Imagine your town flattened overnight. No power. No water. Families trapped in rubble. For days, you wait for help that never seems to arrive.

The first thing that hit me in Gulfport, Mississippi, wasn’t the sight. It was the smell. Raw sewage from flooded treatment plants. Rotting seafood from capsized shrimp boats.

Diesel and gasoline spilled across the water. All mixed together in water so thick with debris it didn’t move like water anymore.

One of my shipmates handed me a jar of Vicks VapoRub. “Put it in your nose,” he said. “It’ll help.” It didn’t help enough.

What I saw looked like a scene out of an apocalyptic film. Whole neighborhoods gone. Homes ripped from their foundations and carried into the bayou.

Those that remained were filled with mud several feet high. I went building to building on search-and-rescue, marking walls with spray paint — an “X” and a number telling the world how many people, alive or dead, had been found inside.

It was devastating. It was lawlessness. And at times, it felt like we were the only ones left.

The days were brutally hot. The sun beat down. There was almost no bottled water to give away. We handed out what little we had to people who hadn’t had water in days. I saw capsized vessels with bodies inside. I helped recover them — putting on biohazard gear for the first time outside of training.

Face shield, gloves, protective suit. This was no drill. This was death, and it was everywhere.

As I remember two pregnant women. One was stranded on a broken pier, living under a plastic tarp. No food, no water, nowhere to go.

She asked us for help and we got her out. The other didn’t make it. We found her in a capsized vessel. That image still haunts me.

Some memories hit like a punch even twenty years later. Seeing a diver bring up a recovery bag with the zipper open.

The arm of the deceased was visible. Reaching to pull them aboard, and feeling the skin slide away in my hands like meat from a chicken bone. We didn’t stop. We couldn’t.

I was in my early twenties then, on my first deployment, eager to prove myself, eager to help. I had no idea what I was walking into.

Most of what we did was about loss — pulling people from wreckage, marking homes, recovering the dead. But every once in a while, we got to save something instead. One of those moments was the Katrina dolphins.

When their enclosure was destroyed, these trained dolphins were swept into the Gulf. Our mission was to help recover them alive.

For a few hours, instead of pulling bodies from the water, we were part of saving life.

It reminded me of being a kid at Brookfield Zoo, when I was once picked out of the audience to pet a seventeen year old dolphin named Stormy.

For the first time in days, I felt human again. It didn’t erase the devastation. But it gave me just enough to keep going.

But today, I worry those lessons are being forgotten. After Katrina, America promised itself it would never again leave communities so unprepared, never again leave first responders without support.

FEMA was supposed to be strengthened — because when the unimaginable happens, there has to be someone ready to come.

With cuts to FEMA, and talks of it being dissolved, I worry we’re moving backward. I hear the same arguments people make when times are calm: that it costs too much, that states and towns can handle it alone.

But I’ve seen what happens when “alone” is all you have.

I’m not writing this from Washington. I’m writing this from Villa Park, Illinois. A small town. The kind of place people mean when they say, “local government will handle it.”

But if a freight train derails in the middle of our village — spilling hazardous chemicals into our streets — local government can’t “handle it alone.”

If a tornado levels half the town, or if flooding wipes out our neighborhoods, we’ll need help. Not someday. Not after a board meeting. Right then.

That’s what FEMA is for. Not just for hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. Not just for wildfires in California. For towns like mine. For places like yours.

Katrina taught me something I’ll never forget: in the worst moments, you look around and realize no one else is coming. You are it. You are the only hope people have.

That’s what FEMA is meant to be for America. The backup when no one else is coming. The safety net when your town is underwater, or on fire, or blown apart.

If we cut FEMA to the bone, or dissolve it entirely, we’re not just undoing bureaucracy. We’re leaving millions of Americans with no backup. We’re telling them they’re on their own.

I’ve seen what “on your own” looks like. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

I don’t write this to relive old nightmares. I write it as a warning. Because if we dismantle FEMA, we are dismantling America’s last line of defense.

Disasters aren’t slowing down. They’re bigger, faster, and less predictable — hurricanes that sit for days, wildfires that turn suburbs to ash in hours, floods that hit places that thought they’d never flood.

Small towns. Big cities. Red states. Blue states. It doesn’t matter. When that happens, you won’t care about politics. You won’t care about budgets. You’ll care about who shows up.

If FEMA is gutted or gone, there may be no one left to show up. That’s why I’m sounding the alarm. Because I’ve seen what it looks like when no one comes. I’ve carried the weight of knowing help arrived too late. And I know what it costs in lives when we gamble with preparedness.

We can’t wait until the next storm, the next fire, the next derailment, to realize what we’ve lost. By then it’s too late. If we let FEMA die, Americans will die with it. And no one else is coming.