Chapter 2 - The gathering storm
August 26-27, 2005
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Debbie Hill, the director of operations for the Humane Society of Missouri, is one of those take-charge types who rarely minces words. But on the eve of a big operation, she enjoys being subtle.
“So what are you doing Thursday?” she would ask each member of her rescue team. “Got any plans?”
This approach had gotten to be kind of a joke among the crew. By late August of 2005, team members had worked with Hill long enough to know they were going to be sent out of town on a difficult mission. The weather reports were telling them where they were headed -- and that this one was going to be a challenge like no other.
Although the mission would disrupt their lives and take them far from their homes and families, the rescue team members were raring to go. “We’re adrenaline junkies,” Hill says.
Well-trained junkies. The HSMO rescue workers had broad experience covering disasters, performing animal rescues after tornadoes in southwest Missouri and Oklahoma City, and during the devastating floods in 1993 in their own community. They had learned how to pull traumatized animals out of difficult predicaments – in the dark, among downed power lines, from rooftops, and beneath piles of rubble. Just as importantly, they learned how to work with the authorities involved in the human rescue. These officials could hamper and even prevent animal rescues if not approached with the proper combination of delicacy and assertiveness.
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Over the years HSMO had acquired quite a bit of rescue gear, not the least of which was a vehicle known as BART (Big Animal Rescue Trailer), a 26-foot custom-built trailer, purchased in 2002 for more than $106,000. The unit has 51 stainless steel cages which can house between 50-100 animals depending on the size and species. HSMO has put thousands of miles on the trailer, using it for mobile adoptions, a rescue animal transport, and a disaster shelter.
As Hurricane Katrina closed in on the Gulf Coast, Hill and her boss, Kathy Warnick, began to plan how HSMO would respond. There was no question that they would be heading for the Gulf, but where? And who was in charge? As Warnick watched the televised reports on the weekend before the hurricane struck, she decided her group must take everything they needed with them …food, water, blankets, veterinary supplies, chain saws, a 14-foot skiff…. They would have to be self-sufficient.
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When a tropical storm or a hurricane comes around, southern Mississippians don’t panic. Many have ridden out previous storms without ever leaving their homes. Sometimes they evacuate, but then just for a day or two. Many remember the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Camille that took the lives of 256 Gulf Coast residents. But it had been 36 years since then -- plenty of time for people to forget.
Animal shelter worker Sharon Polk carried a different attitude toward the weather. Polk would keep an eye on the 24-hour Weather Channel, sometimes watching it for hours. She paid attention not just to the gulf coast, but to satellite pictures from Africa and the mid-Atlantic. Polk knows that tropical waves that surface off the coast of Africa often show up days later around the Bahamas as tropical storms. A few storms get a shot of adrenaline from the unstable atmospheric conditions around the equator and turn into full-fledged hurricanes. In the late summer, they can go pinwheeling around Florida, the Keys, and Cuba. Then every so often, a hurricane heads for the Mississippi coast: home to sun-kissed beaches, casinos, oil refineries, a space center, 364,000 people, and some 91,000 pets.
Home, too, to the Humane Society of Southern Mississippi where Polk has worked for the last three years as its adoption manager.
Her work and those of her 25 colleagues has always been challenging and difficult. The HSSM staffers work in an antiquated and cramped facility – a former armory -- bordered on one side by the local airport and on the other by a sewage treatment plant. Imagine spending a day among dozens of barking dogs, droning airplanes, and the smells brewing from both the shelter and the treatment plant.
While enduring this daily assault on their senses, many of the workers earn a wage on par with that of busboys and sanitation workers. This makes sense only if you consider that HSSM workers frequently found themselves cleaning up someone else’s mess. Most Mississippians do not spay or neuter their pets, leading to an enormous stray animal population.
As Hurricane Katrina bore down on them, Polk and her colleagues did all they could to protect the animals in the shelter. In years past, HSSM had been able to call on the Washington-based Humane Society of the United States for help when a hurricane was on its way. The organization would send people to evacuate the animals. Trucks and vans would come from Florida or even as far away as Colorado. Each time they had been able to relocate the animals ahead of the storm. And when the HSSM workers returned, they found the shelter just as they had left it – dry and intact.
But this time, no safe haven could be found for the animals. They would have to remain behind with two shelter workers bunking in with them.
HSSM had outdoor pens for many of its dogs. Now all of them had to be brought inside for the storm. Each of about 125 dogs and cats were placed in a cage. The cages were constructed as three tiers, to a height of seven feet, with one animal housed above another. The larger dogs were housed in an indoor run. Some individual cages were placed on counter tops.
Into one of the countertop cages went a dog named Pepper. She was the shelter’s latest success story. Pepper would not have been considered adoptable when she first arrived at the HSSM shelter. She was three years old, obese, and a biter. But intake manager Anita Holliman had seen something special in Pepper and had kept her in her office, training and socializing her during her workday. Now Pepper was ready for adoption. Holliman knew some family would fall in love with her, just as she had.
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When Dr. James Riopelle saw that Hurricane Katrina had taken a swing around Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, he had one thought. “They aren’t paying enough attention to this. No one seems to be excited.”
Riopelle, 57, is an anesthesiologist by training, but he spends a great deal of his free time caring for four-legged creatures. He is the past president of the Coalition of Louisiana Animal Advocates, a statewide umbrella organization, and a member of several animal welfare groups, including the Louisiana SPCA. Some of these organizations do not see eye-to-eye, but Riopelle is on good terms with them all.
As Katrina approached, Riopelle, who normally provided indigent care at Charity Hospital, a public facility in downtown New Orleans, was told to report to Lindy Boggs Medical Center, five minutes from the Louisiana Superdome. To make the prospect of being on call through the storm a bit more attractive, Tenet Healthcare, the owner of the hospital, invited employees’ families, including pets, to bunk-in as well. They would use rooms in the part of the facility that had once served as a convent when Lindy Boggs was a Catholic hospital.
Fifty staff members moved in that Sunday evening bringing with them pit bulls, Chihuahuas, guinea pigs – more than 60 animals in all. Riopelle’s wife, Jamie Manders, brought her mother, Lorraine, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and two of their cats, Butterscotch and Calista.
The procedures for handling the patients seemed practical and clear cut. Until the storm hit, the families took care of their own animals and kept them in their rooms. By Sunday night, Riopelle felt confident that everyone was reasonably well prepared. He and Manders figured that the storm would inconvenience them for only a couple of days. In fact, they were counting on it. They had left their other five cats at home.
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Hurricane Katrina landed on Laura Maloney’s radar screen at 5:00 p.m. Friday, August 26. Earlier in the day, it was business as usual at the Louisiana SPCA’s animal shelter in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. The shelter is tucked into an impoverished neighborhood just a few blocks east of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, one of several waterways threading through the city. When the order came to evacuate, Maloney and her staff knew the drill. It would just be a bit different this time.
Normally, stray animals would be shipped to Mississippi and the more adoptable animals to the SPCA shelter in Houston where they would be cared for by Patricia Mercer’s staff until homes could be found for them. Those two shelters, 350 miles apart, had a long history of transferring animals back and forth as hurricanes threatened one coastal city or the other. But this time because Mississippi was also threatened by Katrina, all the animals would be going to Houston.
The logistics were more difficult this time, because Mercer’s unit was in the midst of putting on its annual telethon that raises about $300,000 for the Houston SPCA. They couldn’t drop everything. As it turned out though, the timing proved to be provident. The Houston SPCA told viewers that several hundred animals would be arriving at any time from New Orleans. Would viewers be so kind as to drop off food and pet supplies at the Houston shelter?
Within hours, cars and vans were lined up outside the facility with 50-pound sacks of pet food and cat litter, dog and cat toys, bowls and crates. Houston shelter workers spent most of the night after their five-hour telethon with hand carts and fork lifts, moving the treasures inside. Then they laid out the welcome mat for 263 four-legged guests. Read Chapter 3.
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