Meet the elite group who will remove the bodies from the Hard Rock Hotel

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    New Orleans, LA (WGNO) — They’ve rescued people from floods in Texas and searched through tornado rubble in Alabama.

Making their way through “every inch” of the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel on Canal Street has been their biggest job yet — and it isn’t over.

Nine months after the hotel’s collapse, the “Urban Search and Rescue” team (USAR) is preparing to remove the bodies of two construction workers who were trapped inside. The team is overseen by the New Orleans Fire Department, and its members come from both the Fire Department and New Orleans EMS.

The team is “top-notch,” says Fire Department Deputy Chief Joseph Wheeler. Wheeler oversees the USAR’s training, ensuring that the members are ready to deploy within 12 hours after a disaster and prepared to be self-sufficient for at least 3 days.

Beyond their technical expertise, Wheeler says the team is especially empathetic in life and death situations. The team’s first deployment was after Hurricane Katrina, rescuing people from rising water in the Lower 9th Ward.

“They bring a perspective of losing everything,” says Wheeler, “and a sense of calm (knowing that) we’ve been through it all.”

Leading the USAR team is Captain Danny Simon. He’s been part of the team since its inception, and he’s been on scene at the Hard Rock Hotel every day since the collapse.

“We immediately went in with canines,” says Simon, describing the initial response last October, “and we searched through the entire building from the ground level to the roof for about two weeks to see if there were any live victims … and unfortunately there weren’t.”

In the weeks and months since then, the USAR’s plan to remove the bodies has evolved as the ruins of the building have become more dangerous over time.

“The easiest way to describe it is gravity, ” says Simon. “The rebar has just been pulling down for nine months now, and it’s just shifting (as) gravity is taking affect.”

Simon says that certain sections of the building that they were able to go into initially, are inaccessible today because parts of the building have “caved in.”

Still, a demolition contractor hired by the hotel’s local developers has cleared away the largest debris from the areas around each victim, on two different floors, making a path for Capt. Simon to lead six members of the team to do the recovery.

“We hope to be working on a flat surface,” says Simon, but they may have to do some “hand-picking of debris” around the bodies.

In addition, the USAR team is responsible for collecting and documenting potential evidence– to be used by forensics experts, to determine how the victims died, and by legal experts to determine liability issues involving the hotel’s construction.

“Everything (will be) documented that you can think of,” says Simon, and “anthropologists will be on standby.”

Several days of rain over the past two weeks has slowed the USAR’s mission to remove the bodies, but Simon says the team is ready to do the job “safely and respectfully” to bring some closure to the victims’ families.

Deputy Chief Wheeler will be watching from the ground, staying in contact with the team by 2-way radio– his fingers crossed.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” says Wheeler, “because you don’t know what’s going to happen until they start moving things around. Hopefully the plan will be executed as drawn up, and we won’t have any difficulties.”

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