01:00 AM EST on Sunday, December 4, 2005

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- First responders from Rhode Island described yesterday the utter devastation they found in coastal Mississippi and Louisiana in the days following Hurricane Katrina three months ago.

In a colloquium, "Katrina: From Disaster to Renewal," hosted by Brown University, they also recommended how to avoid weaknesses exposed after the disaster.

Curt Varone, a deputy assistant chief for the Providence Fire Department and team leader for the state's Urban Search and Rescue Team, led a two-week mission to the Gulfport, Miss., area in mid-September. The team found a brown and dying coast, waterfront houses tossed 1,000 feet inland, and acres of debris -- sheetrock, muck, refrigerators and cars -- jumbled together in areas where neighborhoods once stood. In these debris fields, enduring 105-degree heat, Varone's team and a canine unit searched for the bodies of the missing.

"Basically the infrastructure of Hancock County [where Gulfport is situated] was destroyed," Varone told an audience of about 100 people who attended the daylong public colloquium. "The police station, fire station, hospital, Town Hall, bridges -- everything was gone. There was no electricity, water or sewer." Out of 8,000 houses in the county, only 6 were not destroyed by the hurricane, Varone said.

David Sayles, chief of the Westerly Fire Department and head of a state decontamination team, led a similar two-week mission in Louisiana. His unit, which is trained to handle biological, chemical and radiological hazardous materials, was charged with decontaminating the Louisiana and federal emergency responders in the disaster zone, who returned to their camp each night covered in several inches of muck.

"It can only be described as a petri dish," Sayles said. "It was a mixture of crude oil, sewage, mud and dead and decaying flesh."

The Rhode Island team also had to recover decomposing bodies, including 24 bodies at St. Rita's nursing home.

"It was devastating to my men to experience that level of death," Sayles said.

Richard Gould, an anthropology professor at Brown, assisted the federal Disaster Mortuary Operations Recover team with victim identifications and recoveries in Mississippi and Louisiana. Gould used information from multiple sources: DNA, dental records, pathology and radiology reports, to identify the dead.

"In this case, there wasn't much medical or hospital information available, so we really had to rely on information from the families to identify people," Gould said. He also helped to recover bodies from Memorial Hospital in the St. Charles neighborhood of New Orleans.

Most of what Gould saw, he said, he could not talk about. The best part of his experience was meeting the response teams from Louisiana.

"I worked with teams who had lost everything, their homes, their businesses. . . . Many of them had lost their families," Gould said. "I just couldn't imagine how they found the strength. They were totally professional."

For future disasters, response should be even swifter, Sayles said. In addition, more local and federal support is needed to bolster and train first-responder teams -- such as urban search and rescue, decontamination and mass casualty.

The biggest problem with Katrina was the lack of coordination among layers of bureaucracies, along with the ineffectiveness of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Sayles and Varone said.

"FEMA was overwhelmed by the magnitude of this event. The nation was not prepared," Sayles said. Instead of teamwork, his unit found infighting among the various groups and agencies that were there to help.

Other speakers at the colloquium included: Peter Kovacs and Stephanie Grace, both Brown graduates and now managing editor and columnist, respectively, for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Brown President Ruth Simmons and Marvalene Hughes, president of Simmons' alma mater, Dillard University in New Orleans, spoke about the challenges facing Gulf-coast colleges and universities affected by Katrina. Simmons has pledged to help Dillard rebuild and move forward.

More information about the event can be found at: www.brown.edu/web/katrina