1:00 a.m. Friday, Sept. 2. John Grzywacz, general manager of Central Iowa Transit, received a call asking if drivers from CIT can come to New Orleans to transport hurricane refugees to Dallas.

Six hours later, four buses with 10 Story County residents pulled out of town, headed south.

Jessica Schmidt, senior in human, adult and family services, was among them. Schmidt, who returned early Tuesday morning in time to make it to her bus route, said the decision to go was not a difficult one to make.

“We were very ready to be of help,” Schmidt said. “I went down there thinking, ‘OK, this needs to be done.’”

Brent Klooster, charter operations manager of CIT, said he agreed, saying his first thought was, “let’s go.”

Schmidt said as they neared southern Louisiana, they saw trucks full of bottled water, along with church groups and other people driving down for the same purpose.

As they drove across a bridge toward New Orleans, she said she could see the majority of boats overturned in the water. Children were playing outside and people were hanging laundry out to dry.

“They were still trying to function with whatever they had,” Schmidt said.

The group never reached New Orleans. They stopped in LaPlace, a town roughly 28 miles outside of the city because it was too violent to continue, Schmidt said. They sat waiting for the chaos to settle down, although Schmidt said she never felt afraid.

“It was just a mess,” Klooster said.

“FEMA was extremely unorganized,” Schmidt added.

Instead of transporting, Schmidt said they kept busy playing games with the children.

Schmidt said at one point the group was asked if they could drive residents unwilling to leave New Orleans out, but they declined because of safety reasons.

She told of a woman with her 3-month-old baby and 7-year-old daughter who had been stranded when the roof of their house fell in. She said they had brought down many bags of supplies from Ames, and gave three or four bags of baby clothes to the family. She had expected to hand the bags out to more people, but they were thankful they were able to help the family.

“If we could just help one family, it’s worth it,” Schmidt said.

She said she was amazed at how appreciative the people were of the volunteers who had taken time out of their vacation to try and help, and the overall patience showed by everyone.

She said her boss had gone down several hours earlier than the group and had been able to do some transporting. He told her he met grown men crying with gratitude that someone would drive all the way down from Iowa to help them.

Police officers were very concerned, constantly checking on volunteers to see if we were OK, Schmidt said. Schmidt told of a man who made two large pots of food and drove up and down the street feeding everyone who was there to help.

“Everyone was pulling for us,” Schmidt said of the family and friends of the volunteers who went down.