LEEDS – When Noreen Comeau got the call Labor Day to help those in need after a natural disaster struck, she didn’t hesitate.
She has spent her career helping people, first as a nurse and now as a nurse practitioner at Togus veterans hospital.
“It was my first disaster,” she said Wednesday. “I wasn’t nervous. I was excited to go help.”
She was on a plane to Mississippi the next morning to join the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster medical assistance team working in Hurricane Katrina’s wake.
Two days into her mission after she helped set up a pharmacy, she joined a team from Missouri in Bay St. Louis, Miss., on the Gulf Coast. That team had arrived a week earlier and worked with a Florida team, a mile from where the U.S. Route 90 bridge was wiped out.
They had already helped evacuate Hancock Medical Center, where the first flood was under 4 feet of water by the time Comeau arrived. That floor contained the hospital’s emergency room, the intensive care unit and other strategic operations.
Comeau said she heard on the news before leaving Maine that FEMA wasn’t there.
“They were there,” she said. “The medical teams were there.”
The medical professionals provided care, medical assistance and support to people, but they couldn’t give them money, she said.
They set up a makeshift hospital in tents in the hospital’s parking lot.
Comeau wasn’t prepared for what she saw when she arrived.
When the 45-foot wall of water driven by wind came through the village, it brought debris and sand and wiped out everything, she said.
Buildings had no roofs, windows were gone, houses were missing and there were sand piles nearly as high as a two-story home. She saw where the Route 90 bridge once stood.
“It’s one thing to see it on television and it’s another thing to be standing there and see it gone,” she said.
People came in and told incredible stories. A lot of their medication was gone, she said.
“People coming back not only can’t find their houses, they can’t find the road they lived on because it’s covered in sand. It’s gone,” she said.
Comeau took care of patients as well as staff.
By the time her team left, they had seen 2,785 people in 14 days.
Comeau, who will join the practice of Drs. Stephen Bien, Jeffrey Fuson and Gerald Tinguely in Farmington on Oct. 31, said her team did what it could to help.
“When you’re part of a disaster relief team, you do what you have to,” Comeau said. “If you go down with the attitude I’m a doctor, I’m a nurse practitioner,’ you’re not part of a team. You’ve got to be prepared to do anything that’s asked, from setting up tents to taking down tents.”
If people think of going down independently and not part of team, “forget it,” she said.
“There’s no hotels, no gas, no food, no restaurants and you become part of the problem. In a disaster you have to be self-sufficient. You have to have everything you need with you,” she said.
She said that at the end of her mission, when people were starting to clear out their houses and put destroyed furniture and appliances out on the curb, it reminded her how grateful she was for the people in her life and not the things.
“I saw all those things on the sidewalk when I was leaving,” she said. “I think we put too much emphasis on things. It’s the people and the memories that we have, the connections we make, the human aspect, that are important.”
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