Chapter 4 - To the rescue
August 30-31, 2005
Janet Parker carried a special burden with her to Houston as she worked with others from the Louisiana SPCA. She hadn’t heard from her twin 19-year-olds, Justin and Jendella, since a few hours after Katrina struck. And the last word she had gotten turned her stomach. It was a cell phone call from Jendella at a relative’s home. “We’re on the roof,” she was shouting. “And we’re going to die.”
By the time of that call, Parker knew, too, that her own home had likely been destroyed. The television news reported that the area where she lived was nearly all under water.
But there was nothing she could do for her family at that point; authorities were allowing no one back in the city. So she just might as well focus on the task at hand – caring for the dogs and cats who needed her help.
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Over the course of the next couple of days, the Houston SPCA took in more than 600 animals at a special encampment the staff setup at the Astrodome. That was a figure the shelter workers found at once surprising, alarming, and inspiring.
Most of the evacuees from New Orleans had arrived on buses organized by rescue workers. The rules were clear – no pets. And yet, here they were. It was easy to see how Snowball, a kitten, had gotten aboard. She was small enough to tuck under a shirt… and no one was about to tell her owner, an evacuee with the build of lumberjack, to leave his baby behind. He had waded through waist-deep floodwater to get his kitten this far. Here and there you could find a Chihuahua, a rabbit, or a hamster that could have been smuggled aboard in a purse. But how did the owners of that Great Dane ever get him on board? This Marmaduke “must have driven the bus,” one Houston SPCA volunteer surmised.
Keeping a sense of humor was vital. The Houston SPCA workers found themselves confronted with one family tragedy after another, hour after hour.
It was draining,” remembered animal behavior specialist Kelsey Williams. In the long line of people approaching Williams was a man who was dazed and bleeding. He said he had lost his wife during the storm and didn’t know whether she was alive or dead. Somehow, though, he had managed to get his dog out in a duffel bag and all the way to Houston. Now he was standing there with dog bedding, a bag of food, and his beloved pet. The staff took in the man’s dog, but never learned if he was ever reunited with his wife.
During the day, the workers would transport the animals in vans back to the Houston SPCA shelter several miles away. The staffers and volunteers there found the work even more grueling. Each animal taken in by the Houston SPCA required health checks, a record entered in the agency’s computer system, and micro chips to make sure that they all could be returned to their owners. Each animal needed a clean cage, a good walk at least a couple of times a day, and regular feedings. How long could they keep this up? No one could predict. At one point, the Houston SPCA had 140 staff members and volunteers to care for more than 1,000 animals.
Some needed special attention, like Taco or claim #039 as his record says. Taco, a cockatiel, was just a few weeks old and not fully feathered when he arrived by bus with his “sister” Candy and their human companion. Their owner, a New Orleans evacuee, had asked the Houston SPCA to care for them because she had a shot at getting re-established with a new job in Philadelphia. But she needed to get there soon.
Taco was too young and fragile to travel. He needed to be hand fed, a chore that shelter worker Melvin Davis took on. Davis performed the feedings during the day at the shelter, then took Taco home at night.
Unlike Candy, Taco couldn’t simply be crated and shipped to Philadelphia in the cargo hold. So the Houston SPCA bought two coach tickets, one for a worker and the other for Taco, who enjoyed a happy reunion with his owner at Philadelphia International.
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“All I ever wanted to do was walk dogs.” That’s how Tara High described the way she got involved -- very involved -- with the Humane Society of Southern Mississippi. High had been a successful Gulf Coast realtor when she attended an adopt-a-dog event a few years ago at a local PetSmart. There she ran into Eric Aschaffenburg, who was then HSSM’s chairman. Aschaffenburg, who is a passionate and persuasive animal advocate, said the agency was looking for volunteers. Sure, High said, she could help walk some dogs.
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One thing led to another. “I don’t know how to say, ‘no,’” High admitted. Soon High, 42, was named to the agency’s board, then to the executive committee. Then she became its chairman. And two days after Katrina struck, she found herself the agency’s director.
The week before the hurricane, the former director had wanted to meet with High, but two hadn’t found the time to get together. He intended to tell her that he was resigning. Now after the hurricane, he had a myriad of personal issues to attend to and his heart was not in the recovery effort.
Unaware of the director’s intention, High didn’t reach the Gulfport shelter until three days after the hurricane. When she arrived, she was appalled at the conditions. But she also saw something that filled her with resolve – a staff of just a very few workers, wearing no more protection than shorts and t-shirts, caring for the surviving animals, wading through the muck and the filth to clean and salvage whatever they could. These staffers, among them Sharon Polk, Kyle Alsleben, Anita Holliman, Ida Sweiger and Julie Parks, had put rebuilding their own lives and homes on hold, all in an effort to bring this shelter back.
What they needed, though, was a director: someone to make some calls about what to do first, second, and last; someone to get on the phone with government officials, other animal welfare agencies, and the public to get them some help; someone to replace the waterlogged checkbook, because at some point they were going to have to pay some bills.
High barely hesitated, though she had her own issues to consider. She had no experience running a shelter. She had an 87-year-old mother to care for. She would have to give up her real estate business, which would mean taking an approximate 65 percent cut in her compensation.
But High could never resist a challenge. She had played high school and college basketball. Neither the tallest, nor the most talented on her teams, she was nonetheless a leader -- the first to dive for the loose balls or to take the clutch shots. When she saw what had happened at the Mississippi shelter, she knew she had to take the ball. She just couldn’t say no.
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The rescue brigade from the Humane Society of Missouri left St. Louis at noon on August 31 in a convoy of seven vehicles, well stocked -- or so they thought -- and with a crew ready for anything.
Team leader Debbie Hill figured the team would spend a week in the south. That’s the way other disaster responses had gone. She had a corporate credit card in her wallet for contingencies and the Humane Society had $15,000 in its disaster response fund.
When the crew arrived in Grenada, Mississippi, still 275 miles from the Gulf Coast, Hill recognized immediately that neither she nor her team members would see their families for weeks. They hadn’t even reached the scene of the disaster, but as she put it “everything was on the edge of chaos.” Cars were lined up 8 to 10 deep at gas pumps, and fist fights were breaking out over who got to the pumps first and how much gas they could take. As Hill entered a Wal-Mart, she felt queasy and unsafe. The shoppers who packed the aisles were anxious and intense, eager to get out of there with their grocery baskets spilling over the brim. No one was saying anything to her, but Hill felt as if she had a minute and a half to get her shopping done before something or somebody would go haywire. She bought as many non-perishable food stuffs as her group could carry to the check-out counter: bottled water, dry cereal, and canned goods, including tuna and dozens of containers of a product called “Beanie Weenies.” It was all that was left.
Here it was, a full three days after the disaster. They were still hundreds of miles away from the affected areas, and it appeared as if little had been done to provide security, to supply essential needs, to reassure the public that everything was going to be okay. Usually, by the time they let the animal people in, Hill thought, the Red Cross has set up shop and essential supplies are plentiful. But not this time.
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By Wednesday morning, August 31, patients at Lindy Boggs Medical Center had gone three days without medication, clean sheets, and all but the most rudimentary nursing care. The morgue in the basement had flooded. Jody Pattison, a respiratory therapist, and Dr. James Riopelle moved the bodies into a room at the end of a hallway so other patients would not be aware of them by sight or smell.
Finally, that afternoon, firefighters arrived in boats and the human evacuation began. The fittest went first because the firefighters did not have the equipment to deal with the most infirm. Riopelle saw his wife, Jamie Manders, and her mother, Lorraine, off on a boat. Manders did not want to leave, but it made sense to stay with her mother and she needed to get back home to take care of the cats they had left behind. She counted on her husband to care for Calista and Butterscotch at the hospital.
Many family members of the staff were weeping as they got on the rescue boats because they were forced to leave their animals behind. They were certain they would never see them again. Word had spread that the animals would have to be euthanized because authorities would not want to use their time and resources to rescue them.
But they hadn’t figured on Riopelle’s moxie and determination. By Thursday morning, everyone had departed except for Riopelle, who insisted on staying with all the pets. “They thought I was a fool,” Riopelle said of the authorities. And he sensed that at some point, hospital officials or authorities would order him out. Staying behind in an empty hospital can be dangerous. With its supply of drugs, it could be an easy target for looters. Already, Riopelle had been hearing gunfire outside. Some of the rescue boats were riddled with bullet holes.
So he made a plan. He would hide provisions on each floor. If the authorities came for him without plans to evacuate the animals, they wouldn’t be able to find him. If looters invaded the hospital, he would stay out of their way. With him, he kept several flashlights, a cell phone that was rapidly losing power -- and a couple of guns.
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Laura Maloney noticed something disturbing within days after she and her staff established the animal intake center at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center. The people organizing the human rescue effort and the people engaged in the animal rescue effort were not getting along. And no one seemed to be able to get a handle on who was arriving to help with the animals and what resources they were bringing to the effort.
The administrator in charge at Lamar-Dixon acted as if the human issues and the animal problems were separate. He didn’t recognize pets as family members to displaced residents. They were secondary.
And so when Maloney put in a request to use a meeting room, she was told no – that was for the human rescue effort. But what about when no one else was using it? Still a no. Nor could the animal welfare workers use the facility’s mess hall. Also off limits, Lamar-Dixon’s wireless internet that Maloney had set up on the first day that she had arrived.
Over the next few days, hundreds of volunteers were descending on the center. Some arrived with well-trained and well-equipped crews. Others showed up in flip-flops and were, well, a little quirky. Many wanted to head down to New Orleans for rescues. But for every rescue worker, three were needed to provide support at Lamar-Dixon, doing the less romantic chores like cleaning cages and exercising the animals. Many volunteers seemed to put their own interests and demands above the needs of the animals. They would only work at certain times and under certain circumstances, they told organizers.
If anyone could herd these cats, Maloney figured it would be HSUS. But what Maloney hadn’t counted on was that even for HSUS, the challenge was daunting. Though it had responded to disasters across the nation, Katrina was bigger, much bigger than any that it had handled before. Though, many of its staffers had broad experience in mounting rescues and transporting animals, few had ever run a shelter operation or knew what was required to maintain a facility for days and weeks at a time.
Maloney had put her organization in the back seat. She hoped that all the people who loved animals, and had come to Lamar-Dixon to save them, would salute smartly when HSUS issued its directives. Some did, she found. But many didn’t. Read Chapter 5 .
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