Four civilian employees from the Community Support Program at NAS Whidbey were honored Wednesday for their rapid response to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Rear Adm. William French addressed the 11 team members and presented them with letters of commendation and medallions at the Sept. 21 ceremony, which was attended by family and friends.

Bonnie Linscott, a Work and Family Life coordinator, Robert Root, a Group Fitness coordinator, Susan Porritt, a Work and Family Life supervisor, and Dave Eekhoff, Chief of Clinical Services, of NAS Whidbey were part of the 11-member team who volunteered to go to Meridian and Gulfport, Miss. More than 1,000 Navy families in the Gulf Coast region were left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

The team arrived on Sept. 5 and spent nearly two weeks providing shelter and aid to civilians and Navy families alike.

“The main purpose was to act as support for the family support team, to support staff in both Meridian and Gulfport,” Porritt said. “Gulfport did not have a lot of services up and running, and we made sure their immediate needs were met.”

“In Meridian, we had 60 Navy families relocated to our housing area,” Root said. We supported their need for furniture because most showed up with just the clothes on their backs.”

He said they moved furniture out of warehouses to families in need, and also set up computers so that displaced families could apply for aid from FEMA.

Root said the team quickly found out that FEMA forms couldn’t be downloaded and printed — they had to be filled out online. And with the local MCI intranet system down, the team had to set up computers on a different, working network.

“We made an arrangement with Meridian Community College to use their computer lab,” Root said. By the time the team left, nearly 30 computers were available for families to use.

In Gulfport, Eekhoff said, family needs were more immediate.

“People would show up at 6:30 a.m. and line up outside the family support center,” he said. “Most needed to access benefits from the Navy Marine Corps Relief Society.”

Eekhoff said the team was trained in how to interview families and prepare the relief checks so that people could get their money. The commissary and banks on the base were available for families who needed to cash those checks, Eekhoff said. And a special portable ATM was brought in by truck to the flightline in Meridian so people could access their bank accounts.

The Safe Haven program, generally reserved for displaced Navy families from overseas, was even put in motion. In the program, the Navy provides up to six months of funding to families throughout the U.S. who take in and support displaced Navy families.

Despite the obvious hardships of the individuals and families in the region, positive attitudes abounded.

“The thing that impressed me was the positive attitude that everyone had,” Linscott said. “Everybody, regardless of how little they had, could tell you of someone who was worse off than they were.”

The displaced families were even bending over backwards to make sure that they didn’t take from anyone else, Porritt added.

And the team itself wasn’t immune to the strain put on the region.

“While you’re in it, you didn’t realize you were expending as much energy as you did,” Eekhoff said. “We opened at 7 a.m. and we had people walking in at midnight. And we were living where we were working.”

He said the only time they left the support center was to eat in the galley or take cold showers in a nearby tent.

“The only food available was the galley, and they fed 7,000 people for free three meals a day,” Porritt said. Anyone who could make it to to the base was welcome to eat, she added.

Four more Navy response teams were already in place at the onset of Hurricane Rita late last week, should a call for assistance be put out by either Texas or Louisiana. Porritt said more volunteers were ready and willing to respond — even the four who just returned.

“If any of us have the opportunity to be on (the relief teams) again, we will,” Linscott said.