Chapter 3 - Blowing in the wind
August 28-29, 2005
Dr. James Riopelle breathed a sigh of relief on the morning of August 29. Hurricane Katrina had made landfall with winds clocked at 125 miles an hour at 6:10 a.m. at Buras, Louisiana, a small city on a peninsula about 65 miles due south of New Orleans. Four hours later, it struck again at Pearlington, Mississippi, 45 miles northeast of downtown New Orleans and just 20 miles from Lake Ponchartrain, a 630-square mile salt water lake that forms the northern boundary of the city.
Riopelle felt the wind and rain rattle the windows of the tiny room in the hospital where he was staying with his wife, mother-in-law, and two cats. Peering out, he could see how Bienville Avenue had become a stream. But the water was no higher than the hubcaps on the cars. Nary a tree had toppled. So Riopelle figured the storm sewers were backing up. No big deal.
He was wrong. It was massive Lake Ponchartrain backing up and into New Orleans. The lake actually sits on higher ground than the city and all that kept it at bay were a series of levees -- long a source of concern. A hurricane had caused flooding in the city in 1947 and again in 1965. Afterward, the federal government had built up and reinforced the levees. But for years meteorologists and hydrologists had been saying the levees were neither strong enough nor high enough for the kind of wind and water a hurricane like Katrina might bring.
The dire predictions came true. The levees broke. And so over the course of Monday, the lake drained into New Orleans. By day’s end, 80 percent of the city was underwater. Riopelle didn’t know that; but as the afternoon wore on he knew something was terribly wrong. The cars on Bienville had washed away. Soon the lights in the hospital flickered out. The plumbing failed. The temperature inside soared past 100 degrees. Patients began to die.
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On Sunday, as Katrina howled, the ceiling collapsed in the brick home in Gulfport where Anita Holliman had taken refuge with her brother-in-law and sister-in-law. The same thing happened at Kyle Alsleben’s home, a cottage that sat on 2 ½ acres outside of Gulfport. But Alsleben, Holliman, and Holliman’s family were safe.
The good fortune, such as it was, gave the two staff members from the Humane Society of Southern Mississippi time to worry and wonder. What had happened to the 148 animals they had left behind at the agency’s shelter near the city airport?
Initially, Alsleben and another shelter staffer, Kris Johnson, had planned to spend the night with the animals. But after listening to dire warnings all day on Sunday, they decided against it.
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Holliman was the first to head out to the shelter that Monday after the storm. She drove there with her 17-year-old son Nick, even before checking on her own home, a mobile home on the outskirts of the city. When the two got to the road leading to the shelter, they found a lake instead of pavement. Not to be denied, Holliman turned around her Pontiac and went back to get her son’s truck.
An hour later when she returned to Airport Road, the water had receded. As she and Nick approached the shelter, the two were assaulted by an odor that nearly overwhelmed them. Obviously, the storm surge had driven through the sewage treatment plant adjacent to the shelter. But she noticed something else as well. It was quiet. An animal shelter is never quiet.
Holliman and Nick forced their way through a side door, pushing past a clutter of desks, cabinets, and an overturned refrigerator.
The scene they found on the other side of that door brought Holliman to her knees with screams welling from her throat.
The shelter had flooded to a depth of four feet – drowning all of the animals housed in the lower tier of the cages. The surging water swept several cages off the countertops where workers had placed them. Those animals also perished, including Pepper, the portly dachshund that Anita had taken so much care in preparing for adoption.
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Many of the animals had to swim for hours to survive. They were exhausted and traumatized.
In all, 23 dogs and cats died in the shelter on the early morning of August 29. But 125 survived because of the care the shelter workers had shown. As a veteran animal welfare staffer, Holliman has seen her share of deaths. Some animals simply are too sick or too aggressive to be adoptable. It’s up to Holliman and Alsleben to decide which animals must be put down -- a calculus that requires the skills of a clinician and the compassion of a priest.
But in this instance, neither Holliman nor Alsleben had any control over what happened to those 23 lives. They couldn’t hold those dogs and cats, stroke them, or hug them as they had with the other animals they had had to put down. More than anything, that’s what haunts Holliman. And it strengthened her resolve to bring this shelter back and make life better for the dogs and cats of southern Mississippi.
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Laura Maloney and her staff watched the storm coverage with growing dismay at the offices of the Houston SPCA. It was clear from the reports on the Weather Channel that their facilities in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward had been wiped out. Many staff members had left their personal vehicles there as they drove the agency’s vans to Houston. No doubt those were ruined too. Many lived in homes nearby that they feared were now under water.
Even so, they stayed focused on the region’s pets. New Orleans homeowners had left thousands of animals behind with just a few days worth of food and water. Some were tied outside to stakes and fence posts against the pleas of SPCA staff members that were oft repeated in the media. Rescues would have to be mounted. The animals would need a place to stay for days, perhaps weeks, before they could be reunited with their owners.
The state had a plan to take care of them and Maloney had been designated to help them execute it. Officials had identified the Lamar-Dixon Exposition Center, an equestrian facility about 50 miles north of New Orleans, both as a staging ground for the human rescue effort and an intake facility for pets. Lamar-Dixon sits on 250 acres. It includes eight barns that could be used to house the animals and pastures to exercise them.
But as Maloney watched events unfold in her city, she realized that this disaster was far larger than anything her organization had ever handled -- or that the state’s plan had anticipated. Maloney hadn’t figured on losing the SPCA shelter to the storm, nor had she expected that two-thirds of her staff would be unable to report for work in the aftermath.
So she looked for leadership to the Humane Society of the United States – a well-funded organization with offices in Washington, New York and several other sites. HSUS had responded to disasters all across the nation. It had demonstrated expertise and a well-oiled publicity machine that could sound the cry for help.
But HSUS had never encountered anything like the animal whirlwind created by Katrina. Even that agency would find itself overwhelmed. Read Chapter 4.
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