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November 17, 2005
Search and rescue markings explained
Hiromi asked me what the big X markings on the houses meant. These markings are left by urban search and rescue teams when they search a house. Here's an example, taken in the lower Ninth Ward:
When a team goes into the house, they paint one diagonal of the X, and where the northern quadrant would be, they put the date, and in the western quadrant, they put some indication of who searched it. So in the picture above, the team that did the purple X entered on September 10, and was from the DEA (I don't think the drug enforcement agency, there is some other DEA involved). After they're done searching, they put the other diagonal of the X. They fill in the southern quadrant with any people they found, living or dead (here they found nobody), and the eastern quadrant with any hazards that future teams should be aware of (such as unstable stairwells, missing floors, etc.)
For the small houses like this, they probably just painted the whole thing all at once. When you're searching a large structure like an office building, you do the one diagonal going in, one diagonal going out, and you'd also put time in and time out in the north quadrant. That way if the SAR team itself gets in some kind of trouble in the building, the marking on the outside of the building lets other searchers know that there is still a team inside, possibly needing rescue themselves.
The team that made the orange markings put "NE" in the hazards quadrant, which I think means "No entry". This may have been a preliminary search team that was looking for survivors, banging on doors and looking in windows but not going inside. The second team came through at a later date during a more thorough search and likely broke into the house to look in the attic, look under furniture.
Some houses had lots of markings, since the animal rescue teams adopted the same system, so you'd see X's where the team was marked as "SPCA" and the bottom quadrant might say "1 dead dog" or "1 cat under house, left food 9/18".
I would hazard a guess that the animal rescue folks may have annoyed the people rescue folks a bit, since sometimes it was really hard to decipher what the markings on a building said. So you'd look at a house with an X and if the person who marked it wasn't very clear, you wouldn't necessarily know if it had been searched for people or just animals. I bet there was lots of confusion on the ground.
You might wonder why I took a picture of this house, since it didn't really show much in the way of spectacular damage and is pretty much an uninteresting shot:
This is the last known address of somebody who I was trying, without success, to locate for a person at the Red Cross shelter. Her status has haunted me all this time, so I drove by her house in the lower Ninth Ward just to see the SAR markings on her house. I needed to see if there was a 0 in that lower quadrant. There was.
I walked around the house a little while. The windows are broken, and the inside reeks of mold, like a damp cellar. The furniture inside looks like somebody picked the house up and shook it. Couches upside down on top of chairs. Everything covered in mud and mold and muck.
Posted by ray at November 17, 2005 11:19 PM | Permalink
Categories: [katrina | new orleans ]
Comments
I keep looking at those markings and thinking of the x's left on what's supposed to be Marie Laveau's grave.
Speaking of which, Ray, I have not heard much about what happened to the above-ground cemeteries. How badly were *they* hit, do you know?
Posted by: Karl Elvis at November 18, 2005 10:16 AM
I've heard random stories about bodies floating out of crypts, but nothing confirmed. We didn't have time to run around inside any of the really cool cemeteries, but there are a few shots of the one at the end of Canal & City Park that we took just because it looked cool at sunset. They're in the flickr page around halfway through the New Orleans set.
Posted by: Ray at November 18, 2005 11:18 AM
Fascinating information, Ray. Thanks for telling the story of the "uninteresting shot" and the follow-up to the famous mean dog sign: these details help the rest of us contextualize what happened.
Posted by: Hiromi at November 18, 2005 12:56 PM
Thanks for the information about the markings on the houses. I have been working down here in both MS and LA since Sept. 7th. It has been quite the experience.
Posted by: Mike at December 5, 2005 8:38 PM
Thanks for posting this. I am a photographer from CA and am working on a project addressing decay and rebirth. I was in New Orleans this last July and it was overwhelming. I wish you and all your friends the very best.....Like a phoenix from the ashes....
Posted by: Philip Ringler at October 27, 2006 9:20 AM
I found your site while doing an online search for disaster SAR building markings for a scene safety lecture for would be volunteer training. I have a lot of experience as a 911 paramedic, but I did not know the details of how these markings work. Thank you for the info. Take care, God Bless. (Did you find your friend? Do you know if she made it or not?) -Joe (Southern Minnesota)
Posted by: Joe Immermann at June 26, 2008 12:35 PM
Thanks, Joe. If you're interested, the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Field Operations Guide is online:
http://www.disasterengineer.org/library/FOG4e-1005.pdf
More than you ever wanted to know about how to do disaster response. There is a whole other set of markings for designating structural integrity of damaged buildings, which I used to have memorized but don't any more. (Usually a box with either one or two diagonal lines inside. You see a few of them around town still.)
And yeah, I found out that the girl survived. I found her quoted in a newspaper article about six months after the storm, says she was now living in Metairie and did lose some of her family in the storm. I'm sure she doesn't know who I am, I doubt her boyfriend even remembers me from the shelter, he was pretty shellshocked when I talked to him. But it's nice to know she got out.
Posted by: Ray at June 27, 2008 12:18 AM
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