The power was out. Phone lines were dead. Homes were damaged. People were homeless. The elderly needed attention.
The immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago posed seemingly insurmountable challenges, members of a panel looking back at the epochal event said in New Orleans last week. Each person quickly realized it was a time to break the rules to save lives and restore order.
Christopher Cahill, who at the time was head nurse at the Veterans Affairs Hospital emergency room in New Orleans, recalled that medical personnel were confronted with ailing patients who were sweltering in the summer heat and humidity without air conditioning.
Then Dr. Mark Rozans came up with a solution. He had the staff open the emergency room windows and doors, move in fans and pour water onto the floor, which misted in the heat and was blown into the emergency room.
"It felt like air conditioning. It cooled our patients," said Cahill, now the associate chief nurse for acute care at the Veterans Affairs hospital.
Walter Leger Jr., a trial attorney, said he got word that 4,000 to 5,000 people were stranded at the warehouse of the Port of St. Bernard in Chalmette.
Leger got with Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and she concocted a plan to have Leger and others commandeer the Algiers ferries, pick up the people and drop them off at the Algiers Ferry Terminal, where she would have buses waiting.
When Leger walked into the warehouse, he remembered, "I thought I was watching a horror movie. They looked like zombies. They were not talking. They were not crying. They were not yelling. They were just zombies. When we brought those ferries down, and they came outside, and there was a breeze on the river, their spirits lifted. They were saved."
Rene Cross rode out the storm in Lafayette but almost immediately afterward received a call from then-Plaquemines Parish Sheriff Jiff Hingle to return. Cross' construction company had built most of the parish's levees. Two of them had breached, a flyover had shown. But before the levees could be filled in, officials needed to know the depth of the problem.
"I got an airboat from the sheriff's department the next day and probed," Cross said.
Cross' company closed the breaches within two weeks, and that allowed officials to pump out the water inside the parish levee system and open La. 23 to Venice.
Betsy Brien, who handled public relations for the Alliance Refinery outside of Belle Chasse, said her company worked closely with the United Way of Southeast Louisiana and other nonprofits.
"The United Way put together a warehouse," Brien said. "It had everything from baby diapers to food."
Her company and others found undamaged structures in Plaquemines Parish and got donated washers and dryers placed there for people to get clean clothes.
"We needed to get resources out as quickly as we could," she said.
ConocoPhillips, Alliance's owner, hired an 18-wheeler, filled it with fuel and drove it to a gas station on Belle Chasse Highway to power the vehicles of emergency responders.
Another problem cropped up that required immediate attention: Cattle were stranded by water near the refinery.
The solution: Someone fashioned a boom that floated on the water and pulled it toward high ground, knowing that the animals would follow it out.
"We saved all the cattle. There are things like that that are really sweet," said Brien, who now works for an oil company in California.
Benny Rousselle, then the Plaquemines Parish president, faced yet another problem in how to evacuate people from the Belle Chasse auditorium. He had enough buses but ran out of drivers.
"I got on the bus and started asking people with a driver's license if they could drive the bus or try to drive the bus," Rousselle said. "I handed them the keys. We sent the buses out with volunteer drivers. Believe it or not, we got all the buses back."
Timmy Couvillon, whose company, the Couvillon Grou,p is a Belle Chasse-based marine contractor, said he and several Plaquemines Parish officials went to C&C Marine to see if they could find a solution to evacuating people stuck in Chalmette with no way out. If the people could get across the Mississippi River to Belle Chasse, they could be bused out. But the ferry ramps on both sides of the river were now inoperable.
At C&C, Couvillon said, he and the others "commandeered" -- which he said was a better word than "steal" -- a forklift, a cherry picker and crane ramps to jerry-rig ramps that could allow the ferry to rescue the people from Chalmette.
Russel Honoré, then a lieutenant general, remembered pushing his superiors in the Army to let him deploy troops on a rescue mission immediately after the storm, without waiting for the proper sign-offs from any governor or FEMA, after doing a flyover in Mississippi and seeing that the coast there had been destroyed.
"I said we're going to save lives," Honoré recalled. "I don't need a request from no governor to go save American lives. That's our damn job. ... Within a half hour, the word came back: Get that general to New Orleans. They didn't care about the guy who should have been there, who was in San Antonio, waiting on orders. He just followed protocol. You learn from Napoleon the first rule of warfare -- you got to get there. That's how I ended up as the joint task force commander."
Honoré was in New Orleans a day later when he met two guys who had brought 3,000 pounds of meat from Mobile and wanted to cook it up since virtually all restaurants were closed. The food sustained emergency responders and others.
After three days, Honoré learned from one of the men that they were almost out of meat but had another ton in Alabama.
Honoré wasted no time in responding. Three hours later, a helicopter delivered the meat.
"The guy still thinks I walk on water," Honoré said to laughter.