Your counterparts in coastal Mississippi were everywhere and greatly appreciated. Most of what I saw was guard units.

One shelter manager told me when we arrived that the first (and only other) outside contact she had after the Storm was a big green Army helicopter that landed in their parking lot and kicked out pallets of MREs and water, offered to evac any critical medical, then took off.

Then when we arrived, we were the second contact she had. Her sat phone was useless.

BTW, ARC would not dispatch teams into NO, though I volunteered to take a team in. We were in radio contact with a team in a large HS stadium on the outskirts of New Orleans.

Nothing as dramatic as the videos broadcasted from New Orleans, which was not really typical. But they had more fundamental hygiene issues, etc.

Coastal Mississippi was pretty peaceful. Some petty theft, we parked our trucks carefully. The only scary thing was later in the event you'd be driving along and hear a loud bang that sounded like a gunshot. It was transformers exploding as they were trying to get power back up!