Editor’s note: This article is part of a series called “Where are they now?” Originally launched by the Park Rapids Enterprise in 2022, these stories highlight the achievements of area high school graduates. While Park Rapids, Nevis, Menahga and Laporte may be small, northern Minnesota towns, they produce large talent. If you know of an alum from the area who has landed a unique or exceptional job, earned a prestigious award or performed an extraordinary task, contact editor Shannon Geisen at [email protected].
Maria Richardson (née Roerick) has a favorite political cartoon. Dated Aug. 31, 2005 by John Sherffius, it shows a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter with a glowing halo instead of propellers, pulling a basketful of people out of the drink.
Captioned “New Orleans’ Saints,” it recognizes the role the Coast Guard played in rescuing flood victims following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, which breached levees protecting the city on Aug. 29 of that year.
Fresh out of training and newly assigned to Coast Guard Air Station New Orleans at the time, Richardson piloted one of the MH-65 Dolphin helicopters that rescued 6,014 people in one week from the flood waters that inundated the city.
To put that number in context, Air Station New Orleans personnel had saved a total of 3,689 lives throughout its 50-year history, prior to that operation.
Back home, Eva Pohl, the mother of one of Richardson’s high school classmates, and others saw then-Ensign Roerick on TV around that time, being interviewed with a group of other pilots about their rescue efforts.
‘Thought it would be an adventure’
A daughter of Gary and Sandy Roerick of Laporte, Richardson was one of about 25 members of the Laporte School graduating class of 1998, ahead of her two brothers, Tom (‘99) and Jim (‘02).
After graduation, she went straight to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.
“That started with a visit from a recruiter out of Fargo,” says Richardson. “He had seen my ASVAB scores and reached out to our family and asked to visit. He actually drove over, had supper with our family and made his pitch. I’d never heard of the Coast Guard before that. It was intriguing.”
She went on to apply for the academy, “the only service academy that doesn’t require Congressional appointment,” she says. “I needed an endorsement from a school counselor, and I had to write my own essay. At the time, I was applying to 10 or so other colleges, so it was easy enough to throw one more in the mix. But based on what the recruiter says, I didn’t really have any expectations.
“They sent me a conditional acceptance, based on doing a physical. So I thought, ‘This could be interesting.’ It just went from there. I thought it would be an adventure.”
Academy aligned with a lot of Richardson’s previous interests, such as sports, choir, band, community service and song-leading in church. She continued to be involved in all those things.
“My bigger goal beyond high school was to help people,” she says, noting that she had previously considered becoming a physical therapist. “Certainly, one of the things that appealed to me about the Coast Guard was, despite it being a military service, its commission was primarily humanitarian. Search and rescue sounded fun and exciting, helping people all at the same time.”
Academy and beyond
At the academy, Richardson earned a bachelor’s degree in marine and environmental science, “which also suited me very nicely,” she says. “My dad worked for the forest service, and I grew up outside, definitely intrigued by nature.”
At that time, academy graduates were required to go to sea to get experience in “the bread and butter of Coast Guard missions,” a rule that has changed since then. “It was something that I appreciated through the course of my career,” she says. “I went to the Coast Guard Cutter Legare, a 270-foot cutter out of Portsmouth, Va. I spent a year-and-a-half on the Legare. I became a deck watch officer, which is the qualification to be on the bridge and drive the ship.”
Near the end of her tour, she was accepted to flight school and moved to Pensacola, Fla. to train at the Naval Air Station. For the next year-and-a-half, she learned to fly, starting in fixed-wing aircraft. But she grew more interested in flying helicopters, “where, I guess, most of the action is in the Coast Guard, and it sounded like the most fun,” she says.
Assigned to Air Station New Orleans, she took another eight weeks of training on the specific helicopter she was going to fly: the MH-65 Dolphin.
“I graduated on the Friday before Hurricane Katrina hit,” she says. “So, I had a weekend to run back home, and I bought my first house in New Orleans,” then immediately had to evacuate.
“They called me on Monday morning and said, ‘We need all qualified pilots. Report back.’”
“The next day, I was helping fly rescue missions in New Orleans,” Richardson says. “That was a very memorable tour, for all sorts of reasons.”
She downplays her actions during the rescue operation, describing it as no different from what everyone else was doing. Regarding her moment on TV, Richardson says media crews came through, looking to tell the story of “a very significant natural disaster in our country’s history, so they just rotated us all through.
“We all got turns interviewing with radio or books or newspapers or TV. One of the more significant ones that I ended up on was CBS This Morning. Six or seven of us were interviewed together. That particular story, I remember some of my classmates reaching out later and saying, ‘I was lying on my couch and I heard ‘Maria Roerick’ on the morning news!”
She recalls another interview on a Weather Channel series, Storm Stories. “They also interviewed a pretty good handful of us, and I was included,” she says.
Richardson says the rescue operation was a success for the Coast Guard, while other levels of government failed in the eyes of the public.
“It was really neat to be part of that, and certainly personally rewarding to help as many people as we did,” she says. “The individual stories are intense and sad, and the effort was heroic. I’m grateful that I was able to help.”
Miracle rescue
Later in her tour in New Orleans, Richardson flew out in response to a flare sighting off the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, a fixed-wing aircraft out of Mobile, Ala. was searching for a missing fisherman. The two search areas crossed each other, going east and west, “and they were in different enough spaces that they didn’t correlate that the missing fisherman might have shot off the flare,” she says.
Even a year after Katrina, the coastal waters were still covered with debris, including derelict vessels. “As we were flying along, we saw the bow of a boat,” she says. “I noted, in particular, that it seemed odd that it was a little further offshore than I had seen other derelict vessels or debris. Out of natural curiosity, we circled back to look.
“All it was was the top three or four feet of the bow, sticking vertically out of the water. When we flew by, we were looking at the underside of the boat that would normally be in the water. As we circled around, there was the fisherman who was overdue. He had wrapped his arm around the bowline and was hanging on.
“He was outside the search area that the airplane was assigned to go look for him. We were able to get him to a hospital. He was severely hypothermic, but to my understanding, he survived.”
Richardson calls it a “fun surprise” that, “by God’s will, we not only saw the boat but decided to spin around and take a look, and there he was.”
Post-New Orleans
Toward the end of her four-year tour in New Orleans, she signed up for a training opportunity in aeronautical engineering. She calls it the equivalent of studying for a graduate degree while continuing to serve as a pilot.
Upon completion, she was assigned as an assistant aeronautical engineer in San Francisco. Three years into that tour tour, a colleague’s retirement enabled her to “fleet up” into the engineering officer’s position, which she held for two years.
In 2014, Richardson moved to “flying a desk” in St. Louis, as the logistics officer for Sector Upper Mississippi River. “That office manages the Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri rivers,” she says. “They are all considered federal waterways, and a very large amount of the U.S. economic engine floats on those rivers. It’s the Coast Guard that oversees the safety and security of those commercial operations.”
After three years there, Richardson took an opportunity to explore unmanned systems. “Again, it sounded like an adventure,” she says.
That took her to Corpus Christi, Texas, flying the MQ-9 Predator, which required only a minimal ground crew in-country. The rest of the team operated from Texas, keeping the unmanned aircraft aloft 14 hours a day.
“We used it as a patrol aircraft, primarily patrolling the Texas-Mexico border,” Richardson says. “When statistics are cited about the number of migrants crossing, and how many of them got away and how many were apprehended, those stats come from our surveillance.”
They also did a drug interdiction mission in the waters off Central and South America. “We would visually intercept drug runners,” she says, “running sometimes thousands of pounds of cocaine, marijuana, and we’d pass the information on to surface assets that could respond. That was a pretty unique and interesting mission.”
After about a year in Corpus Christi, the program was moved to San Angelo, Texas, five hours away, and Richardson opted to move with it. “We ended up staying there for three years,” she says, “and that brought me to retirement.”
In the summer of 2022, she hung up the helmet after a 24-year career, including 20 years of active duty. Along with Michael, her husband of 13 years, she transitioned to raising four children and 20 chickens near Burtrum, Minn.
The Richardsons have three girls and one boy between 5 and 12 years of age. Marie also teaches fifth grade math at the Catholic school her children attend in Round Prairie.
She says the quotes and memes about “flying like the bird” are all true. “It’s like nothing else. There’s nothing better than being able to see all of God’s creation from 500 feet, the beauty of it.
“I loved it. The adventure was fun. There were plenty of scary and exciting moments that pushed the limits of my abilities and tested me in ways I never could have imagined in high school.”
Despite challenges and difficulties along the way, she says, “Overall, I wouldn’t trade it. It was through that career path that I met my husband and ended up with the beautiful family that I have. It’s worked out wonderfully. I feel very blessed.”