Post-Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was a city unnervingly quiet, abandoned not just by its people but even its birds and bugs.
“The silence,” Tim Serban of Marysville said of riding along city streets. “The brokenness you saw in an empty city.”
Serban, spiritual care director at Providence Everett Medical Center, was in Baton Rouge, La., from Sept. 3 to 17 leading 20 chaplains in hurricane relief work. Associated with the Red Cross, members of the national Spiritual Care Response Team volunteer to assist at disasters.
In Louisiana, Serban was housed in a shelter with 500 people and cots set up just four inches apart.
He heard a man describe being flushed like a bobbing cork up a stairway into the attic by the force of a towering wall of water.
Serban saw families that had only a small, unmarked area of carpet in a conference center lobby to call home.
He and two other chaplains began their work one day at 4 a.m. with a federal recovery team. By day’s end, 56 bodies had been recovered.
Amid all that, he coordinated with several government agencies responding to the disaster: the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state medical examiner, the Homeland Security Department, and the federal Health and Human Service and Justice departments.
And he met with 21 bishops, rabbis, imams and other local religious leaders to collaborate on spiritual care.
“Tim had to be a diplomat,” said Earl Johnson, based in Washington, D.C., national coordinator for the Spiritual Care Response Team. “This was a profound hardship deployment.”
Serban has been a Catholic lay chaplain for 18 years and has worked at Providence Everett Medical Center for nearly five years. He’s been a member of the Spiritual Care Response Team since 1999, originally formed to help families at the scene of airplane crashes.
After the terrorist attacks of 2001, the group’s mission expanded. Serban was sent to New York City two weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, sometimes accompanying family members as they got their first glimpse of the smoldering devastation.
Hurricane Katrina stands out both for the 90,000 square miles of devastation and the 150,000 Red Cross volunteers, one of biggest deployments in the organization’s history.
International Red Cross teams came from Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sri Lanka, that island nation’s way of giving back, he said, for some of the help it received after last year’s tsunami.
Much of Serban’s time in Louisiana was spent assessing spiritual care needs at the state’s 150 shelters, having chaplains on duty 24 hours a day at a temporary mortuary and deploying chaplains with disaster recovery teams.
Serban said he witnessed how the recovery teams worked to ensure that each body was treated with dignity and respect. An interfaith prayer, similar to one used in New York City at ground zero, was said as each body was retrieved, he said. They prayer was repeated before the body was transported and said again just inside the gates of the mortuary.
Piece by piece came tiny signs of change. The bugs eventually returned, as did a small flock of pigeons, with feathers so tattered “they looked as though they had been through a war,” Serban said.
Each day, he tried to save a few moments to call his wife, Carla, and their 6-year-old son, Joseph. With electrical power out, he would often sit in a darkened car with the motor running to charge his cell phone so they could talk.
“That’s the only quiet space I had,” he said, “a quick call at 11 at night.”
A picture of New Orleans that Serban’s son drew on a napkin and the words his son said before he left helped sustain Serban through sadness and devastation.
When his son gave him the map, he pointed to where the hurricane hit and said, ” ‘This is so you can find your way home.’”
Reporter Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@ heraldnet.com.
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