Cumberland County Sheriff’s Deputy Joe Schnupp, along with fellow deputies David Dunnemann and James Ambrose, drove 1,650 miles to Franklinton, Louisiana last Wednesday to help with Hurricane Katrina relief.

Schnupp is well known in the Lakes Region area as the D.A.R.E. officer for Raymond, Casco, Naples and Sebago and for his work with the community-based Crime Watch program and other programs in Standish.

In a phone interview from Louisiana on Tuesday, Schnupp shared his circumstances of the past week.

“It’s a life-changing experience,” Schnupp said. “The depth and scope of the devastation on T.V. was bad but with boots on the ground, it’s indescribable.”

Since his arrival in the hurricane-torn communities of the Gulf Coast, Schnupp has been hard at work passing out supplies and cutting down trees that cover much of the landscape.

For the first two days, he worked in a distribution center in Pine, Louisiana on the outskirts of Bogalusa, alongside inmates from correctional institutions and county jails. They passed out water, medical supplies and MRE’s, which stands for Meals Ready to Eat. These meals, also used by the military, are pouches of pre-cooked, ready-to-eat food.

Schnupp and others like him have filled in with these tasks so that local deputies could go rest and see family members, some of them for the first time since the hurricane struck.

The days have become blurred for Schnupp, but on one of them, he and others traveled to Baton Rouge to deliver supplies to a church distribution point.

“I thought it was bad in Pine,” Schnupp said, “until I went there.”

He saw churches and other buildings in Baton Rouge with all their windows blown out, metal buildings buckled from the pressure of the water. And trees down. Everywhere.

Schnupp has spent much of his time cutting up the trees tossed across the landscape like bundles of pick-up-sticks. In Tuesday’s 102-degree heat, he was cutting up trees near a golf course when the course’s automatic sprinklers came on. He put down his chainsaw and ran through the cooling mist like a kid before returning to work.

Schnupp and the other Cumberland County deputies have been housed at Trinity Baptist Church in Franklinton, one of the many churches that have opened their doors to shelter the homeless and the volunteers.

One of the church’s temporary residents is an 80-year-old woman whose house is covered by fallen trees. She’s always there to greet Schnupp and he calls her “the house mother.” Her family, who lives in Texas, hasn’t come to get her but all she really wants is to move back to her own home.

When Schnupp and the other deputies arrived, the local sheriff, Aubrey Jones, told them: “I want you boys to go home just the way you got here – don’t do anything silly.”

The sheriff and his department constantly express their appreciation for the volunteers from Maine, said Schnupp, saying, “Any time you have a problem in Maine, we’ll be there. We don’t know how to drive on ice, but we’ll come.”

According to Schnupp, the people of Louisiana are “extremely resilient individuals,” possessing a lot of characteristics similar to those of Mainers.

He’s also encouraged by the outpouring of help from people in all parts of the United States.

And those back here in Maine are among them. Even as the Cumberland County Sheriff’s deputies prepared to go south, local businesses and individuals contributed to their trip.

Martin’s Point Healthcare gave them all their shots at no cost, L.L. Bean donated backpacks for water, the Long Island Fire Department held a dance and “passed the boot” with a Long Island church giving $300 for a total of over $500.

Even St. Patrick’s School, attended by two of Schnupp’s children, participated. According to Joe Schnupp’s wife, Kris, the school held a bottled water drive that netted 208 cases of water as well as other essentials.

Kris, who works as a nurse and as a daycare provider, has used her husband’s trip as a learning experience for their three children, Sarah, 7, Patrick, 5, and Erin, 3. Even her youngest can now point to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on the map.

“The good thing for them is they’re learning a sense of community and helping,” she said.

And what would Schnupp like them, as well as all the children he works with regularly in the Lakes Region, to know?

“I’d like the kids to know that we’re such a quick society,” Schnupp said. “We click the clicker when we don’t want to see something. Here, we can’t just click it and change what we’re seeing. It’s a long-term problem with long-term solutions.”