By Daily Press staff
Brant Looney is still absorbing it.
Less than a week after returning from Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, having served a 32-day stint as a member of the first National Guard unit deployed to the disaster area, Looney has memories to sort out.
“The smell was the worst — you just wanted to gag,” said Looney, a systems administrator at Santa Monica College. Dead bodies and animals, raw sewage, chemicals from vehicles, and food left to rot all combined to form, “a gumbo.”
Looney was deployed to New Orleans on Aug. 29, just days after Katrina struck, as part of the National Guard’s 18th Cavalry. His unit of approximately 500 guardsmen and women was the first to be sent to the area, and their job was security.
Duties included security patrols, checkpoints, assessments of downed power lines as well as checks on gas and water lines, animal rescues, and damage assessment. Headquartered at a middle school at the edge of the floodwaters with no power and water, the guardsmen worked 16 hours a day, every day, for 32 days.
“Between the humidity and heat, there were a lot of sleepless nights, but we were so busy we didn’t even have time to think about it,” Looney said.
Working in a 50-square-mile area, Looney and his fellow guardsmen would patrol in boats and on foot. Among other duties, they helped the New Orleans police officers — stretched thin — to stop looting and crime.
Looney said he saw a few floating bodies, but federal authorities had ordered that bodies be left where they were, tied to a tree or some stationery object so they could be recovered by the local coroner’s office after the flood waters receded.
Looney, who has worked at SMC’s Academy of Entertainment & Technology for eight years, is a corporal in the National Guard, having served about half of his six-year stint. This was the first time he was called up to active duty. In-depth hearing of the Beatles
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 14, 2005. Read the original PDF.