“It's been a long day; a really good one, though. It started out back in the area just north of Gulfport where I've spent the last five days. I made sure everyone was deployed as planned, and got ready to leave. The weather had lifted to the point that I was more or less comfortable flying out and getting back over to Livingston, but about the time I decided to go, I called up the flight service station, and found that there was a Presidential temporary flight restriction (TFR) for Baton Rouge. It's good to know that the President was paying attention. Unfortunately, when he shows up he shuts down all air traffic except for specially designated operations, of which I wasn't designated. So, I had to wait until 2 o'clock in the afternoon when that was lifted. So I flew over to Hammond, landed there, and waited out the TFR. Hammond is 32 miles away from Baton Rouge, so that was free space. After the TFR was lifted, I flew the rest of the way to the little grass strip just north of Walker where we have been staying. The ride was actually quite rough, because the winds continued to be 18 gusting to 28 in Baton Rouge around the time that I landed, and they were not much better than that when I left Gulfport. The ride was very turbulent, but controllable. I let Charlie, the EMT who has volunteered with us, fly the plane the majority of the flight except for takeoffs and landings. He did very well with it.

Upon landing, we got the plane unloaded (including the generator that we had picked up in Slidell 5 days before) into the Suburban that I have been using that belongs to a member of the church, and drove towards the church. I got a phone call on the way that I needed to go immunize some biologists who were going to scout out our next deployment. So I went directly to the church and immunized them. I found out also that one of my oldest and dearest nursing professors, Shirley Spears, was on her way down with 5 of her students and one other nurse, also an old friend of mine. That's happy news. They're now here.

We have since that time gotten everyone immunized as needed and have deployed to Lake Charles. We arrived here about 20 minutes ago - it's probably about 12:30 right now as I'm recording this - I can't see a clock. We're all staying here. We have two RVs for the ladies to sleep in, and the rest of us are sleeping under the stars tonight. It's a beautiful evening here, if a little bit on the hot and muggy side. We had a police escort the whole way.

We will be deployed in the morning and start seeing patients. Probably the majority of our patients early on are going to be the rescue personnel - fire and police - that are here working in the area of Lake Charles. There is no power. Everything is dead. It looks like there is no traffic on the streets because of the curfew and electricity is out so everything is dark, like a ghost town. It's quite strange to run into a place like that, but we're excited. It's going to be a new experience for each of us. By tomorrow night we'll have a much better idea of what we are getting ourselves into, but it's, again, very exciting.

The group in Gulfport, I believe their report was around 400 patients today. I believe they were in Long Beach and did a bunch of immunizations down there, so they're staying busy also.”