Many people from this area responded five years ago when hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast, including a petty officer stationed in Philadelphia now a search and rescue controller for the Coast Guard.

KYW’s Steve Tawa reports in Katrina’s aftermath, now 28-year-old 1st class petty officer Jared Stanton  (photo) was among the 5,600 Coast Guard responders.

At the time, he was aboard a 378-foot Coast Guard cutter deployed to the Louisiana coast, doing whatever was needed for about two weeks:

“We delivered about 10,000 bottles of water for local agencies to disperse.”

And he was among the work crews sent out to help parish schools, by controlling flooding, dump trucking in dirt, securing walls and ceilings and rebuilding playgrounds:

“A lot of trees down. It definitely looked uninhabitable. It looked like a ghost town when we arrived there.”

Stanton views it as his most important deployment:

“Because I was able to help out the community during a storm.”

(photo by KYW’s Steve Tawa)