I W ATC H A M A N LO S E A N D I T M Y . 🧾 On August 14, 2016, I watched a man on WBRZ lose everything on live television. The next morning I started dispatching boats from a Facebook group. Ten years later, here's the whole record. I'm Rob Gaudet. Across 25,000+ posts on this page, I've kept the camera pointed where it belonged — on survivors, volunteers, partners, and the communities doing the rebuilding. Today I'm stepping into the frame. Just this once. Then I'll get back out of it.
I'm posting 80 screenshots — my own posts and the posts of the people around me, August 14 through the end of 2016. Every one is timestamped. Read them in order and you'll watch the whole thing get built in real time. I founded Cajun Navy Ground Force in the aftermath. We've delivered over 60 million in aid to families over the past 10 years. See all 80 screenshots here. ━━━━━━━━━ 🌧️ THE STORM NOBODY WAS WATCHING No hurricane. No name. Just rain that caught everyone off guard — eight dead, 40,000 homes flooded. And it landed in the worst possible week for attention. Trump vs. Clinton owned every headline. The Rio Olympics owned every screen. Louisiana was drowning in silence. So we fought two battles at once — and the screenshots document both. ━━━━━━━━━
⚓ BATTLE ONE: TURNING FACEBOOK INTO A 911 SYSTEM Scroll the August 14–21 screenshots and you'll see the system get built piece by piece: 📍 Aug 15 — The rescue list and the map. I opened a running rescue list and built a live Google map called Cajun Navy Pickups. Look closely at that screenshot: the pins are color-coded, and the caption says the blue ones aren't vetted yet. That's triage. We weren't just collecting cries for help — we were verifying them before a boat burned fuel on them. Every one of those pins was a family. 📍 Aug 15 — The intake standard. Post an address. We must have a phone number. Name your source. If you're safe, monitor the group for people who aren't. We pulled requests off Twitter with #LAFloodRescue and fed them into the list.
📍 Aug 16 — The morning dispatch. Read that one twice. Staging locations. Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office coordination. And a named dispatch team: Cade Roux running boaters, Molly Oehmichen and Trey Roberts on dispatch, Christie Gaudet researching open roads, Alaina Hebert on resources and food, Jimmy Allgood and Nicole Buffinet on donations. What I told the authorities that morning was simple: Cajun Navy is organized. We have dispatch. We have CB comms. Every boater is tracked on GPS. Every boater carries a full day of food and water.
📍 Aug 16 — The protocol. 911 first. Parish emergency center second. GOHSEP third. Post here only if all of it failed — and when you do, full contact info, check for updates before reposting, and don't post and leave. Why so strict? Because duplicate requests were sending boats to families already rescued. Triage isn't red tape. It's how the next boat reaches someone still on a roof.
📍 Aug 16 — Working inside the system. Boat captains couldn't launch in some zones without police permission. So we coordinated instead of going around. I was reaching out to parish emergency leadership directly so they'd know who we were. That effort was greenlighted all the way up to the Governor's office.
📍 Aug 20 — What the officials said afterward. The Advocate ran it: Livingston Parish was roughly 150 calls behind. Parish President Layton Ricks admitted they'd been wary of civilians in the water at first — and then said plainly that they couldn't have done it without us.
📡 BATTLE TWO: MAKING AMERICA LOOK AT LOUISIANA The screenshots show this half of the fight too — and it was every bit as deliberate: 📍 Aug 17 — I asked 220,000 of you to become citizen reporters. That graphic says it outright: NATIONAL AWARENESS = RELIEF SUPPORT. I asked you to flood social media with your own photos and 1–2 minute videos under #CajunNavy and #LAFloodPhotos. I wrote in that post that it wasn't about glorification, it was about awareness — and that I knew it went against our instincts, because south Louisiana is private by nature and people were in pain. But the country couldn't help what it couldn't see. 📍 Aug 18 — It worked. Front page of the Drudge Report. That same day I was on the Rush Limbaugh show — there's an email in this archive where I say so while working distribution logistics into Mississippi. 📍 Aug 20–29 — The dam broke. IJR ran a piece on the man behind the Cajun Navy. The Weather Channel put me on air. The Wall Street Journal published The Great Cajun Navy. Fox Business followed in October, where I walked through exactly how the group I organized did what it did. And Connie Hair — the friend who pushed me to take this to the national press in the first place — is in these screenshots too, amplifying every hit. ━━━━━━━━━ 🤝 WHAT THE ARCHIVE ALSO SHOWS: WE SHARED IT This is the part I'm proudest of. On August 17 I wrote: "If you are helping put boats in the water and moving people and supplies, YOU are the Cajun Navy." That was never a brand. It was an invitation. On August 21, after meeting Chris King of the Cajun Army, I wrote a long post at 4 a.m. begging you all to go volunteer with them — because rescue was ending and gutting houses was beginning. I linked their volunteer page eight times in one post. Also on August 21, Chris tagged me on an urgent Tangipahoa Emergency
Management request with four words: "is this something the Navy can handle?" That's what we were to each other. Partners, not competitors. On August 23, Sean Ardoin came to me to plug his Lake Charles benefit concert into our network — "when 1 hurts, we all HELP." On August 25, Katherine read a post here on a Monday night, packed her truck with blankets, toiletries, games, puzzles and movies for the kids, and drove it to the shelter in Baker herself. That's the record. A hub that made other people's work bigger. ━━━━━━━━━ 💵 AND WE DIDN'T TAKE A DOLLAR Read the August 17 and August 21 screenshots carefully. No website. No logo. No t-shirts. No swag. No GoFundMe. No donations. Nothing for sale. Posted publicly, over and over, while people were still being pulled off rooftops — because sites were already popping up using the name. We were an all-volunteer group running on Facebook, Zello, Glympse and Google Maps. That's it. ━━━━━━━━━ 🕯️ WHAT IT COST There's a post in here from 4 a.m. on August 21 where I admit I'd eaten about one meal a day for five days and was sleeping two to three hours a night. And one from August 18 that still gets me. I told a volunteer I could only imagine how hard it was. He said: "It is hard... but some people were born for these moments. They're the ones I'm working with." That's who you were. ━━━━━━━━━
🛤️ AND THEN WE KEPT GOING The floods didn't end the work — they started it. Hurricane Matthew. Harvey. Laura and Delta, where we ran relief in Southwest Louisiana for 12+ months. Ida, in Houma. 25+ disaster responses in ten years, now under Ground Force Humanitarian Aid. In 2017 the state named me Louisianian of the Year for the 2016 response. In 2019 I was texting Senator Marco Rubio about staging for Dorian. In 2023 I was texting Mike Johnson to get a situation report for elderly folks losing power in North Louisiana in extreme heat. The phone numbers changed. The mission never did. ━━━━━━━━━ 🙏 NOW THE CAMERA GOES BACK WHERE IT BELONGS I don't do drama. Never have. I'm not here to argue with anybody — I'm here to put ten years of receipts in one place and let them speak. But history deserves a record, and this one belongs to all of us. 👇 IF YOU WERE HERE IN AUGUST 2016 — COMMENT BELOW. Were you rescued? Tell us where, and who came for you. Did you run a boat? Tell us what you saw. Did you work dispatch or Zello? You were the switchboard. Did you post a request for a family member? Tell us how it ended. Did you load a truck like Katherine did? Did you first hear about this flood from Drudge, Limbaugh, the Weather Channel or the WSJ? Then you're proof battle two worked. Tag someone who was in the water with you. I've spent ten years telling your stories. This thread is where you tell them yourselves. 💙 Louisiana remembers. — Rob Gaudet, Founder, Cajun Navy Ground Force
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