Faith Tomoyasu was at Honolulu International Airport yesterday to welcome her husband back home from a two-week Hurricane Katrina relief stint in Louisiana with a kukui-nut lei and the words he most wanted to hear:

"It's in the car," Faith told her husband, drawing a gleeful smile from Jason Tomoyasu, a Honolulu Emergency Medical Services paramedic who could hardly wait to dig into his favorite plate lunch of teriyaki beef, noodles, mac salad and rice from Heights Drive-In in 'Aiea.

"The shrimp (in Louisiana) was good but I missed the local food, especially the sticky-kind rice," Jason Tomoyasu said.

Tomoyasu was on the Hawai'i Disaster Medical Assistance Strike Team that did triage at New Orleans airport at the start of the recovery effort, and provided the first on-scene medical assistance to Plaquemines, Louisiana's southernmost parish where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Besides the return to local food, coming home also means a return to creature comforts such as baths, safe streets and clean water — normal living conditions — for the crew.

The team was headed by Healthcare Association of Hawai'i nurse Toby Clairmont and also included Dr. Monte Elias of Straub Hospital; nurses Annie McCoy (Maui Memorial Hospital), Sandra Melton and Cynthia Junkin (The Queen's Medical Center) and Peter Hughes (Kaiser Permanente Medical Center); retired Honolulu EMS paramedic Dennis Lai Hipp; and Tomoyasu. Nurse Kenneth Moskow of Hawai'i Medical Professional Services also went to Louisiana but had to return home ahead of the team because of a family emergency.

"The first phase of emergency response is over and they're into the second phase of recovery, trying to put the pieces together," said Clairmont, who noted the team worked well together in accomplishing its assignment.

Working disasters is nothing new for Tomoyasu.

He was involved in the Virgin Islands hurricane relief effort in the early 1990s, and in Guam after the August 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801 that killed 224 of 254 passengers. But nothing he has seen comes close to the devastation in Louisiana.

The environmental damage, especially the floodwaters, is horrific, he noted.

"The water is contaminated by sewage and petroleum products, and it's so bad that it makes the Ala Wai look like drinking water," Tomoyasu said. "We could see oil slicks for miles. The animals can't drink it.

"They've got a lot of problems with contaminated water and contaminated soil. In Plaquemines, they have to pump this water into the Mississippi or the Gulf of Mexico. The long-term effects of this is scary. While I was there, I kept thinking this could happen to us (in Hawai'i). We could be in this situation."

Working triage at the airport was like "taking people from a city the size of Honolulu and sending them to Oklahoma," Tomoyasu said. On the medical side, he noted it was mostly "taking care of scrapes that could get infected and inoculations" because by the time the team got to Plaquemines Parish, what victims needed most was social services.

While in Plaquemines, the team did its field work under the protection of federal officers because of the threat of snipers. Recalling that one vehicle transporting a team not from Hawai'i was hit by gunfire, Clairmont said, "I can't understand why anyone would be shooting at people trying to help them."

Elias described his first disaster relief experience as unique.

"You might see 20 to 30 people in a day (at the hospital here) but not 18,000," Elias said of the triage work at the airport. "We went there and saw the need right away. People were getting off buses or trucks lined up for three miles, all of them needing help, and there was no medical presence."

The team spent about one-third of their mission time at the airport before going to Plaquemines, where the injured were being treated at a church.

Reach Rod Ohira at rohira@honoluluadvertiser.com.