By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Picking through a dark, submerged Louisiana funeral home beneath chandeliers resembled a "Titanic" scene.
He battled the elements, an alligator and CNN to recover hundreds of bodies, some of which flowing water carried three miles.
It was an experience colored by moving from a freezing funeral home to a hot tent to Army barracks.
Brad Yazel, 38, a funeral director at Groner Funeral Home and Cremation Service since 2001, deployed for two weeks of recovery and identification work on the battered Gulf Coast of Louisiana with the Great Lakes Region DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team).
He got his first training in 1997 while a funeral director in Cincinnati, but this was his first deployment.
As a team leader, Yazel drove one of two Ford Expeditions which each led a convoy of five vans. "The only demand we made - and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) wasn't very happy about it - you can fit five bodies in a van without stacking. They were under the strong impression we would just stack the vans to the ceiling, then come back. This is a professional organization that takes care of their friends and neighbors and that's not going to happen. We stuck by our guns. I wouldn't pile people on top of each other in Dowagiac, Mich. I'm sure not going to do it in New Orleans, La., Houston, Texas, or anyplace else," Yazel said. "We have more respect for the people we care for than that."
Yazel had been to New Orleans about 15 years ago. "I wasn't all that impressed the first time I was there. It was hot and muggy and Bourbon Street, as I recall, had a particular urine odor to it. I'd like to revisit some of those areas in three or four years. I could understand people breaking into Winn-Dixie to get formula for their babies or diapers or food. That's probably permissible, but I don't understand the other stuff. People stealing DVD players from Best Buy. What are you going to do with it with no electricity?
Yazel's team spray-painted an orange X code on each building checked. "The bottom was the number of dead. The top was the date it was checked. The left was the unit. Over here was whether it was entered and was structurally sound. It wasn't the hurricane which killed these people, it was the flood when they lost the levee.
About 70 percent of their recoveries were identified.
Day 1/Sept. 10
Yazel flew to Memphis from Chicago Midway at 5 a.m., then on to Houston, where he met up with part of his team about 2 p.m. After a FEMA briefing, they boarded buses for a four-hour ride to Baton Rouge. A rear steering tire blew near Whiskey Run, La. They drove the rest of the way in vans which rescued them.
Arriving at Welsh Funeral Home on Florida Boulevard, he was met by dozens of other funeral directors, EMTs and firefighters. He called Welsh home for the next several days. The funeral home had one shower and two toilets for all 47 of them. They slept 12 inches apart on cots and sleeping bags. Air-conditioning felt cold, not comforting.
Day 2/Sept. 11
Their first mission took them to a funeral home in Metairie, La., that sat at the back of a large, above-ground cemetery. Granite crypts - "mini-mausoleums" - go for $60,000, but can accommodate eight to 10 members of an extended family, he learned.
There were about 20 bodies in the preparation room and cremation cooler before the hurricane hit. Water rose too rapidly to nearly seven feet to remove the bodies, so they were left behind.
The preparation room contained a 9-year-old girl shipped in from Florida. He thought of his son, Ian, who is about the same size, as he lifted her into a black vinyl body bag.
The temperature inside was "amazing," and a team member went down with heat stroke. They wore Tyvek haz-mat suits that don't breathe and neoprene waders over their clothes. "Our boots filled up with sweat, not water," in heat that reached 104 degrees by noon.
The cremation cooler at Lake Lawn Memorial Gardens was "a totally different story and one I was not fully prepared for," Yazel recalled. "When we opened the cooler door, the odor was not bad. It was mind-numbing horrendous. I will never forget that smell. My olfactory senses never smelled that before and I pray that I never smell it again."
There were nine bodies inside, stacked on shelves floor to ceiling, and two people on dressing tables. Loaded body vans moved the remains to a waiting refrigerated truck in Letcher, La.
Day 3/Sept. 12
They left Baton Rouge early and convoyed 70 miles to New Orleans.
Their convoy met Georgia state patrol escorts in front of a "busted-up" Blockbuster Video and Subway sandwich shop in a strip mall "that had been looted and then some." Eyeing the few DVDs looters left in the video store, he decided they "must have been really bad movies."
The convention center in devastated downtown New Orleans became their morning meeting place. "This is where we met up with the men of the 82nd Airborne," he said. "These guys were fresh back from Iraq and battle ready. We knew we were safe."
Their first mission was to recover the bodies of 38 people abandoned in the nursing home, which made national news.
Two recoveries stick in his mind. "A man tied to a boulevard light pole looked like he was doing some strange stretching exercise before working out. He had not only fallen victim to the storm, but to roving animals, too."
The other was a man found face down in the front yard of a home in St. Bernard Parish. He was partially mummified on the exposed areas of his ankles, arms and neck. His pockets had been picked through, but three unopened Natural Light beer cans perched between his knees.
Day 4/Sept. 13
They were dispatched to Tulane Medical Center, where 45 dead bodies were reported in the basement, but 10 feet of water still stood in their way.
Finding another man strapped to a power pole in the Elysian Fields neighborhood, they looked up on an overpass to find a CNN crew with its cameras trained on them, "ready to film our every move. I had all the vans circle and block their view so they would not have a shot and the jerks moved further up the bridge to get a better look. Four of us held up body bags while four of us got the man in his bag without having it filmed for the world to see. I wanted to go up to them and ask if it would be okay if I came and filmed one of their loved ones being removed from their place of death and splash it all over the world. I have lost total respect for the mass mediia. A poor man being strapped to a pole and decomposing is not news. It is a tragic end to a life and must be respected. CNN bird-dogged us the rest of the afternoon. The Georgia State Patrol guys really wanted to peel off a couple rounds in their general direction - pretty bad considering CNN is headquartered in Atlanta."
Day 5/Sept. 14
The overcrowded funeral home had two services and two viewings since they moved in. They moved to New Orleans' Camp River Dale with 3,000 regular Army troops.
They changed their routine, marrying up with Orange County, Calif., Urban Search and Rescue Team to search from house to house in St. Bernard, Bywater, Elysian Fields, Magnolia, Algiers and New Orleans.
They guzzled Gatorade and water to combat 103-degree heat.
Day 6/Sept. 15
The Army Corps of Engineers is moving 30 million gallons of contaminated water into the Gulf of Mexico every day that pumping stations operate. "The ecological damage is going to be horrible," Yazel said.
Their new escorts are from the New Mexico State Police.
On their first call they found an elderly couple who apparently perished in their attic trying to escape the rising water.
Day 7/Sept. 16
While recovering six bodies in the water in St. Bernard, one of the 82nd spotted an alligator.
Next came the call Yazel remembers as "ironically weird," a body discovered in a car at the levee.
Day 8/Sept. 17
The day started as any other down there, then "went from bad to worse," Yazel said.
MSgt. Matt Rodriquez stepped on something that caused a piece of glass to flip up and caught him above his boot in the right leg.
Yazel applied pressure to the six-inch gash in his leg as they called for immediate medical evacuation. "Rodriquez was not doing well on the way there, I assume from the high bacterial count in the water."