As Herb Ennis moved through the wreckage, he found an older man searching for his wife.
The couple had climbed into their attic, holding hands, as floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina rose around them. Then the water surged through.
“He hadn’t seen her since,” Ennis said. “But he had one of her shoes. He showed it to us and said, ‘These are what she had on.’ ”
The man was looking where the house used to be, but “nothing was there anymore,” Ennis said. He and his teammates with Florida Task Force 8 expanded the search. Based on the flood pattern and the man’s description of his home, they found a pitched roof with shingles that matched. She was inside.
“It wasn’t a happy ending, but it was closure for him,” Ennis said. “That stuck with me.”
Herb “Bubba” Ennis of Gainesville Fire Rescue, right, and Lt. Robert Graff of Marion County Fire Rescue walk through a neighborhood destroyed by Hurricane Katrina as the look for victims and survivors in Bay St. Louis, Miss., on Aug. 31, 2005.
The 14-day deployment to the Gulf Coast in 2005 marked the first large-scale activation for Task Force 8, a regional search-and-rescue team made up of firefighters and specialists from Gainesville, Ocala, and Alachua and Marion counties. The team had formed less than two years before Katrina hit. Within hours of landfall, they were on the road to Mississippi.
“Our first stop was Bay St. Louis, which was pretty much ground zero,” Ennis said. “We were new to the search and rescue theater, so we were learning on the go.”
Since then, Task Force 8 has responded to nearly every major disaster in the southeastern U.S., including Hurricane Dorian 2019, Hurricane Helene in 2024, and the Surfside condo collapse in 2021. In July, the team traveled to assist with recovery efforts following historic flooding in Texas.
What began as a small 30-person operation has grown into a highly trained state-recognized unit able to deploy by land, air, or sea.
Ennis, a second-generation firefighter who started at Gainesville Fire Rescue in 2003, now serves as captain and oversees the department’s technical rescue training. On top of their daily fire and EMS duties, crews spend Mondays and Fridays practicing rope rescue, building collapse response, and other complex scenarios. Quarterly drills simulate full-scale events like trench rescues, wilderness searches, and animal extrication.
“We eat, sleep, and breathe this job,” Ennis said. “These are all perishable skills. If you don’t use them, you won’t be able to perform. You won’t have time to prepare when something happens.”
During Katrina, the team worked in devastated neighborhoods “that looked like lumberyards,” Ennis said — without any structures, roads or landmarks. They’d walk across debris fields 10 feet off the ground, using older maps to figure out where houses used to be. Task Force 8 slept in parking lots, ate military rations, and dug latrines with shovels. Residents who had lost everything still came forward to offer hot meals.
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“Those people had nothing, and they were cooking for us,” Ennis said. “That’s something I’ll never forget.”
Only two current Gainesville firefighters deployed to Katrina remain: Ennis and Todd Willoughby, who both joined GFR the same year. Everyone else from the original team has since retired.
The experience left a mark — and a mission to improve, according to Ennis. Today, Task Force 8 travels with boats, cargo trucks, side-by-sides, and mobile command tents. They train with the National Guard and can be dropped into hard-hit areas by helicopter and remain self-sufficient for up to 72 hours.
“There’s not much we can’t handle now,” Ennis said. We’ve come a long way.”
Some of what they carry, though, can’t be seen. Ennis said the mental toll of disasters doesn’t always surface right away — but it lingers.
“Everybody who does this has ghosts,” he said. “No matter what, you can’t unsee what you see.
Everyone deals with it differently. A lot of ours is laughter, honestly. It’s actually a coping mechanism that helps us make things a little more normal.”
Although the ghosts remain, the fire service is working to shed the tough-guy culture Ennis encountered after Katrina and take mental health seriously. More resources are available now than ever before. Through it all, the sense of purpose remains.
“We’re here for our community, and our community is not just right here where we live,” Ennis said. “It can stretch the whole country, depending where we’re called to help serve. If, at the end of your career, you’ve been able to positively impact enough people’s lives that you can’t even count them, that’s what makes the ghosts rest.”
This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Gainesville Fire Rescue captain recalls Hurricane Katrina deployment