Students at the Frenchburg Job Corps Academy have served in some pretty stressful places while doing relief work, but they had seen nothing like New Orleans' Louis Armstrong International Airport after Hurricane Katrina.

"We rolled into the airport at about 8 o'clock at night on Sept. 3, and there must have been at least 2,000 people just huddled up on the sidewalk out in front," said Job Corps student Kent Bannister.

"They all seemed to be kind of confused and didn't know what was going on. There was a lot of garbage laying around, a lot of people were sick. Everything was just a complete mess, and it kind of smelled a little bit too."

Undeterred by the conditions, the Frenchburg group would spend the next two weeks at the airport, which served as a staging area for the massive Katrina relief effort in New Orleans, as well as a triage site for evacuees who needed medical treatment. During their tour, the students unloaded trucks, cleaned bathrooms and generally helped do whatever was needed to keep the staging area operating.

More than 2,400 patients -- many of them elderly and very ill -- were processed through the Louis Armstrong Airport during the Labor Day weekend. And Lt. Col. Anne Conwell, mission commander for the Air Force's 43rd Air Medical Evacuation Squadron, credited Job Corps students with helping make the system work.

"We couldn't have done it without them," Conwell said in a statement.

Altogether, the Frenchburg center sent five crews to help in the aftermath of Katrina, and one crew of nine students is still on duty in New Orleans. In addition to the Frenchburg students, crews from the Pine Knot and Great Onyx Job Corps centers in Kentucky, plus a center in Coeburn, Va., worked in the Katrina relief effort.

On Friday, some other students from the Frenchburg center were sent to Texas to help out, if needed, in Hurricane Rita.