The Game Wardens Who Pulled 21,000 People Out of Katrina

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is the agency whose officers check hunting and fishing licenses. In August 2005, its enforcement agents, the state's game wardens, became one of the first search-and-rescue teams to reach flooded New Orleans, and the department later told the Senate its crews had rescued an estimated 21,000 people.

Waiting Out the Storm

Before Katrina made landfall, the department alerted its people and staged boats and vehicles near Baton Rouge and in central Louisiana. Its enforcement chief told the Senate that agents "had to wait for landfall and passage" of the hurricane before moving.

By 9 a.m. on Monday, August 29, 2005, the response teams were gathering in Baton Rouge. By 1 p.m., they were on the road to New Orleans. The initial group was made up of 120 agents, with boats and four-wheel-drive vehicles. Sen. Joe Lieberman later told the same hearing that the department brought 60 boats to the city from its staging areas around the state. Boat counts vary by account: an oral history in the Historic New Orleans Collection recalls about 120 boats in tow, so no single figure is firm.

Into the Water by Dark

The teams reached New Orleans at about 4 p.m. Before that, agents had already started evacuating a nursing home in the Power Boulevard area of Kenner.

In the city, they put boats in the water in New Orleans East, at the St. Claude Avenue Bridge, Esplanade, Elysian Fields, Franklin Avenue and St. Bernard Avenue, all by dark. By then floodwater from failed levees had spread across the city; the National Weather Service later put at least 80 percent of New Orleans underwater by August 31.

The people they found were on rooftops, in attics and on makeshift boats floating through the neighborhoods. Many were elderly, sick or injured. The agents worked through the night in streets with no lighting, debris, downed power lines and water as deep as 15 feet in places.

By daybreak on Tuesday, August 30, the department estimated that nearly 2,000 people had been moved to safety on the elevated stretches of I-10 and I-610.

Help From Nine Other States

By midmorning Tuesday, more enforcement agents and department biologists, technicians and specialists joined the effort. In the following days, conservation officers arrived from Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said its first team of 53 game wardens crossed into Louisiana on August 30 with 50 boats and 52 vehicles, and that on September 1 the team rescued 1,500 patients from Charity Hospital. Texas legislative resolutions later credited its wardens with 4,940 rescues in New Orleans.

The Number They Gave the Senate

In January 2006, the department's enforcement officials testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The agency's own estimate was that Wildlife and Fisheries rescued about 21,000 people. It is the department's estimate, not an audited tally, and no independent count of the figure was found. The same testimony put the rescue total across New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, from all agencies, at about 60,000.