SHREVEPORT, LA (KSLA) -
Isaac has taken a huge toll on residents in south Louisiana. But, there's the other side of it, too: The emergency responders. How does it affect them? Nearly two dozen firefighters in northwest Louisiana just traveled down south to help their over-worked counterparts.
That local team consisted of 22 firefighters from various parish departments in this region, to relieve some fire crews who had worked 48 hours straight. When they arrived in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, they saw a real mess.
"The elevated water levels, trees down, power lines down of course there was no power in the cities," described Chief Damon Johnson of Caddo Fire District 6.
Chief Johnson said the group's mission was to relieve exhausted fire crews specifically in St. John Parish. "We got down there, sent their firemen home. Most of them started returning within an hour."
That's despite the fact that those exhausted St. John fire crews hadn't stopped working for days. "We let them still take a break, tried to give them some down time to get them some rest 'cause they'd been going at it for two straight days during the storm," added Johnson.
But just making up the team posed challenges, said Johnson, before heading south to help in storm efforts. "We didn't know which path that storm was taking so you didn't want to leave your own department abandoned. So, we took a little bit from each department to make one big team."
And the extended storm just made the team's job that much tougher. "The storms got intense real quick. You would have blue skies. Twenty minutes later you had a pretty intense band of storms on top of you. So, you had to take shelter and wait until that subsided to go back out," continued Chief Johnson.
After nine hours on the ground in St. John the Baptist Parish, the team of local parish firefighters began the long journey home. And they did so with a newfound sense of comradery with their counterparts down south. "It doesn't make any difference where you come from when you went to a fire station you were a fireman. And everybody treated you well."
That team of 22-local firefighters left at midnight early Thursday (8/30/12) morning and returned almost exactly 24-hours later. They were exhausted, but also glad about returning home with a job well done.
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