Coast guard crews got an early look at the Haiti quake devastation

Some of the first Americans dispatched to Haiti left Florida at 3 a.m. Wednesday with a simple mission: Tell the world how bad it is there.

Coast Guard Lt. Comm. Elizabeth Fielder piloted a C-130 and her seven-member crew three hours south. While another C-130 crew headed to northern Haiti to assess the situation there, her crew headed south toward Port-au-Prince to radio back its observations to Coast Guard operations in Miami.

The first thing she remembers seeing is the presidential palace, pancaked by the force of the quake.

"That's a huge area," Fielder said in an interview Thursday night. "The palace was all caved in. And all the homes nearby were demolished."

"Basically, we were the only ones there," she recalled. "We saw the United Nations. They had one aircraft that landed while we were there and two helicopters that were spun up but never took off. Air traffic control at the time was down. It was pretty quiet, actually.

"We could see a whole hillside of houses that were leveled," she said.

Fielder and her crew have flown several missions off the coast of Haiti, but Wednesday morning she flew directly over the country for the first time, often just 500 feet off the ground.

"We were just looking at these people's faces, and they're waiting for us to land and bring them supplies," Fielder said. That help would have to come later.

Fielder, 36, has piloted C-130s for most of her 13 years with the Coast Guard. She flew similar assessment missions over New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, helping coordinate the helicopter recoveries that earned the Coast Guard international acclaim. Although there are risks and long hours, Fielder's family is proud of her service, she said.

"I think they get as excited as I do. They text me: 'Are you going to Haiti? What are you doing?' " Fielder said. Her father, a Navy veteran who flew P-3s, gets especially nostalgic when she tells him stories.

Fielder and her husband are two of the thousands of Coasties stationed at Air Station Clearwater. She keeps a backpack ready, knowing deployments can come at anytime. The couple has no children, but often need to find someone to watch their dog.

"It's one of those things where you're waiting for hours on call and then everything happens really, really fast," Fielder said. "I saw that the earthquake hit on Tuesday, and I'm sure that we're going somewhere. Sure enough, in the middle of the night -- it's always in the middle of the night -- we got the call."