Bear Grease - Ep. 262: This Country Life - The Hurricane

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

A work trip to southern Louisiana forced Brent to break a promise he’d made to himself many years ago. After his experiences during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he’d never thought of returning as a tourist. A recent fishing trip helped turn a broken promise into a journey of healing and rediscovery. This one’s a little different but the message has never been more important.  Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Nives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. The Hurricane. We're deviating from the format this week for something that I believe is more important. I'm still going to tell you a story, but that story is just about going to take up the whole episode. It's something that means a great deal to me and something that more or less came full circle

after my job made me break a promise to myself from nearly 20 years ago. Parents talk about some things here that might have the little ones asking questions. Nothing graphic. Y'all know me better than that. But it may bring up some questions, especially for our listeners that have been affected one way or another from Hurricane Helene. But that said, let's get to it.

When I left New Orleans 19 years ago, I swore I'd never go back. It had been my first trip to a place I'd only heard about prior to my arrival and was a destination I'd intended on traveling to one day. After all, the food New Orleans is famous for is my favorite, and in many respects, very similar to what I'd grown up eating myself. The folks there always seem to be having a good time and good food and good times are what I've always been about. And not necessarily in that order, but this was different. And my being there had nothing to do with food or fun.

Hurricane Katrina had ravaged Louisiana and a lot of the Gulf Coast and Mississippi. It was August of 2005, and I was the SWAT team commander of the Union County Sheriff's Department in Arkansas. Union County borders Louisiana, and we trained with the Union Paris Sheriff's Office team should any operations require us to cross the state line and vice versa, or to work in conjunction with them since we shared the small community of Junction City, a town that straddled the state line of Arkansas and Louisiana. Now, only on a couple occasions prior to the hurricane did we ever see that training and preparation put to use.

A couple search warrants and low-level manhunts of really insignificance were what the joint operations consisted of. Until the hurricane. As we all set glued to the news as the impending doom and gloom of the hurricane approached landfall, I received a call from my sheriff. The conversation went something like this. Union Parish has requested us to be ready to assist him in the advent of the storm stays on the projected levels and course.

Get the team advised ready to deploy should that happen and pack for a week. With our team and support personnel and boats, we deployed nearly a dozen deputies to assist the Louisiana Sheriff's Association Hurricane Task Force in Operation Restore Order. We were assigned a designation southeast of Baton Rouge that would serve as a rally point and staging area where we would be briefed on where help was needed, what assets we brought in our overall capabilities to support security for search and rescue efforts that were still in the initial stages of planning and execution. All communication was limited to safety.

and vehicle-to-vehicle communication on low-band radios. Hand-held radios were good only for short distances and anything that relied upon the relay of a boosted signal from radio towers was useless. Either the pirate of those towers was off, or the towers themselves were destroyed by the storm. And we arrived in Gonzales, Louisiana, a mass of law enforcement, fire, and medical services that filled a big fairgrounds and exhibition center. It was beyond chaotic, lots of well-intended

people kind of standing around ready to offer aid with little or no clear direction of where to do it. That would lend itself to describe that there was no organizations, but it would be unfair to the preparedness of the plan and the people who were in charge of it. The simple truth was there was no way to have been prepared for what was happening. All communication, had been cut off from South Louisiana to anywhere. Reports were all sat phone dependent, and at that time the technology wasn't 10 years old yet. It was its use or even the need for it

hadn't been a priority to anyone in the civilian sector. With a little direction from the staging personnel in Gonzalez, I reached out to our sheriff back in Arkansas and he eventually made contact with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff where the offer of our service. services. He gladly accepted, in less than 18 hours after arriving in Louisiana, we had our first clear mission. We were headed to New Orleans and would link up with the Jefferson Parish

Sheriff in the downtown staging area where they had set up a command post. The ride from Gonzales to New Orleans would take you less than an hour today. It was considerably longer due to the debris in the road. There were dead animals and fish of every kind of imaginable skis. scattered up and down the highway. Mud, marsh grass, trees, parts of buildings, boats of every size, and vehicles littered the road and the landscape in every direction. There were huge tuna fish laying on the side of the road

at one of the first highway exits coming into New Orleans. It was awful. Sites and the smells were sickening, and it was only going to get worse. Once we reported to the Sheriff's Department at the Command Post, we were immediately assigned to assist in restoring order to the areas where lawlessness and looting had become the norm. Got a little western at times, but things slowed down to the point after a day or two

that we were assigned to secure the landing zone where search and rescue medical and supply helicopters were on a constant rotation, bringing in survivors and adding people to the, Several thousand who were already sequestered beneath the overpass where the majority of my team was stationed. If you saw or remember seeing on the news all the footage of the military and the civilian helicopters operating adjacent to an overpass, the only place the press was allowed to be. That's where we were. There was a hopeless sea of humanity beneath us. The trauma and loss these people had just endured was a scene out of nothing I'd ever.

ever witnessed or hoped to see again. There was no bathrooms, no food, and nowhere to take them. There were buses supposedly on the way by getting a bus into that area to evacuate them, was taking a whole lot of time to coordinate. You have to remember that all the assets to do an evacuation operation of that magnitude had just been washed away by the very thing that had these people standing below me. and it was going to get a lot worse before it got any better. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right?

That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning calls.

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. His darkness fell, the influx of evacuees began to subside somewhat, but it didn't stop. And there was still no way to get them out. The limited communication we had with those in charge was extremely vague. It wasn't purposefully in that way. There were just no clear answers what to do with what some estimates say was 5,000 recently displaced hurricane survivors. Three people lost their lives during the 36 hours we were stationed on that bridge. This staging area was just one of many.

Eventually, a convoy school bus has arrived, and people were methodically loaded on each one to the capacity and they left. Eventually, so did we. I wouldn't find out until a week later that the majority of them would go to Houston, Texas. My team eventually regrouped after a few shows. stress-filled hours, and some of my men had been assigned to support different patrol elements and were scattered all over at New Orleans. They were professionals capable of doing any job to ask of them, but with no communication with them, my worry was not that they couldn't accomplish the

task at hand. It was that I couldn't come to help them if they needed it. The department and their families had entrusted me to bring them all home safe once our mission was completed, and I'd I didn't take that responsibility lightly. Now, through the Union Parish Sheriff and our Sheriff back in Arkansas, we were tasked with supporting the St. Tamini Parish Sheriff's Department in Slidell, Louisiana. We rolled northeast across Lake Pontchitrain and linked up with deputies who arranged for us to have the first meal we had in about 36 hours. We stayed in the Sheriff's Department training facility. We all stayed together in one big classroom, sleeping on army cots, and living out of our duffel bags.

We started immediately after being sworn in, half of us on 12-hour day shifts and the other half on nights. Each of us were assigned to General Patrol as a ride-along to supplement single deputy cars, two officers to the car. That's one thing for an area to be impacted by an unimaginable storm, but to deal with that on top of the escalator, of looting and violent crimes was something I'd never witnessed or hoped to see again. We had recalled after call the majority of mena for the most despicable acts of inhumanity. People taking advantage of each other during the best of times is bad enough, but it's magnified when the suffering is as extreme as losing your home and your way of life and your family. I have no idea how many people were arrested for looting, but it was a lot.

On the other hand, people we encountered carrying food items were allowed to continue. Grocer store owners had been in contact with authorities and said the public had free range any store and it was first come, first served until all the edible food was gone. The storm surge that hit the Slidell, Louisiana was estimated to be 20 to 25 feet. deep. The average height of a one-story building is about 14 feet. It don't take a math way as to imagine how bad that was. The amazing thing I witnessed above everything else were the people I was working with. Some deputies, one in particular that I was assigned to, had lost his home. He'd evacuated his family further north in Louisiana to stay with

relatives. A lot of other deputies did the same. And yet there they were at work with no idea what was going to happen next with their future. They slept there in that big converted classroom with the rest of us. The only difference being we had a home to go to after this was over. They didn't. There was dedicated a group of deputies as I have ever seen. A few of them only had the uniforms they were wearing and spares they kept at work for clothes. That was it. We stayed with them for the better part of a month before going back home to Arkansas. Twelve-hour shifts with no off days.

Night before we left, they threw us a party. They scrounged up food from everywhere and cooked for us. Some of them didn't have homes, but they cooked for us in appreciation of our breakfast. being there and helping. I've never forgotten that and will always remember how the majority of those people who had little, if anything, to give gave most of all they had. Hurricane Katrina took the lives of 1,392 people and displaced over a million. Over a third of those deaths were attributed to drowning, and a higher figure would claim

the lives through disease later on. A hundred and thirty-five people were listed as missing and have never been accounted for. They were, they're just gone. Less than a month later, Hurricane Rita claimed the lives of 120 more down there. Now, as bad as I wanted to go home, I felt guilty for leaving. Order had been restored for the most part, but the men and women we were working alongside were still there dealing not only with their jobs as peace officers, but the losses they incurred from the storms as well.

Now 19 years later, Hurricane Helene slammed the eastern U.S. and the cost in lives is well over 200, with many still missing and unaccounted for. But we have the ability to resolve and the will as Americans to stop what we're doing and help our brothers and sisters when they're in need, and there has been no greater need in recent times than right now. This is another defining American moment where we, as individuals are presented an opportunity to set aside any differences and rally together with the focus of a free people to choose to do the right thing and help those who need it most.

Last week had me traveling to and driving through New Orleans, the place I vowed to never see again. While I often think of those events 19 years ago, I seldom speak about them and I won't go into much more detail than I already have here, but it has been burdensome, to say the least. Driving through New Orleans on the way down to Venice last week bothered me more than I thought it would. I started recognizing buildings and features and seeing the contrast to what it had been to what it is now.

The people there seemed resilient and strong, and the further we went toward Venice, the dynamic differences were astounded. Homes and businesses had returned in comparative photos of then and now wouldn't even be thought of as taken in the same place. As we drove back through New Orleans on the way home, Ryan Callahan asked me if coming back had helped me. It definitely had.

But what helped me the most was seeing and talking with the people who marked time and stories by saying that they either happened before or after Katrina and seeing the pride that they had in persevering and the memorialization of all that was lost. I'm sure that it isn't the same as before Katrina, but seeing it seemingly thriving from the way it was when we left gives me hope that the same could be done with what happened as a result of Helene. There are many organizations collecting money and distributing aid,

and I encourage anyone who has the means to donate what you can. Five or ten dollars may not sound like a whole lot, But a whole bunch of them will add up pretty quick. As for me, I'm donating through the Gary Sanisse Foundation Hurricane Relief Emergency Fund. Now, if you can't trust Lieutenant Dan to get the money where it's supposed to go, you can't trust anyone. Riva's going to post a link in the show description directly to that fund if you're interested in checking it out. Keep those folks in your prayers.

They need them. They need them all. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Signing off. Y'all be careful. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper.

From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers.

Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.