Chapter 6 - Rescue 24/7
September 3-6, 2005
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If there was one thing that the rescue workers from the Humane Society of Missouri had learned over their years, as they helped out at the scene of disasters across the country, it was this: respect authority, but take the initiative.
Emergency responders typically do not take animals into account. That was clear on the Gulf Coast where evacuees relying on government transportation were told they had to leave their animals behind; where no precise plan was in place to find those animals once abandoned; where regulations barred rescuers from capturing and transporting animals to safe havens out of state.
In Mississippi, HSMO workers learned that it was the state’s veterinarian who was keeping them from performing rescues. He was concerned that these rescuers, working in hazardous areas, might need to be rescued themselves, thus creating another burden for those involved in the human rescue effort.
Someone needed to talk with him. But how do you get in touch with such an official when the land lines are out and cell phone service is intermittent, when you’re just some folks from Missouri in a long line of callers with issues and agendas?
You find a friend, preferably a local, who’s powerful, politically astute and well-connected. In this case, that friend was Franklin Leach. When rescue workers Brett Huff and Tim Rickey approached Leach, a member of the Jackson County Board of Supervisors and its emergency operations director, Leach was forthright with them. He had to admit he had not given animal rescue much thought.
But with hundreds of animals now loose on the streets in and around his home town of Ocean Springs, Leach could readily see the need for the services the Missourians were offering. And he could see that these boys knew what they were doing. They had come well-equipped and spoke articulately of rescue missions they had performed in storm ravaged areas across the country.
It probably didn’t hurt that Leach spent six years of his childhood in Calverton Park, just outside of St. Louis, where his dad worked at McDonnell Aircraft. Leach liked these Missouri boys, they seemed to him both respectful and resourceful. And his operation badly needed people with can-do spirit and spunk.
So the Leach picked up the phone and dialed the capital. Polite, but insistent, Leach went up the chain of command until he got the permissions necessary. Huff and Rickey told him they hoped someday to return the favor. As it turned out someday was not far off.
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At Lindy Boggs Hospital, James Riopelle had set up a system of sorts for the 60 pets under his care, now that he was alone with them. He shepherded the dogs to four partly roofed outside runs on the fifth floor, which seemed almost ideal to him because they had pebbled floors. The cats got individual rooms. Before departing, someone had shown Riopelle a storeroom with at least 100 gallon jugs. Using a knife, he fashioned them into water bowls. When the pet food began to run low, he began feeding people food to the pets.
On Sunday, September 4, hope arrived. Tenet officials called Riopelle to say they had arranged for an airlift. Riopelle methodically moved the animals in crates to the hospital loading dock, then to a patch of dry land near a post office, and waited to be rescued. Finally, he heard the whirring of a helicopter and watched it descend. And then…. an explosion. The helicopter had tipped on its side, knocked over by the downwash of another helicopter. The copter’s rotors struck the ground and then it burst into flames. Fortunately, the pilot escaped unhurt.
But it meant another night at the hospital and exhaustion began to overtake him. Too weary to move the animals back to the fifth floor, he kept them on the first floor. But there he found it difficult to keep the floors clean. He would throw sheets down to clean up the excrement, but could barely keep up.. The pets, having gone days without getting outdoors, began getting into fights with one another. That night Riopelle returned to his room and fell asleep with Butterscotch on his chest and Calista by his side.
Photo from Matthew McConaughey's photo diary on Oprah.com |
On the following day, Matthew, a strapping young man with a bandana on his brow, showed up at Lindy Boggs Medical Center with a convoy of skiffs. Behind him was a man with a camera. He aimed his lens at the gaunt doctor in sweat-stained surgical scrubs.
“I hear you are taking them all,’’ said James Riopelle. “I’m so very grateful. I wasn’t sure if I could go much longer. I’m mighty glad to get out.”
At the time, Riopelle thought he was talking to a rescue worker or perhaps it was a reporter. But Matthew McConaughey was in fact a movie star. A native Texan, McConaughey had joined Oprah’s Angel Network to provide assistance to hurricane victims. The network provided McCanaughey with equipment and logistical support to look for stories throughout the Gulf region, in the hopes of inspiring others to help. When McConaughey learned of Riopelle’s plight, Oprah’s people arranged for the airlift.
Within hours, families of the hospital workers were reunited with their pets in Slidell, Louisiana about 30 miles from the hospital. Only two pets died, Riopelle’s own. Butterscotch perished on the flight back to Slidell. Calista, Jamie’s beloved silver Persian, was euthanized at Slidell apparently after suffering a bad reaction to a sedative.
Riopelle, a hero to so many pet owners, felt personally devastated. For a time, hospital officials questioned his mental state, refusing to release him to his family.
But Riopelle insists he never lost it, nor did he feel particularly heroic. He saw the world clearly and he did what had to be done.
“All of these animals had homes,” he said, reflecting on the experience in the matter-of-fact way of a clinician. “They had people who loved them. We just had to keep them alive until the water went down. This wasn’t the Titanic. A ship wasn’t going down. It was just a big stinking mess.”
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When the rescue team from the Humane Society of Missouri finally got its clearance from the state of Mississippi to do their work, they found almost more than they could handle. Kyle Held, Carmen Skelly, Tim Rickey and Brett Huff would drive through neighborhoods and hear barking dogs at every turn… some were wandering aimlessly through the streets and the debris, some dogs were trapped inside or under homes. What they couldn’t hear as easily were the cats. Often they were well hidden.
Cats could be particularly time consuming to rescue because they are skittish and quick. It could take 45 minutes to coax a kitty out from under a home with a bit of kibble and kindness. And that was just one animal, among thousands.
But on a back road near Pascagoula, the HSMO staffers, along with a group from the Humane Society of the United States, were able to rescue dozens of animals. They had come to the home of a breeder -- a disabled man and his wife, who had more than 140 dogs on his property when Hurricane Katrina hit. Watermarks showed that the tidal surge had reached 14 feet on his double-wide trailer.
The dogs, most of them Miniature Pinschers, had been kept outdoors in wire and plastic cages piled one atop another. The hurricane had tossed the cages every which way and at least sixty of the dogs had perished. Others had gotten loose and were starving. Still others were trapped in their cages, buried beneath the debris, and howling for help.
The breeder and his wife had been praying for help to arrive. But when the HSMO team showed up with their chain saws and catch poles, he was reluctant to give up his animals. They were his livelihood. How would he get them back?
A delicate negotiation followed, with Kyle Held taking the lead. The rescue team would help the breeder restore what was left of his operation. But he couldn’t possibly care for all the dozens of surviving dogs. Held persuaded him to give up a few of his animals. The dogs were later shipped to humane facilities outside the region, where they were adopted out to good homes.
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As Janet Parker was riding with the staff of the Louisiana SPCA from Houston to Louisiana, she got the phone call she had been praying for. After four days without hearing from her family, her daughter, Jendella, was on the line. She and her twin brother, Justin, along with their grandmother, had been rescued from the rooftop of their grandmother’s house by a National Guard helicopter. The kids were now safe with their dad.
Parker could breathe a sigh of relief. But she could hardly relax. She had a lot of work ahead of her. On the following day, Parker would be dealing with the burgeoning animal intake center at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center.
It was horribly sweaty and grimy work. The temperature on those first days at Lamar-Dixon was in the mid-90s. The humidity, combined with the temperature, created a heat index of 110 degrees. The animals kept arriving and there were never enough workers to clean the cages, feed the animals and give them the exercise they needed. Thousands of animals sent up a racket that kept Parker’s ears ringing long after she was out of range of the animals. Each night, Parker would return to Baton Rouge where she stayed with other workers at the home of Laura Maloney’s father. She would sleep on an air mattress for a few hours before rising early in the morning to do it all over again.
Someday, Parker imagined, she would see what had become of her home. Someday, she’d get to see her children and give them big hugs. But someday was a long way off. There were so many animals to care for and too few people to do the job.
That fact was weighing, too, on Laura Maloney. Hundreds of animals were arriving at Lamar-Dixon each day, and so, too, were calls for help. Keeping track of it all became extremely difficult. It might have been even more of a nightmare if not for a group called the Cajun Clickers. This group of tech savvy volunteers set up a computer command post and began logging in the requests for help. Unfortunately, it would take a week before rescue requests could be moved from paper to digital files and longer still for a dispatching system to be established.
At the same time, other organizations had their own means of getting and sending information. No one, it seemed, had either the authority or capability to put all the information together in one place, so rescue efforts could be coordinated, so owners looking for their pets could find them without having to look at a dozen different web sites or visit intake facilities that now were stretching across America.
Still, Maloney found herself moved by how many people had come to help. More than 50 agencies had sent rescue workers. They and others sent pet food, leashes, collars, towels, blankets and toys by the ton. Forklifts were brought in to move the stuff around. Within days, the supplies filled an entire barn. Celebrities arrived. The actress Kirstie Alley gave every animal a treat. Linda Blair, the former child star, stayed for days and took some dogs back to Los Angeles with her.
At times, the workers and volunteers could barely manage the crush of animals and supplies. Sometimes, they simply weren’t allowed to. At various times on short notice, authorities would close Lamar-Dixon to animals, creating a backup in the field. Animal rescue organizations would then create their own encampments, housing pets in vehicles and tents on parking lots and in parks. Rescue workers also began taking pet food into the city, leaving bags on street corners so that the animals who could not be captured could still find a way to survive.
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Frank Leach was a busy man in the first week after Katrina struck. As emergency operations commander for Jackson County, Leach had to stay in touch with all four Mississippi counties along the Gulf Coast to coordinate rescue efforts among dozens of different agencies. He hardly had time to talk with his wife, Cynthia, about what was happening to her family members, who had barely gotten out of New Orleans.
Cynthia and her sister, Brenda Reilly, didn’t want to be a bother to Frank. But they were getting concerned. Reilly had left two of her three cats at her home in the Lakeview section of New Orleans. Like most residents, as the hurricane closed in, she figured that she would be gone just a day or two. But now it had been a week.
Reilly had left a few days worth of food and large bowls of water on the first floor of her home for Snowball and Murphy, and a bowl of water upstairs. After New Orleans flooded, Reilly didn’t have to wonder long about what had happened to her home. An internet site provided satellite pictures and graphics showing the water level in each New Orleans neighborhood. By Reilly’s reckoning, the water had probably risen to the second floor of her home. If Murphy and Snowball were lucky – and they do get nine lives don’t they ? – the two had scrambled to the second floor. Maybe they rode out the flood atop Reilly’s bed or on a dresser. But what then would they drink? What would they eat? How long could they hold out?
So Reilly and her sister hatched a plan. They’d haul a family member’s 14-foot skiff to the edge of the Lakeview section, or wherever the floodwater met the road. Then they’d row their way over to Reilly’s house on Louisville Street and rescue the cats.
When Frank Leach learned what the women were up to, he was incredulous. They aren’t letting anyone into New Orleans, he said. And, by the way, did you know rescuers are getting shot at?
Still, the women – Reilly especially – appeared determined to get those cats out. That’s when Leach thought of his buddies from Missouri.
Maybe they could help. Read Chapter 7.
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