Narrative

08/29/2005  0700 AM - Hurricane Katrina makes landfall as a Catagory 4 storm with 145 Mph winds.

08/29/2005  0800 AM - First reports of levee failures in New Orleans. By mid-day 80% of New Orleans is flooded or flooding.

08/30/2005  1500 PM - The first of several   American Ambulance Association Member Alerts is received. AAA activates an 800 number to poll companies to ascertain the availability of resources and to answer questions. No activation of resources was requested at this time.

08/31/2005  0800 AM - Throughout the night AAA leadership has been in contact with disaster response officials. Specific information regarding individual company capabilites is requested. Still no resources are activated. This request is repeated at 1245 PM. Care Ambulance Operations begins preparations by gathering strike team supplies and polling employee resources for a possible response.

09/01/2005  1800 PM - Care Ambulance receieves a request to deploy available resources to the Katrina relief effort.  7 BLS ambulances and a supervisor team leave for Lafeyette. They will be reporting to Acadian Ambulance Service disaster coordinators. The strike team drives straight through and arrives in Lafeyette 27 hours later. Crews take a brief nap and are then put to work.

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Over the course of the next 7 days, Care Ambulance crews go on a variety of missions thoughout the disaster area. Some CARE crews are paired with Acadian ALS crew members in order to expand the availability of ALS resources. These teams then went on 72 hour missions providing immediate ALS services to communites that were left without any EMS resources after Katrina hit..

Other CARE strike teams responded directly into the city of New Orleans and helped transport patients from the Superdome to the New Orleans airport for evacuation. 

09/09/2005  0800 AM - All Care Ambulance resources are deactivated and all Care resources head back to Orange County..

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