and Louisiana, Ross Lane traveled with a search and rescue team that scoured storm-ravaged neighborhoods and used chain saws to cut into the rooftops of flooded homes to look for survivors.

Instead, they found corpses.

“There were quite a few people who didn’t make it,” he said Thursday to a group of Sumner Memorial High School students raising money for hurricane relief.

“It was so time-consuming to go from house to house to house, saw a hole in each roof and see if anyone was there,” he said. “I guess I can’t stress enough the level of devastation these people are facing.”

Ross, a Franklin resident who works as a special agent with the National Marine Fisheries Service, was deployed to the Gulf Coast on Sept. 2. He arrived in Biloxi, Miss., on Sept. 5, about a week after the Category 5 storm hit the region.

His agency, which is the law enforcement branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has a quick response team that is activated in times of national disasters. Lane was called to service during Hurricanes Ivan and Andrew and after the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center.

Waterfront homes in Biloxi were reduced to kindling and swept 15 miles inland when a 30-foot wave rolled through the area.

“Imagine you’re in your house, you’ve chosen not to evacuate, and you’ve got this wave rolling toward you,” Lane said. “There were incredible mounds of everything conceivable – bathtubs, motor homes. For me, it was mind-blowing. These whole communities are gone.”

The search unit to which he was assigned converged on one neighborhood after a Marine pilot spotted messages written on the ground by residents there. The inhabitants had used sheets of damaged roofing to spell out “Help!”

After four days in Biloxi, the group moved into New Orleans, where they encountered more ruined homes and casualties, hundreds of abandoned cats and dogs, and flooding of “the most foul-smelling water I think I’ve ever smelled,” he said.

Lane shared photographs of shredded bluejeans and mattresses hanging in trees, trucks that had been looted and vandalized, homes with the walls peeled away and people waiting on rooftops to be rescued.

Lane said he was encouraged by the students’ desire to help. The teens in French teacher Anne Osborne’s classes have reserved the proceeds from their annual charity drive for Hurricane Katrina relief and have attempted to expand their fundraising effort to include other Down East communities.

In just two weeks’ time, they have collected about $575. A benefit supper is planned from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, at the Sorrento-Sullivan Recreational Center on U.S. Route 1.