HURRICANE KATRINA : S'pore copters help to dam broken levees

SINGAPORE'S Chinook helicopters are winding up a week-long relief mission in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans even as American police and army troops prepare to evacuate remaining residents by force.

PLUGGING THE GAPS: A Singapore helicopter drops sandbags to fill the breach in a damaged levee in New Orleans, one of its final vital tasks in a week-long mission. -- AP

Four Chinooks and 45 air force personnel who fly and maintain the helicopters will soon return to their training base in neighbouring Texas after the successful mission in the hurricane-ravaged city, said the Ministry of Defence last night.

Before leaving New Orleans, the Chinooks joined helicopters from the United States military and US Coast Guard for one last critical task - damming up the broken flood barriers, called levees, in New Orleans.

The helicopters are from an RSAF training detachment, codenamed Peace Prairie, which trains alongside the Texas Army National Guard. It was set up in 1995 to train RSAF personnel to fly, operate and maintain the air force's most powerful transport helicopters in the town of Grand Prairie, in neighbouring Texas.

In New Orleans, US police and army troops stepped up pressure on holdout residents to obey a mandatory evacuation order. Officials said the time was nearing for police to exercise their authority to compel people to abandon their homes.

'It will be a forceable evacuation - not that we will use force, but it will be mandatory,' said Chief Deputy Sheriff Anthony Fernandez.

Lieutenant-Colonel Kevin Rodrigues, 41, the Peace Prairie detachment commander who led Singapore's hurricane relief mission, said yesterday that the RSAF Chinooks had carried a total of 226 tonnes of cargo - mostly sand to shore up broken levees - during the week-long mission. They also airlifted relief supplies, such as food, fresh water and medicine.

Each Chinook can carry three giant sandbags, weighing more than nine tonnes, using three cargo hooks on its belly. A flight engineer and aircrew specialist stand at the open rear cargo camp of the Chinook to guide the pilot over the levee breach as the helicopter hovers low over the murky water.

'It's not a precision operation. We try to drop the sand bags between the two broken ends and dump more and more sand until the sand is above the water level,' said Lt-Col Rodrigues. Once enough sand is dumped into the breach, US Army engineers use machinery such as bulldozers to seal the opening with more sand.

Lt-Col Rodrigues, a pilot for 22 years, said Chinooks operate like aerial cranes. A trip from the sand bag preparation site to the broken levees takes just 10 minutes and Chinooks make multiple trips from dawn to dusk each day, he said. At the start of their mission, the RSAF Chinooks airlifted more than 620 residents from the city.

Major Kevin Wee Kim Aun, 33, an RSAF officer involved in the operation, said: 'The high points of this humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operation must certainly be the looks of relief and appreciation on the faces of the evacuees when we flew them from the flooded areas to temporary living quarters set up by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency and the US Army.'

David Boey
dboey@sph.com.sg
The Straits Times Interactive, 10 September 2005