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MAINE - Two Maine game wardens will never forget the screams of agony that pierced the New Orleans air late last month while they were standing in the storm-ravaged Ninth Ward. It was the first day since August that residents had been allowed back into the city on their own to gather belongings after two hurricanes and a flood tore apart their lives. "You could hear screaming and crying and shrills of agony in every direction," Warden Sgt. Roger Guay of Greenville recalled last week after returning to Maine. The residents were grief-stricken over the destruction of their homes and neighborhoods. "It's hard to go to your little home in Maine and those people literally have nothing," Guay said. It is one of many haunting memories Guay and Warden Wayde Carter of Machias brought back after spending two weeks in late November in the Southern state searching for bodies. They were aided by Guay's cadaver dog, Rader, a Labrador retriever, and Carter's cadaver dog, Buddy, a German shepherd. The wardens' search and rescue work in New Orleans, part of a reciprocal agreement Maine has with other states, has not ended. Guay, a 20-year veteran with the Maine Warden Service, and Carter, a 12-year veteran, recently received orders to return to the same area in New Orleans on Jan. 1 for another grueling two-week assignment. "The mind-set that things are getting back to normal is not reality. There's nothing to get back to normal with," Guay said of the Ninth Ward. "For them, the crisis is not over, and they think the world has forgotten them." Despite the gruesome deaths the men have seen in their Maine careers, nothing prepared them for the sights and smells emanating from the Ninth Ward. "You can't smell the smells on television or [in] the newspaper, but when you step outside that truck and start walking through those buildings, you can see that everybody's lives that they once knew was completely gone," Carter said. Guay said it looked like a bomb had exploded. The hurricane and flood forces had picked up houses and dumped them blocks away. Some were sandwiched between other buildings. Others were nothing but matchsticks, he said. Large numbers of armed military and police officers patrolled the area in Humvees to prevent looting. Of 4,000 people unaccounted for in the Ninth Ward, 1,400 were elderly and infirm, the wardens were told. The three bodies the team found last month supported that conclusion. The body of one elderly woman was found near her wheelchair. She apparently was abandoned by others who had lived there too. The dogs also indicated there were bodies or body parts under large debris piles, the target of their return trip in January. In an attic wardens found a box of food, an open Bible, and an ax the homeowner had used to reach the roof, Carter said. In another attic, six X's on the wall indicated the number of days the occupants were there before rescue. The names of the occupants also were recorded. Guay said they saw baby shoes, dolls, wedding pictures and birth certificates lying on the ground, all special elements of people's lives, now tossed carelessly about. The wilderness-trained dogs had no experience with such a natural disaster, but they did a phenomenal job, both men said. "It was very challenging to work the dogs because of the degree of decomposition and environmental factors involved," Guay said. The dogs are trained to detect human scent, a chore made difficult because domestic and wild animal bodies and rotted food were in the mix, and by the fact that wild animals had scattered body parts. "It was very enlightening to see them be able to sift through all of that and make the right choices and do that well," Guay said. Climbing under, over and through gooey sludge and debris was stressful and dangerous for the handlers and their dogs, according to Carter. Guay reached down to remove some debris the first day and sliced his leather glove and hand. He said he also stepped on a bottle of liquid that exploded, its contents traveling up his leg, which scared him. To his relief, the bottle had contained baby oil. Even the dogs were not spared from danger. A piece of steel embedded itself in Buddy's eye, requiring surgery, but a veterinarian deemed the dog fit to work again within 24 hours, Carter said. Unleashed inside buildings for fear they might get tangled in debris, the dogs wore bells on their collars to alert their handlers of their whereabouts. Outside, the wardens had to make sure the dogs avoided water because of snakes and alligators. In certain known snake-infested areas, police armed with shotguns accompanied the teams, according to Carter. Despite the fact that most of the local police, wardens, firefighters and rescue personnel had lost everything in the disasters, they made sure the wardens and their pets were well cared for and protected during their stay. During a rest day, their counterparts took the men to visit untouched areas of New Orleans, a respite from the gut-wrenching scenes in the Ninth Ward. "As a nation, we have a lot of work to do to get that corner of the world back together. It's going to take lots of people and lots of time," Guay said. Part of that process is bringing closure to those who have missing loved ones, Carter said.
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