New Orleans airport reopens
By Spc. Thomas Day
September 14, 2005
NEW ORLEANS (Army News Service, Sept. 14, 2005) – The Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans reopened Sept. 13 for limited commercial traffic, while Army relief operations continued in a segregated section of the facility.
The new flight schedule will initially be a fraction of the roughly 175 flights a day that landed at Louis Armstrong International Airport before the hurricane, with any future increase in flights dependent on “how the rest of the city goes,” said Michelle Duffourc, airport public relations director.
“A lot of our traffic is from tourism. Obviously most of that is gone, for now.”
During the past two weeks ago, Louis Armstrong International Airport had barely resembled the commercial hub it was before Hurricane Katrina. Gone were the commercial pilots, baggage handlers and flight attendants -- the airport has instead served as an operating center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a field hospital, and housing for American troops and displaced residents evacuated from New Orleans.
FEMA and U.S. troops will continue to use the airport as a staging base, with a non-intrusive presence for commercial travelers, Deffourc said. The airport will be “segregated,” she said, with FEMA and U.S. military personnel partitioned at one end of the airport and commercial airlines working at the other.
The first signs of normality actually came Sunday, when the first cargo flights began landing at the airport since Hurricane Katrina.
With the airport gradually returning to its standard operations, troops working inside the airport have increasingly found their jobs taken over by their New Orleans counterparts.
Maj. Leigh Holt, a registered nurse with the 375th Medical Group from Scott Air Force Base in Illinios, has been treating patients in a temporary Combat Support Hospital assembled at gate “D2.” Upon arriving in New Orleans, Holt found herself treating the patients that the local hospitals could not.
More than 23,000 evacuees were treated by the U.S. Army and Air Force medical staff operating in the airport in a three-day period immediately after Hurricane Katrina.
The local hospitals are now back in commission, and Holt is having trouble finding work.
“Most of the (patients) are going to other places,” Holt said. “You can see how busy we are,” she added, holding an open book in her hand.
Holt expects to be pulled out of the airport within the next week. She has been living in a cot near a baggage claim area underneath an electric sign that still reads, “Thank you for flying Delta Airlines.”
(Editor’s note: Spc. Thomas Day serves with the 40th Public Affairs Detachment.)
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