Immediately after Katrina I traveled to Louisiana as an independent volunteer EMT. Through the LA Bureau of EMS I was paired with a trauma nurse (Lynn), and our first assignment was to triage patients at the New Orleans Louis Armstrong International Airport. We were there from 9/2 ? 9/4, the time in which all of New Orleans was being evacuated. We were later assigned to a makeshift hospital in Lafayette, but the airport was by far the most heartbreaking and memorable experience. We hear a great deal about what went wrong after Katrina, but little is said about the positive. The volunteers I worked with were by far the best team I?ve ever been a part of. We had few resources and worked long hours in the face of constant heartbreaking circumstances. But there were few complaints. Everybody worked together to make the best out of a bad situation. Here?s to all the volunteers and to the citizens of New Orleans. The memories will fade, but every one of you will live in my heart forever. Here?s a glimpse of what it was like: From the time we started and Lynn told me we would not stop for anything, even a person dying on the side of the road, the magnitude of what we were going into hit. This was compounded when she let me know she had a loaded .380 in the console because car-jackings were happening on the road down. (And I volunteered to come down here???) Within an hour we were talking our way through police roadblocks. At one tense point we were confronted at gunpoint by a very belligerent (and obviously scared) officer when we asked how we could get to the airport when he directed us off our route. Two hours later we finally arrived. At that time the airport was a clearing house for New Orleans. There was a constant stream of buses from the Superdome and the Convention Center as they closed them down. All the people you saw on the news being airlifted off rooftops and saved by boat were funneled through the airport. Thousands of people passed through in the days...