LAS VEGAS -- As they sipped champagne and dug
into braised short ribs Wednesday night at a reception heralding
the debut of the musical ''Avenue Q" at the posh Wynn Las Vegas
resort, New Orleans emergency medical services workers Chris Keller
and Keely Williams still couldn't help thinking about where they
were seven days ago. The contrast was as surreal as Vegas itself.
About that same time -- 10 p.m. -- during ''Katrina Week," as they call it, Keller, Williams, and their colleagues were trying to settle down for another hot, humid, uncertain night on the floors of an auditorium at a retirement facility for Catholic clergy that their division had taken over as a command center and shelter.
The days run together in their memory, but they think that was one of the days they spent roaming the city for survivors. Or they might have been tending -- with few supplies and less medicine -- to addled, agitated survivors at the New Orleans Convention Center.
And now they were here in the other Sin City, celebrating the opening of a Tony-winning Broadway production about the unpredictability of life while wearing new clothes purchased on a shopping spree earlier in the day with money given to them by the Las Vegas chapter of the American Red Cross.
The pair are among the 25 EMS workers and firefighters from the ruined city flown to Las Vegas with their spouses or partners for a free five-day getaway paid for largely by Allegiant Airlines, which chartered their flight from Baton Rouge, and Station Casinos Inc., which donated the rooms at the Boulder Station Hotel-Casino about 5 miles east of the Las Vegas Strip.
The rescue workers being ferried around town by local firefighters and are enjoying free tickets to see Barry Manilow at the Las Vegas Hilton.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans made a plea last weekend to colleagues in other cities to help arrange rest-and-relaxation furloughs for overstressed and traumatized first-responders, a call Mayor Oscar Goodman of Las Vegas answered by reaching out to a variety of hotel-casinos in the Las Vegas Valley. Other groups are taking breaks in Atlanta.
''We will do whatever it takes to get these people back into the frame of mind to return and to service the people of New Orleans," said Goodman at a news conference Tuesday night when the group arrived. The group returns to Baton Rouge on Saturday and starts work again Monday.
Goodman said the city would continue to host groups of rescue workers over the next month, noting it is one of the unique ways that this vacation destination can respond to the crisis.
''They asked us if we wanted a free trip to Vegas, and we would have been crazy to say no," said New Orleans Fire Department Captain Phil Mason, the ranking officer on the surprise furlough. No police officers were on the trip.
Yet many of those who came said they resisted the notion of taking a vacation but were ordered to do so by officials fearful that the burn-out rate among those immersed in handling the aftermath would overwhelm the workers.
''I do feel guilty that we're here while people are still back there suffering and needing us and doing the work," said Keller, 35, who brought his boyfriend, Topher Cummings, along. ''But there are plenty of people there now, and we have to go back this weekend to all of that, so this is good for us."
The first-responders have their own tales about what they faced at the center of the disaster. Keller recalls finding a man in a waterlogged park having a seizure because he didn't have his medication. Keller was helpless to do much more than get him into a boat and send him to the shelter. All the while, it was several days before Keller had any contact with Cummings, 21, who checked into the Hotel Monteleone, the French Quarter's oldest hotel, before the storm and stayed there five days.
EMS worker Danny Brown also struggled with that balance between worrying about his personal losses and doing his job. He spoke longingly of the day he and some colleagues were near his apartment in New Orleans and how he wanted to run over and get some money he had stashed there. But ''we couldn't make it there and get back in time, so we couldn't," Brown said.
Brown, 24, was in Vegas with his pregnant girlfriend, Gina Massey, 21. He resisted the trip, then saw it as a chance to console Massey, who spent the storm in Atlanta and whose parents' home was destroyed by flood waters.
That sentiment may explain why Las Vegas is not getting Katrina evacuees any time soon. After preparing for as many as 500 people to be flown to Las Vegas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency put that on hold Wednesday because evacuees in Houston resisted being moved on to yet another unfamiliar city.
The Vegas trip has been a source of great relief for the rescuers, though. Most are avoiding news coverage of the disaster, as suggested by the counselors they saw before they arrived. But everywhere they go, they're greeted as heroes in a way they're unaccustomed to as EMS workers.
''Normally, nobody pays attention to us, but I was at this store [Wednesday], and I was talking to the store manager who had family in New Orleans," said Brown, who spent Wednesday filling prescriptions, buying clothes, and walking the Strip. ''I was looking for the smallest bottle of cologne I could find, and he decided to give me this huge bottle of Kenneth Cole. It feels like we're in the military, everybody's so respectful and grateful."
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