One Year Later

The bodies sprawled in the mud or hung unnaturally in trees.

Wyatt Burks saw them—dozens of them, hundreds of them—the tragic reside of a catastrophe unlike any other in US history. In moments, it seemed, Hurricane Katrina had transformed New Orleans from the ultimate party town into a hellish otherworld of sunken homes and ruined dreams.

Even the dust was toxic. Contact with it caused rashes and respiratory infections. The water was worse, a vast cauldron of sewage, oil, chemicals and decaying matter.

Among the survivors still living in the ruined parts of the city were gunmen, some of whom fired on Burks and his teammates as they went about their grim task of recovering and identifying the dead.

"The smell—it was horrendous," said Burks, 53, an Oklahoma City fire major who spent sixty-two days in Louisiana last year as a member a federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. "The smell was bad. Conditions were horrible. It was hot, humid. But there was a job to do, and we did it."

Giving aid in troubled times

The situation on the Gulf Coast posed a logistical nightmare.

Evacuees were fleeing. Roads were clogged. The ocean surge had erased portions of New Orleans and thousands were trapped inside the city, suffering without electricity, sufficient food and clean water.

Someone needed to tend to the dead.

That's where Burks and his colleagues came in. The disaster response team helps local officials overwhelmed by disasters identify victims and provides mortuary services, Burks said. They track down bodies, take them to mobile or temporary morgues, identify them with and arrange for burial.

"We've got medical examiners, coroners, dentists, anthropologists, morticians, police officers that do fingerprint work, pathologists and doctors," Burks said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has ten regional disaster teams across the country and about 1,200 volunteer team members. About 1,000 helped out on the Gulf Coast between late August and early March, according the National Disaster Medical System.

Burks, as part of the mortuary response tem, was on of the regional team volunteers. A team member since 1996, Burks signed on with the Region 6 team after working with FEMA following the Oklahoma City bombing. By the time Katrina blew in, he'd already spent more than twenty-seven years on the fire department's dive team, helping recover drowning victims.

He'd see far too many of those in New Orleans.

Helicopters provide protection

The hurricane struck Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005. Burks' team reached the state about a day later.

At first, they could not venture far into New Orleans; FEMA didn't want anyone touching the contaminated water. Burks' team set up a "collection site" on a stretch of highway that sunk down into water, and the dead found them—brought to the site by people in all kinds of water crafts.

The bodies were carefully placed—not stacked—in refrigerated trailers and taken to a morgue, where technicians identified them, Burks said.

As the water receded, Burks' team moved further into the city encountering in-tack homes that had floated off their foundations and caskets swept from their graves. The team was accompanied by Federal Protective Service agents armed with machine guns, and at times, their presence was needed.

Once, Burks said, the guards had a minor confrontation with some inebriated New Orleans residents. Another time, the team came under fire from would-be snipers.

"The FPS (Federal Protective Service) has some type of helicopter," Burks said. "I don't know what it is, but it was huge. In less than a minute . . . there were Cobras, Black Hawks. It looked like a swarm. They were everywhere. And every helicopter had snipers in them. You could see them hanging out."

In the end, the situation was resolved quietly. Thermal imagers located the shooters on the second floor of a house, Burks said, and Navy SEALs seized them.

But the tension only made a difficult job even harder. Bodies turned up in yards, attics, streets, trees, nursing homes, and hospitals. Burial vaults had collapsed or been damaged.

And Burks was about to lose four people...