Relief mission to a ravaged region

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It may not have been as famous as "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," but Denzil Mooney's journey to Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Mississippi was arguably a lot more interesting.

The trip in the Ford F350 began in Boulder City on the morning of Sept. 8. Eleven days, 5,000 miles and $1,000 later, Mooney walked away knowing what it's like to make a difference in a crisis.

Mooney celebrated his 40th birthday on Sept. 7 by gathering donated supplies for his relief mission to help those in need in Mississippi's forgotten rural communities.

"All the National Guard and (American) Red Cross are doing is going to the big cities and helping them and they just blow by the small towns," said the lifelong Boulder City resident, reserve firefighter and emergency medical technician for the Boulder City Fire Department. The self-employed diesel mechanic is attending paramedic school.

His super-cab pickup truck and the U-Haul trailer it pulled were tightly packed with camping gear, clothing, bedding, water, hygiene products and other provisions.

Mooney arrived at the Mississippi state line on Sept. 9. It had taken 38 hours and 20 minutes and 160 gallons of diesel fuel costing nearly $435, but he had finally made it to his aunt's home in Booneville, Miss., which would become the home base for his one-man medical mission to help hurricane victims.

His aunt Terri and her husband, Johnny Williams, were lucky. Their hometown, 300 miles north of the demolished Gulf Coast line was spared the wrath of Hurricane Katrina.

That Saturday was spent repacking and organizing the supplies so they could be easily handed out to area churches that would distribute them.

At 6 a.m. the next day, Mooney pointed his truck south into the thick fog toward Picayune, Miss., about 30 miles northeast of New Orleans. He and Johnny Williams would ultimately travel as far as Bay St. Louis, Miss., giving aid to those in need.

When Mooney and Williams arrived in Picayune, they found a church and learned that their help was needed more on the coastline. They hopped back into the truck and drove 25 miles down Highway 603 toward the Waveland-Bay St. Louis area.

Along the way, they saw dozens of cars in ditches and front yards littered with powerboats, power lines and soggy personal belongings.

When the men arrived, they met residents discarding everything they owned. After just two weeks, their storm-surged homes had started to suffer mold growth that left a stale smell wafting through the neighborhood.

"I've lived here since 1958 and went through Betsy and Camille," said Larry Gagnon, a Bay St. Louis resident, who was too afraid to shake hands because he had been scraping his mold-covered walls. "This one was 50 times worse than Camille."

A few blocks down the road, Mooney and Williams found a church, Our Lady of the Gulf Catholic Church, where they emptied their trailer of goods to be distributed to needy families. But the mission wasn't over.

A few days later, after taking Williams home so he could return to his job as a maintenance worker in a Booneville steel plant, Mooney ended up in Biloxi, Miss., helping Dr. Lee Thomas with the Baptist Child and Family Services unit. It was there, under the direction of Thomas, a family practice physician from Lancaster, S.C., that Mooney spent three days and nights in the makeshift compound and was assigned to patient intake. He recorded medical information and took blood pressure and pulse readings.

"It all worked out. I knew we had to come," Mooney said. "I told my dad I had to go and if nothing else, I'll put a band-aid on a little kid's knee and I'll know that I fulfilled what I came down here for."

On Wednesday morning, Mooney and Thomas left for the neighboring town of Gulfport. Along the way they offered medical assistance to residents in Forrest Heights, a predominantly black neighborhood north of the downtown area.

Later that day, Mooney headed toward the seashore down Highway 49, driving past a National Guard checkpoint at U.S. Highway 90 and into the coastal area where Katrina had stripped the land of buildings and slammed dozens of 53-foot tractor-trailer rigs into the front and sides of homes facing the docks.

That next morning found Mooney in Biloxi. After another breakfast of tasteless grits and spicy sausage, he headed to a Baptist Child of Family Services meeting. He volunteered to be part of a two-vehicle medical team headed for a clinic in Kiln, located about 15 miles inland from the Bay St. Louis-Waveland area.

After an hour's drive, he finally found the clinic, which had moved 5 miles east of Kiln to Vidalia, a wide spot in the road with a couple of old gas stations and a country store. The makeshift facility was housed in the Dedeaux School, a former Catholic elementary school.

The clinic had medical facilities and a multipurpose room where assorted men's, women's and children's clothes and shoes were scattered on the floor and stage. The Salvation Army had set up a mobile canteen van where people could get a warm meal.

Mooney checked in with the clinic's organizers and soon hit the road as a one-man mobile medical technician.

His first encounter was with Luby Peterson, 79, whose blood pressure had skyrocketed that morning after cleanup crews, sawing away at trees and limbs, sliced through her water line, leaving her with no water but plenty of anxiety.

He calmed her down, reassured her the line would be fixed, checked her medications to see if there were enough and promised to bring a hot meal back to her.

Soon, it was time for Mooney to say goodbye to the BCFS and go home to Boulder City in the Las Vegas Valley. Driving out of Mississippi on Highway 603, he flipped on the radio to hear: "This is paradise under reconstruction, that's our motto now."

View reporter Fred Couzens was given an opportunity to accompany Boulder City resident Denzil Mooney on a Hurricane Katrina relief mission. The preceding was an account of their 11-day journey.