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Dennis Duggan
'It was like one of those old movies when the Old West settlers are down to their last bullet and the Indians are moving in and then you hear a bugler and you know the calvary is coming in and everything is going to be OK."
That's how Capt. Billy Shanks, a New Orleans firefighter, described the arrival of the first wave of New York City firefighters in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In all, 350 members of the FDNY went to New Orleans last month to help put out fires, clean the flooded homes of firefighters, remove trees, whatever it took to restore some sense of sanity.
"The guys who came to help us were selfless and caring," Shanks, 40, said yesterday. "They said they would do whatever we needed to get done. They were all over the city, cleaning roadways of trees along with fighting fires.
"It wasn't that we were ready to lay down our cards, but we really needed a boost in morale, and these guys from New York and from Maryland and Illinois gave it to us," he said.
One of those cavalrymen-firefighters was Jon Anderson, 33, who drives a fire rig out of Engine 72 in the Bronx.
Anderson is the son of Tommy Henderson, who fought fires here for 28 years before retiring to Florida.
"Jon has a big heart," said Henderson, who rose to captain before retiring, "and he loves New Orleans. That city is like his second city, and he knows the streets of New Orleans as well as the streets of New York."
I talked to Shanks and his wife, Flora, 45, in Houston, where his family, including two children, Jessica, 10, and Joshua, 4, have been staying with close friends.
This weekend, they will return to New Orleans and try to rebuild their lives - again with the help of firefighters from other parts of the country.
The Shanks have no home to return to, the one they bought 11 years ago destroyed in the flood. I asked them why they wanted to return to a city that some say is beyond repair.
"One reason is I was born and raised there," Billy Shanks said. "I know it's called the Big Easy and it has the image of a frontier town, but most of the people I grew up with are really family-oriented.
"When you get to know the true heart of New Orleans, it is hard to settle for something less," he said. "I think of this city as a friend."
But Shanks is no starry-eyed optimist about going back.
"We are hoping to get a trailer home from FEMA," he said of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It will be tight quarters for a while until we get back on our feet, but the kids are excited. They miss their school and their friends, and so do we."
Shanks said he is totally disillusioned with Mayor C. Ray Nagin, whom he voted for. So is his wife.
"I don't think either the mayor or the governor rose to the occasion," Flora Shanks said. "We thought that because Nagin was a former businessman, he would be able to run the city and free it from corruption, but now he wants to make gambling casinos an even bigger industry than it is today."
Billy Shanks said he still can't shake off the sight of his house after the 17th Street levee had been breached. When he later visited it, water was receding from the rooftop.
"You know, it looked like those crystal globes you buy at Christmas and when you shake them, you see what looks like snowflakes falling," he said. "That's what our home looked like, as though someone had picked it up and shook it."
Lt. Matthew Komorowski, 42, of Ladder 19 in Brooklyn, also was shaken by the sight of the flooded homes.
"Every other day, we worked Operation Chainsaw, where we went to the ruined homes of the firefighters," he said. "When you saw the mold and how high the waterline had risen inside the home, you knew that these homes were not going to be saved - they were going to be bulldozed."
Komorowski said many people thought the FDNY sent firefighters down because of the help the city received from elsewhere during 9/11. He said more than that drove the city's firefighters south.
Shanks sensed that, too.
"What a brotherhood, what a family, what a tradition," he wrote in an
e-mail yesterday. "Thank you, New York and may God bless you all."
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