Men who searched for Katrina victims at work again

Most of the men in the 2 1/2-ton truck had embarked on the grim hunt for bodies in the wreckage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. On Sunday, they prepared to risk their lives for a similar search in their own backyards.

SWAT team commander Sgt. Rodney Harrison and five other members of the Port Arthur Police Department drove the truck into the waters covering Texas 87. Their mission: search portions of Sabine Pass for stragglers and corpses.

Harrison and two of the other men had worked the flooded Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in 2005. The whole group had just returned from a similar mission in Houma, La., which was hit hard by Hurricane Gustav.

"Everybody's sort of running on juice now," Harrison said as an alligator ominously floated past and fish leapt from the murky water. "It's a little bit easier when it's in our own backyard. ... We know the people, we know the ins and outs."

Chugging along at 5 mph, Lt. Troy LeBoeuf was having trouble keeping the truck on pavement. Less than a half hour into the trip, the gear shift broke off in his hand.

He continued for a distance in third gear, but the clutch threatened to burn up. After a few moments of brainstorming, LeBoeuf slipped an eye bolt over the broken stem. The team was back in business.

Then it started to pour.

About an hour into the excursion, LeBoeuf shouted over the diesel engine's roar that the truck was as deep as it could be without swamping the engine.

Worried that "we would become part of the problem," Harrison decided it was time to turn around. But that's not so easy when you're essentially out in the Gulf of Mexico.

"We can back up to that high spot," Officer Mark Holmes shouted, spitting tobacco juice into the brackish water.

"What high spot?" the driver demanded.

Stripping off his radios and other gear, Harrison climbed over the side and sank waist-deep into frigid water to guide the truck.

"Come on back!" he yelled, backing slowly toward a stilt house. "You've got good pavement here."

LeBoeuf cautiously guided the truck back to the staging area, swerving to avoid a 7-foot alligator sunning itself on newly exposed pavement. After two hours of struggle, the team had little to show for their work other than sopping wet clothes and exhaust-streaked faces.

Harrison said the equipment problems were frustrating. But what bothered him more was the thought that he and his men were risking their lives to help people who shouldn't have even been in Sabine Pass.

"You have people that have families at home who put their lives on the line to come out here and save somebody that made a bad decision," he said. "I don't think that's right. I don't think that's fair to everybody."

Unfortunately, he said, "the law doesn't give us the right to drag them out of there in handcuffs for their own well being. Maybe in the future, the law might change."