The Lafayette Daily Advertiser:
Mark Creswell remembers throwing tuna cans and water bottles at the people clamoring at the helicopter.
"We just started chunking whatever we had," said Mark, who spent nine days hopping from hospital roof to hospital roof as the eyes and ears of Acadian Ambulance's efforts to evacuate New Orleans area hospitals in the days after Katrina.
Mark, of Abbeville, also remembers the moment he realized empty Kentwood water boxes would be better to transfer the babies from Children's Hospital than traditional bassinets.
"We went in Children's Hospital. This lady was under the impression we were going to do things the way we did before the hurricane - one isolet, one practitioner per baby in the helicopter.
"I said, 'Lady, you're in Bangladesh. This isn't last week.' "
Mark said the nurse was concerned because they had never done anything like that before.
"We hadn't either, but I couldn't afford to take that much from the operation to do everything nice and neat," he said.
Mark said putting the babies in blanket-lined water boxes "afforded us the ability to put four others in the available crawl seats."
"We did what we knew we could do," he said. "Someone said it looked like a green and white flying orphanage. They all made it."
Richard Zuschlag, chief of Acadian Ambulance, said Mark's stories are among hundreds of heroic tales - not only of Acadian Ambulance medics, but of volunteers from other companies and states.
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