JACKSONVILLE Gustav medical evacuees get lift from airmen

By Amy Widner

LITTLE ROCK — As Hurricane Gustav approached the Gulf Coast at the beginning of the month, thousands of evacuees fled while nine C-130 airplanes from Little Rock Air Force Base flew toward danger.

The crews were on a mission to evacuate 171 special-needs and critical-care patients from hospitals in the St. Charles, La., andNew Orleans area. Similar missions occurred last week in advance of Hurricane Ike in Texas.

Capt. Derek Tate has been in the Air Force for 10 years, but the Hurricane Gustav mission was his first time piloting for a hurricane evacuation in the United States. There were 13 people on his plane made up of a combination of flight crew and medical personnel specially trained in medical transportation by air and caring for critical patients.

His medical crew was on the ground and in the air, monitoring about 20 patients’ needs constantly throughout the flight and updating the flight crew. Many of the patients were coming from intensive care units and were being assisted by ventilators and other equipment. This was a situation where the patients came fist, Tate said.

“I was basically like an ambulance driver,” Tate said. “The only thing missing was the lights and siren.”

Tate said the medical staff were the same people who have been taking care of wounded soldiers flying from Afghanistan and Iraq to the military hospital in Germany. He said they excel at what they do, and seeing them in action was “awesome.”

“Just so you can get an idea of how serious these folks are about what they do, as an example, when we were flying in to Oklahoma where we were taking the patients, we were just about to start our descent when the chief medical crewman notified us that one of our patients was having trouble breathing,” Tate said. “He basically said to us, ‘Hey, you guys need to step on the gas.’ And we did. Nothing else matters at that point but getting the plane on the ground and getting the patient in a stable facility. It was cool to be a part of that.”

Tate’s crew was the last C-130 out of the airport that day. They left at about 8 p.m. the evening before the hurricane made landfallthe next morning. Up until about 10 minutes before takeoff the crew thought they were going to be making a return trip to New Orleans, but as the hurricane got closer and more threatening, they found out that plan had been scrapped. Patients from New Orleans were driven to Lake Charles to be flown out in one big trip.

Tate said he has flown into the Lake Charles airport many times before, and when they arrived in town for the evacuation mission it was immediately clearthat Gulf Coast residents had heeded evacuation warnings. The airport’s air-traffic control tower was already shut down. Its staff had evacuated, along with all of the approach controllers and ground service staff.

“It was pretty much a ghost town, except for the military and all of our folks down there helping get people out,” Tate said.

There are other bases with C-130s that are closer to Louisiana, Tate said, but the robust capability needed to handle such a mission is available at LRAFB, where there are more C-130s on the ramp than anywhere else in the world.

- awidner@ arkansasonline.com

Three Rivers, Pages 53, 54 on 09/18/2008