The 400: Technical School Airmen Endure the Storm and Then Stay to Pick Up the Pieces

THE 400

Technical school Airmen endure the storm and then stay to pick up the pieces

STORY BY RANDY ROUGHTON // STAFF SGT. JETTE CARR

21 September 2015

KEESLER AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. — As Hurricane Katrina struck the base, rising waters swallowed parked cars. The base and the 6,000 sheltered military students, permanent party, civilians and their families survived the Category 4 hurricane with no casualties. The initial damage was catastrophic to base infrastructure. The base is currently in the assessment and recovery stage. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Aug. 29, 2005 – Hurricane Katrina reached the coast of Mississippi, bringing with it high winds and widespread flooding.  When the storm dissipated,  it wasn’t calm that settled over the city. Instead, thousands of people were left without homes, with family and friends who had died in the storm or its aftermath, and a long road ahead of them as they tried to come to grips with what they had lost. While people worked to resurrect their city, a large group of Airmen came together to help in whatever manner they could.
Tech. Sgt. Steven Brumley, now the 637th Communications Squadron communications focal point NCO in charge at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, in retrospect, finds it interesting how much of a non-event Hurricane Katrina was to begin with.  The storm wasn’t expected to grow so large, or to have such a devastating effect when it impacted land. Coming from an inland state, Brumley wasn’t sure what to expect when he first heard about the incoming tempest nearly one decade ago.

Courtesy Photo

In September 2005, Brumley was a 17-year-old airman basic who’d just arrived at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, for technical training to become a radio frequency transmission systems Airman. Because he was so new, he hadn’t yet been given the opportunity to visit the surrounding community of Biloxi. Therefore, his memory of the city pre-storm is now relegated to the view he saw from a car window while on his way to his base the first time.
“I can barely remember what it looked like,” Brumley said.  “There was stuff all along the shore – the casinos and whatnot — and it was bright.  I saw it all on the drive in, and then the next time I went off base, there was nothing at all along the shore. It was all gone.”
Just hours before the storm hit, an evacuation/shelter in place notice was given out.  Hundreds of tech school students gathered into crowded rooms at Jones Hall, each finding small spaces on the floor to claim as their home for the next three days.

Courtesy Photo

“It got hot really fast, and you could hear the wind howling outside,” Brumley said.  “I remember wandering the halls, always dodging to get out of someone’s way, eavesdropping on conversations, time dragging by slowly.  Students were congregated by boarded-up exits with phones checking for signals or playing cards, or just talking in groups.”
After the storm had passed, the doors were opened to let in fresh air; however, Airmen weren’t allowed to leave the building until a couple days later. On the first day, people crowded around the door openings to peer out and assess the damage.  Brumley said he didn’t see much from that vantage point, but later, during the cleanup effort, he would get a more startling view of his surroundings.
Once Katrina had finished ripping through Mississippi, those affected began the arduous task of clearing out the debris and mending whatever structures they could.  On the base, 400 students were given the option to stay and help in the effort; all others would be evacuated. Brumley was quick to volunteer.

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“One thing I told myself when I went to basic training was I wanted to ‘make a difference’ in my career,” he said. “I remember the (military training leaders) announcing that everyone would be flying out to Sheppard (AFB), but they needed some students to stay back to help with cleanup.  I really didn’t know a lot about what was going on immediately following the storm. I had no idea what was coming or what to expect.  All I remember thinking was ‘Here’s an opportunity to make a difference,’ and I jumped at it. I’ve still never regretted that decision.”
All remaining 400 students congregated into one building on base.  Each day, they were separated into teams and given an area to begin picking up trash and debris – a common commodity on base after Katrina. The flightline smelled of dead fish after being submerged during the storm, and tree branches blanked the ground.  Brumley said he was grateful to never get tasked with cleanup of the Commissary building, which at one point had been flooded with nearly six feet of water.  He’d heard horror stories about the smell of the place.
On a few occasions, Brumley’s team was able to give aid in the surrounding areas.  During one trip, the students’ driver pointed to a street as they passed.  He let his passengers know that entire families had been found dead in their homes after they tried to ride out Katrina there.  That was the first time the magnitude of the storm hit home for the young airman basic.

Courtesy Photo

“One thing that struck me about the few times I helped clean up off base was the overwhelming feeling that we weren’t making any progress” Brumley said.  “I went out in crews and we would spend all day moving trash into piles, but the destruction felt endless, like we hadn’t even put a scratch on the surface.
Over three weeks, the 400 Airmen worked tirelessly every single day. After that time, classes began again and the technical schoolers’ parts in the recovery effort, for the most part, came to a close.
“The experience has helped me put other things in life into better perspective,” Brumley said.  “You can think about something like Katrina and you realize all the little things you get caught up in are petty and don’t really matter – they’re just distractions.  When something catastrophic happens, you have to focus on the bigger picture.”

KEESLER AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. — Students with the 332nd and 335th Training Squadrons here prepare to be evacuated to Shepard AFB, Texas, aboard a C-17 Globemaster III from the 58th Airlift Squadron, Altus AFB, Okla. Sept. 1. More than 2400 students and non-essential personnel will be evacuated from Keesler because of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Mike Buytas)

Many of the 1,000 technical training students who had to be evacuated around the time of Katrina’s landfall wanted to stay behind to help. Once they returned to Keesler, one of the first questions they asked was how soon they could begin helping in the area recovery effort, said Col. Robert F. Simmons, then the 2nd Air Force director of operations. The account of the students’ evacuation and role in the area’s recovery was told in “Operation Dragon Comeback: Air Education and Training Command’s Response to Hurricane Katrina” by Dr. Bruce A. Ashcroft and Dr. Joseph L. Mason with the Air Education Training Command Office of History and Research.
“Most of these folks had only been in the Air Force for eight weeks,” said then-Chief Master Sgt. Rodney Ellison, AETC command chief master sergeant, when he visited Keesler AFB two days after the storm. “But their sense of commitment and their willingness to stay and do whatever it took to clean up, because they had been through the storm and felt they were abandoning others when they needed help the most — that’s heartening. Because here are people whose biggest concern two or three months ago was who to take to the prom. Now they’re concerned about people they’ve never even met.”
Though 400 non-prior service students stayed to help clear the base of debris, the 81st Training Group initially wanted to keep 800 students, but had to reduce the number to make billeting room for Mississippi National Guard troops after U.S. Northern Command made Keesler an operational staging activity three days after the storm.
“The students played a tremendous role in the recovery effort,” said retired Maj. Gen. Paul Capasso, who took command of the 81st Training Wing about two months after the storm. “From base cleanup to going downtown to help the recovery efforts of the cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, they were literally involved in that every week.
“Probably every day of the week, there were students out and about doing great things for Keesler (AFB) and the community, such as repairing and building houses and picking up debris off the beaches. Recovery covers a lot of things in getting the wing and the community back on their feet, and for the first month or so after the storm, those 400 students had their hands full.”

People continue cleanup efforts here after Hurricane Katrina passed through Aug. 29. Although it did not pass directly over the base, the base sustained more than $765,000 in damage. Maximum winds reached 50 knots. (U.S. Air Force photo by 2nd Lt. Jeremy Cotton)

Katrina may have slowed the wing’s training mission for a while, with officials facing the task of reconstituting more than 100 resident courses that were taught before Katrina, but it was quickly back to its pre-storm footing. By the first anniversary of Katrina in 2006, the 81st Training Group was averaging 3,400 students, a 26 percent increase from the pre-storm average, said then-Col. Deborah Van De Ven, who assumed command of the group a month after Katrina, according to an August 2006 article on the official Air Force website.
The command formed a tiger team to work with the 81st TG staff to deal with training issues and establish priorities to bring up 142 courses determined by Air Staff. After the hurricane, the number of staff members dropped by 10 percent, but the staff augmented the instructor force with people from other bases.
By the time Capasso took command on Nov. 15, almost 2,000 non-prior service students were in training, more than before Katrina. On Aug. 21, the last student whose initial skills training was interrupted by Katrina had returned to finish training, which led Capasso to say, “Today, our training mission is back to 100 percent, thanks to the hard work of our Airmen.”
Capasso retired in 2011 as director of cyberspace operations and network services with the Office of Information Dominance and chief information officer for the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force and is now vice president of strategic programs for a cybersecurity solutions provider in Ashburn, Virginia. But a decade after Katrina, he still has fond memories of the students who played such an integral role in the recovery of the base and the community so early in their Air Force careers.
“The whole story of Katrina is a story of courage, strength and resiliency – people helping people and neighbors helping neighbors,” Capasso said. “It was an eye-awakening experience for all of those new Airmen who had just joined the Air Force during their time (at Keesler).
“Then, a major storm comes through, and they’re out there making a difference to a community that has been devastated. I think the stories they can tell are good teaching moments for all of the folks they met as they got older and more experienced in their Air Force careers. It was a brilliant story of how people, no matter who or where they are, can come together.”

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Hurricane Warning: 53rd WRS aircrews weather dangerous storms to gather data, save lives

STORY BY RANDY ROUGHTON

15 September 2015

The view above Hurricane Katrina. (U.S. Air Force photo)

As the WC-130J Hercules draws closer to a hurricane deep in the Atlantic Ocean, the navigator lines up the crew’s flight plan with the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) information requests. Just for a moment, as the plane approaches the storm, the 20-year Hurricane Hunter veteran’s mind drifts back to a similar mission a decade ago. That storm, Hurricane Katrina, changed the way crewmembers view virtually every storm mission they fly.
“While I’m setting our computer up, it always takes me back to that normal Sunday morning in 2005,” Lt. Col. John Fox said. “We knew it was going to be a bad storm, but like so many other people, I was in the trap of thinking of Camille (a Category 5 hurricane that devastated the Mississippi coast in 1969). Nothing was ever going to be as bad as Camille, but here came Camille’s big sister. Katrina tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, John, you’re not a forecaster.’ The Katrina experience taught us that you never really know what you’re going to see.”
Although each flight is different, during a typical 10-plus-hour mission, each of the five crewmembers stay busy while on their way to the storm, inside the eye of the hurricane, and on the flight back to Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi. On each mission, the crew flies through the hurricane in what they call an alpha pattern, penetrating its eyewall at least four times and collecting valuable data from each quadrant of the storm.
As “the overall boss of the aircraft,” Maj. Sean Cross, the aircraft commander, lets his co-pilot take care of the flying as he monitors the radios and the rest of the crew. While currently in his 14th season as a Hurricane Hunter, Cross has seen more than his share of hurricanes, both from the air and on the ground. Since he joined the squadron in 2001, Cross has made almost 150 “pennies,” a term crewmembers use for flights into the eyes of tropical storms and hurricanes.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew spends their time on pre-storm checklists. They also use the satellite phone — a convenience crews didn’t have onboard in previous years — to talk with another crew on their way back from a previous hurricane mission to get pre-briefed on expected weather conditions. At the same time, they know they could face something different, maybe even considerably more intense, than what the previous crew experienced just a few hours earlier.
Daylight gradually disappears as the plane draws closer to the storm. The crew is relatively quiet as they approach the hurricane’s outer edges.

Air Force graphic // Travis Burcham

“The eyewall’s coming up crew!” Maj. Devon Meister, the pilot, announces as the plane approaches the area of about 200 miles of intense, spinning thunderstorms that whirl around the hurricane’s center. Anyone not already buckled up quickly clicks in their seat belt. The pilots are especially focused because they want to make sharp turns to ensure they reach the exact center of the storm, so they can gather the information they need. Sometimes the first encounter with the eyewall isn’t as violent as the crew might expect, but they know not to take it for granted on subsequent passes through the teeth of the hurricane.
“What you have to be careful of is that you don’t drop your guard on the next pass about 40 minutes later, because this thing is living and growing and spinning counter-clockwise,” Cross said. “The spot you went in is not going to be the same stuff you go through an hour and 40 minutes later.”
Inside the storm, the navigator and weather officer study the radar. The crew doesn’t mind flying through areas in red, but they want to avoid magenta, which usually means heavier rains and turbulence, and flashing white, which would signify severe turbulence.

Loadmaster holding a biodegrable dropsonde.
(U.S. Air Force photo)

As the WC-130J continues through the eyewall, radiometers on the wings gauge wind speed at the ocean’s surface every second. Meanwhile, Master Sgt. Jeff Stack, a loadmaster, watches the screen on his computer monitor while holding a cylindrical capsule in his left hand. He waits for the weather officer to give him the signal to drop the first biodegradable dropsonde that will collect the vital data on the storm as it falls attached to a parachute to the ocean surface.
The dropsonde is one of several weather instruments that measures temperature, pressure, dew point, wind speed and direction inside the hurricane, as well as the surface pressure inside the hurricane’s eye. It can directly measure at several levels in the atmosphere as it descends.
The weather officer is focused on his radar, waiting until the winds reach the maximum peak. He relies on surface wind data from the Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer (SFMR) — which continuously measures the winds at the ocean’s surface directly below the aircraft — to tell him when to give the signal the loadmaster is waiting to hear to release the dropsonde.

Lt. Col. John Gallagher roughly calculates the size of Hurricane Igor’s eyewall onboard a WC-130J Hercules during a mission Sept. 16, 2010, over the Atlantic Ocean. Colonel Gallagher is a flight meteorologist with the Air Force Reserve Command‘s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron at Keesler Air Force Base. Miss. (Photo // Staff Sgt. Michael B. Keller)

During the 2005 season, only a few aircraft had the instrument available, but now each of the 53^rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron airplanes have the SFMR, nicknamed “the Smurf.” This constant measurement of surface winds gives the NHC a considerably more complete picture of the storm and can also determine rainfall rates within a storm system.
“Now we’re able to map the entire surface wind field underneath a hurricane and provide very accurate data on the strongest winds and where they are in the storm,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Talbot, the 53rd WRS chief meteorologist. “The exciting thing about this instrument is you don’t have to rely on visually seeing what the winds are, or just getting a single point sample. You have hundreds and hundreds of samples of what the wind speeds are, and you can see as the storm intensifies or weakens, and that directly relates into the warnings that go out.”
Finally, the SFMR shows the winds at their peak, and the weather officer gives the signal to the loadmaster. A few seconds after the loadmaster releases the dropsonde into a tube through the bottom of the aircraft, it descends attached to a tiny parachute toward the ocean and immediately begins sending data back to the plane on the way to the NHC.
Suddenly, the rain and winds cease, and the sky is now blue above the plane, which is surrounded by magnificently white and puffy clouds — what the crewmembers call “the stadium effect.”

The sun sets as the clouds break after the WC-130J aircraft penetrates Tropical Storm Lee Sept. 2. The 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron “Hurricane Hunters,” were gathering atmospheric data on the storm to send to the National Hurricane Center. The crew flew was flying to Houston to store the aircraft as Tropical Storm Lee was set to bring heavy rain to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss. (Photo // Staff Sgt. Valerie Smock)

“We’re breaking out now,” the pilot announces to the rest of the crew. “We’re in the eye.”
“Turn left 10 degrees,” the weather officer tells the pilot, so the plane can reach the direct center. Once at the spot where the wind readings fall to zero, he tells the loadmaster to drop another dropsonde. The crew can then connect the two coordinates and refine forecasts on the storm’s movement and direction.
Once out of the storm, the crew works on their post-storm checklists and making sure the NHC has all the information retrieved during the mission. Some crewmembers are already thinking about the impact the information will have on weather forecasts and if people in the storm’s path will heed the warnings.
As each hurricane season begins, Cross reflects on the 2005 storms, including one conversation he had with a fellow Gulf Coast resident who had just discovered his house was destroyed. The man covered his mouth with his hand, and Cross tried to comfort him by placing his hand on the man’s shoulder. Cross told him he could rebuild, but was informed the family had no insurance.

The casino resort area of Biloxi, Miss., received significant damage in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which had roared through the area four days earlier, as seen in this Fla. Fish and Wildlife Commission water patrol tour Sep. 2, 2005. Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast with wind gusts in excess of 140 miles per hour, flattened buildings and flooded areas from Florida to Louisiana. Millions of people were left without power and hundreds of thousands homeless. (Photo // Tech. Sgt. Jennifer C. Wallis)

“It’s really hard when you do this years on end, because you know there’s always going to be somebody standing with their hand over their mouth because everything they owned is gone.”
Katrina remains the costliest hurricane in U.S. history and the deadliest since 1928, with more than 1,800 deaths, mostly due to the 30-foot storm surge that breeched the levees in New Orleans and flooded 80 percent of the city. But Katrina was only one of four hurricanes that reached Category 5 status on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale for winds higher than 175 mph. The busiest season on record produced three of the five most intense hurricanes in the past decade, according to NHC data.
Fortunately, this year isn’t forecast to be as devastating as the 2005 hurricane season was — a year that set records for tropical storms and the most major hurricanes to hit the U.S. The Hurricane Hunters remain ready for whatever the season — which continues through Nov. 30 — throws at them.  Less than a dozen 53^rd WRS members remain from a decade ago, when Katrina damaged or destroyed about 30 percent of the homes of squadron members, including Fox’s.

A member of the Calif. Task Force (CATF) 4 out of Oakland, Calif., searches through the rubble of a house in Biloxi, Miss., Sep. 7, 2005. CATF joined the U.S. military and other agencies from around the country to search for missing Biloxi residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast with wind gusts in excess of 140 miles per hour, flattening buildings and flooding areas from Florida to Louisiana. Millions of people were left without power and hundreds of thousands homeless. (Photo // Tech. Sgt. Jennifer C. Wallis)

If he ever needs a reminder not to take a storm for granted, Fox just recalls a flight 1,000 feet above the ravaged Mississippi coast from Houston to Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Georgia, where they flew the rest of their storm missions before returning to Keesler AFB in November.
“Normally, there is some talk and some banter on the aircraft. This was dead silence,” Fox said. “I remember how quiet the airplane was. You were kind of punch-drunk looking at that. In our little part of the world, Katrina was like a house fire that everybody suffered, when you realized what was really important.”
On missions inside the most powerful storms like Katrina, crewmembers often reflect on how the data they gather will affect advisories and warnings that help people on the ground stay safe.
“You just hope that because we risk our lives to get this information out there to help forecast models to put the warnings out there, that people listen and pay attention,” Cross said.

Thick clouds engulf the WC-130J aircraft as it penetrates Hurricane Irene August 27. The flight was a pretty smooth one for the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron “Hurricane Hunters,” who transmitted storm data to the National Hurricane Center for their forecast models. The dropsonde measures air temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and relative humidity. (Photo // Tech. Sgt. Ryan Labadens)

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'Katrina Girl' Found: Pararescueman finally locates girl he saved after Hurricane Katrina

HH-60 Pave Hawk
Photo // Staff Sgt. Jason Robertson

Destruction and heartbreak surrounded the pararescueman, along with the rest of New Orleans, during the first week of September 2005. No matter how many people Staff Sgt. Michael Maroney pulled from rooftops, trees and the flooded waters of the Crescent City, there was no escaping the sickening sights and sounds during those 14-hour days in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That was before he received an enthusiastic embrace from a little pigtailed girl he pulled from waist-level water into his HH-60G Pave Hawk about a week after the hurricane. When Maroney delivered the girl and her family to the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, she leaped up and threw her arms around him. The embrace and the girl’s infectious smile were captured in a photo that later went viral. That moment with the unknown child, who later became known as “Katrina Girl,” changed everything in Maroney’s mind. In late August, after almost a decade of searching, Maroney learned the girl is 13-year-old LeShay Brown, who lives with her mother in Waveland, Mississippi, as first reported by PEOPLE Magazine on Sept. 2. He’s eagerly anticipating a reunion with her and her mother, Shawntrell Brown, in New Orleans in late September, a meeting he calls a “one in a trillion” shot. A friend of LeShay’s sent a copy of the viral photo of that hug, along with another picture in a clipping of a newspaper article published in Tennessee, where the family was sheltered after the rescue, to Maroney’s 13-year-old son, Christopher.

Senior Airmen Talon Leinbaugh, a 66th Rescue Squadron aerial gunner, conducts aerial surveillance in an HH-60G Pave Hawk over the Pacific Ocean during Angel Thunder 2015, June 11, 2015.
Photo // Senior Airman Betty R. Chevalier

“I’m a very optimistic person, but I’m also a realist,” Maroney said. “Things don’t always happen the way you want them to, so I try to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. It was like it was never going to happen. But when I saw the picture, I knew it was her. I’ve been speechless ever since.” Maroney is now a master sergeant assigned to the 308^th Rescue Squadron at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida. However, he’s training future pararescuemen in San Antonio while he works on completing his medical retirement at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. When Katrina struck the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, Maroney was a pararescueman deployed with the 58^th Rescue Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. He had armed himself with Beanie Babies to comfort the children he knew he would encounter in the rescue effort. In a career Mahoney calls the “world devastation tour,” he counts the people he’s rescued at 304, but LeShay stands out above them all, partly because she was about the same age as one of his sons. Once the Pave Hawk delivered LeShay and her family to the airport, they joined many other residents who were displaced by the hurricane and were taken to various locations. Maroney never asked her name, but also never forgot her smile or the unbridled joy she showed in the midst of all of the turmoil and tragedy. Just a couple of months before Katrina, Mahoney returned from a deployment to Afghanistan, where he and his fellow pararescuemen picked up nothing but bodies for 22 days. By the time he’d found the girl’s family, he’d experienced similar emotions as he tried to find people he could save, especially on that particular day. Years later, the little girl stood out in his memory, not only because of the happy ending at the airport, but also because for once, someone Mahoney rescued was able to say express appreciation. Even though hearing those two words isn’t the reason Mahoney faces the dangerous work of a pararescueman, hearing them — especially from the mouth of a child – was particularly meaningful. “Most of the time I drop people off, they’re unconscious,” he said. “They’re blown up or shot, so they’re not really cognizant. She made up for all of the thank-you’s I never got.” Maroney carried LeShay from the ground to the Pave Hawk. As they ascended on the hoist, she pointed out her home and school from the air. Once in the helicopter, LeShay consoled her mother, who was apparently frightened of the helicopter ride, by rubbing her back and telling her, “It’s OK, mom. We’re safe now.” “When we landed at New Orleans International Airport, I picked her up to take her off the Pave Hawk, and she wraps me up in that big hug,” Maroney said. “All of the troubles and problems going on were just melted away.

58th Rescue Squadron pararescuemen perform a 50-foot hoist extraction from a HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter assigned to the 66th Rescue Squadron as part of a search and rescue mission during Operation Angel Thunder 2011 in Tucson, Ariz.
Photo // Staff Sgt. Andy M. Kin

“It could have been five or 10 seconds. But that hug has lasted 10 years now. It was the perfect moment, what I needed to recharge my batteries after seeing New Orleans destroyed and picking up all of those people after all of that destruction. That one gesture from her gave me enough energy to make it through the rest of my time. If I never did anything else the rest of my life, that hug made it worthwhile.” The family returned to New Orleans from the shelter in Tennessee, but moved to Mississippi a few months ago. Both mother and daughter seemed surprised the pararescueman who saved them spent so much of the past decade thinking about them. “I was excited that he was looking for me for such a long time,” LeShay told PEOPLE. “I’ve barely seen any of the pictures!” LeShay doesn’t remember the rescue, although she does recall much about life in the shelter after FEMA moved them to Tennessee. Her mother remembers it all, especially since it was her first helicopter ride, as well as her first trip out of New Orleans. About five years after Katrina, Maroney left active duty for the Reserve after deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that photo of the one memorable rescue in New Orleans remained on the wall in his home. Now that he’s finally found the girl who for about a decade was only known as “Katrina Girl” by much of the country, he’s grateful for many people who helped get the word that finally reached the family’s neighborhood in a small Mississippi town.

NEW ORLEANS — A young Hurricane Katrina survivor hugs her rescuer, Staff Sgt. Mike Maroney, after she was relocated to the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, La., on Sept. 7. Sergeant Maroney is a pararescueman fromm the 58th Rescue Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
Photo // Airman 1st Class Veronica Pierce

“If I can thank everybody who helped look for her, give everybody a hug, say thank you to every single person who helped me, I would do it,” Maroney said. “It blows me away, the outpouring of love and kindness people have given, and shows that it’s not about color, it’s about people. If we can come together in a horrible moment like Katrina, I wonder why we can’t come together now. I hope this picture can show we’re all Americans and can find things that pull us together.” Maroney has had a decade to think about what he would say to her if he were to ever see her again. Finally, he will soon get that chance. When Maroney and his two sons make the eight-and-a-half drive from San Antonio to New Orleans, he plans to show LeShay and her mother some of the many articles and videos that have been produced about them. His main goal is to emphasize how important she has been in his life for the past decade. “(Shawntrell) and her daughter have left an indelible mark engraved on my heart,” he said. “It hurts me to know that people are suffering, but what’s beautiful is they’re fine, they’re happy living their lives and aren’t letting things get to them. There is such strength and resiliency in that family. If I can help them, I really want to help them because they really helped me.”

- See more at: http://airman.dodlive.mil/2015/09/katrina-girl-found/#sthash.STikNHD2.dpuf