New Orleans & the Gulf Coast. The largest US&R deployment to that point. All 28 task forces deployed; teams made more than 6,500 rescues across a drowned city.
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in late August 2005. Levee failures flooded roughly eighty percent of New Orleans, and hundreds of thousands of people were left stranded. It remains one of the costliest and deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history.
All 28 FEMA urban search and rescue task forces were deployed in response to Katrina, alongside more than 50 Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, swift-water rescue teams, and Incident Support Teams. At the height of the operation, roughly 800 federal US&R personnel worked in New Orleans alone. Task force teams made more than 6,500 rescues, often going house to house through contaminated floodwater, marking each structure as they cleared it.
The work was grueling and slow by necessity. Crews pulled people who had been trapped in their homes for days, including an elderly woman found alive after thirteen days, dehydrated and in poor condition, then lifted out by helicopter. Decontamination of rescuers exposed to polluted water became a daily medical operation in its own right.
Katrina exposed how hard it is to coordinate dozens of teams across a catastrophic, multi-state footprint, and it drove lasting changes in how the national system stages, supplies, and commands its task forces. It is the baseline every later large deployment is measured against.
Every deployment on this page ran on equipment that had to be owned, maintained, and ready before the call. Project Cache exists to make that equipment understandable, and to put it in the field. Explore the Mission Ready Packages →