Hurricane Katrina tested former NOPD lieutenant’s mettle
Published: Thursday, September 02, 2010, 9:47 AM Updated: Thursday, September 02, 2010, 9:47 AM
The day Hurricane Katrina plowed into New Orleans five years ago, Russell Vappie’s mind was not on his work as a police officer.
Joe Songer / Special to The Times-PicayuneDays after losing his mother, Russell Vappie, a Public Integrity bureau lieutenant for the New Orleans Police Department, inherited command over dozens of officers during Hurricane Katrina and orchestrates the evacuation of 750 men, women and children from the floodwater-swamped Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital in eastern New Orleans. Russell and his wife, Jean, at home at their apartment in Homewood, where they have lived since Katrina. They have a fleur-de-lis on their front door.
Only 11 days before, the lieutenant had buried his mother, Doris, a seamstress, who died of heart failure. He had been on leave, grieving, until his superiors ordered him to report to Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital in eastern New Orleans.
His grief, however, had to be put aside. Of the more than 30 NOPD officers and Louisiana National Guard soldiers stationed at the hospital, Vappie was the highest-ranking law enforcement official.
The hospital’s conditions went to hell after the storm’s landfall and the subsequent failure of the city’s levees. Heavy wind tore up parts of the building. Up to 10 feet of water surrounded the hospital; about 4 feet swamped the first floor. Temperatures soared into triple digits after the seven-floor building lost electricity, except for an intensive care unit powered by a backup generator.
Vappie arrived armed with little more than his uniform, gun belt and a change of clothes. His first assessment of the situation, after realizing its severity, was grim. At least two elderly patients perished. Trapped were about 750 people — doctors, nurses, administrators, patients and their loved ones — with no clear escape available. Telephone communications died. Officers panicked. They used their police radios to ask first responders to check on their homes and relatives. Some wanted to desert their posts and check for themselves. Some simply did.
Resolving such a situation “wasn’t taught in the academy,” said Vappie, then a 31-year veteran assigned to the department’s Public Integrity Bureau. “I wasn’t sure I could handle it.”
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Vappie turned to his PIB colleagues for support. He asked NOPD Officer Johnny Young, also a member of the Army Reserve, to relay requests to the National Guard.
Joe Songer / Special to The Times-PicayuneRussell points with pride to photos of his wife Jean and daughter Beverly, who now attends a high school in Homewood, Ala. The family has lived there since after Hurricane Katrina.
He tasked Sgt. Claude Flot with helping a 7th District sergeant check on officers stationed on different floors. Officer Darryl Ribet, who was battling prostate cancer, patrolled Methodist’s tucked-away areas. Members of the National Guard boarded a skiff and stopped anyone who was not hurt from approaching by boat. They couldn’t take anyone who didn’t have to be there; the hospital’s supply of sandwiches and water would last just three days.
Moments grew tense. Flot and Young at one point confronted and ran off a group of suspected looters. Officers and soldiers spent an entire day helping hospital staff squeeze critically ill patients’ bag valve masks in darkness after their ventilators stopped working.
“It was like we were stranded on an island,” Ribet said. “But no one panicked. We took it one day at a time.”
Two days after the levees failed, Vappie at last contacted his superiors on his police radio. Their evacuation plan was to fly everybody out by helicopter. First, they planned to pluck small groups of patients off the rooftop with baskets. Then they planned on landing the choppers directly on Methodist’s roof.
“Have you ever landed helicopters on the roof?” Vappie asked the hospital manager, a man named Bill Fox. “No,” Fox replied, his voice somber.
Vappie agreed to the plan anyway. He commanded hospital staff, officers and soldiers to help each other carry all of the patients up several flights of stairs. Newborns, pregnant women and some overweight patients were helped to the hospital roof, where a series of choppers flew them to safety.
Hospital staffers boarded the choppers next, and five days after Katrina’s landfall, Vappie and his remaining colleagues took off on skiffs to other parts of their flooded city.
“Lt. Vappie and his guys did a great job getting everybody out,” Fox said. “I believe we would have lost the patients that we lost despite the storm.”
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Once the waters receded, life did not afford Vappie much time to feel proud of his team’s performance at Methodist.
The flood wrecked the Gentilly home he shared with his wife, Jean, and young daughter, Beverly. It destroyed the Benjamin’s School of Dance and Gymnastics, which his wife had run for almost three decades. Then, in March 2006, doctors diagnosed Jean Vappie with breast cancer. Her husband retired from the force and joined her and their daughter in Homewood, Ala. — about 4 miles outside of Birmingham — where they had decided to ride out Katrina.
Twenty-six weeks of commuting by plane to Houston for chemotherapy treatment followed. Friends helped pay for the airfare until doctors declared Jean’s cancer to be in remission.
Russell Vappie, whose twin brother, Jeffrey, still serves as an NOPD officer, then focused his efforts on rebuilding his home in Gentilly. He spent weekdays in New Orleans dealing with roof, plumbing and electricity contractors. On the weekends he drove back to Homewood to visit Jean and Beverly, who enrolled at a high school there.
Emboldened by the home’s progress, Vappie took on another project he had worked on piecemeal the nine years before Katrina: completing his college degree in criminal justice at Loyola University. He wrote papers, studied for exams and devoured reading assignments for his night classes, held at the Uptown campus up to three times a week.
Vappie, now 60, used his down time studying in Loyola’s library. He slept at the home of a childhood friend on the West Bank and, on the weekends, drove for 5 ½ hours to Homewood, where the family now lives.
By December 2008, the retired cop had nursed his family’s home back to order. He had finished his coursework, walked across the graduation stage at the Louisiana Superdome and received his diploma five months later.
“I was determined,” Vappie explained recently. “I wasn’t going to let Katrina dissuade me from doing what I needed to do.”
His daughter turns 16 in September. She graduates high school in two years, and afterward, her parents hope to move back to New Orleans, the last phase of their Katrina recovery journey.
“Russell is the family rock, steadfast and unmovable,” Jean Vappie, 58, said. “He was there for everybody, for everything.”
