Chapter 7 - Racing the sun
September 7-20, 2005
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“Let’s go, go, go,” shouted rescue chief, Debbie Hill, each day as she rose before dawn at the Humane Society of Missouri’s base camp in Jackson, Mississippi. It had been more than a week since Hurricane Katrina had struck the Gulf Coast and Hill knew that time was running out for thousands of pets trapped in homes throughout the region. The rescuers had only the daylight hours to work with. The region was still without power and at night, in the nearly pitch black darkness, it was dangerous to work around downed power lines and to enter homes where floors and ceilings might collapse. In the second week of September, 2005, the sun was rising at about 6:40 a.m. and setting at about 7:15 p.m. It could take up to two hours to drive to a rescue site, then another two hours to bring animals back where they could be registered, treated, bathed, and fed. So there was no time to waste.
And yet, it seemed to Hill like the operation overseen by the Humane Society of the United States was too often running in place. They spent too much daylight time in meetings and strategy sessions. There were waits for specialists to be brought in to handle one aspect of the operation or the other. Increasingly, the HSMO crew skipped the meetings so they could round up the animals.
At the same time, Hill could see the long hours were beginning to take a toll on her group. The work didn’t stop after the sun set. Under the illumination of headlights and flashlights the crew worked with the animals, cleaned cages, and got their equipment ready for the next day’s forays. Those tired bodies hadn’t seen a mattress in many days. Tim Rickey slept in the cab of their truck, his feet propped up on the dashboard; Kyle Held slept on the tool box in the bed of the pickup. Carmen Skelly slept on a cot that she brought from home, between the two HSMO trucks. Brett Huff would awaken with grooves on his face from sleeping atop a tool box.
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Once on the road, the workers were back in their element, riding high on the adrenaline that comes from rescuing. And they were up for anything – not just dogs and cats, but swans, seagulls and even a ’gator. As Hill, Held, Skelly, and Huff were driving along one day, they spotted a group gathered around an alligator that had somehow found its way to the ocean. They learned that a nearby oceanarium had flooded, washing many of the inhabitants into the sea. Already staff members had pulled out a walrus and a seal.
The alligator may have been attracted to the salt water when he saw what seemed like 40 tons of Tyson chicken that also had been washed into the sea. Huff and Held lit out from the truck. They plunged into the brackish, bacteria-laden water to see how they could help. That angered Hill who was concerned for their safety. She saw that they had gone in without the protection of their protective rubber boots.
Following the HSMO workers into the ocean was a man named Kevin from Florida with even less protection, but with tons of self assurance. The man waded in bare-chested and barefoot amidst the flotsam of broken building materials and decaying chickens, and jumped onto the back of the alligator. As he seized the alligator under its chin, Held grabbed the tail. Then, as Held put it: “We wallered our way up the beach until someone runs up with duct tape.” Once they had secured the alligator’s snout, the rescue became a lot easier. Lloyd later hauled the animal in his truck to a fresh water inlet and released it.
The rescue gave the group a sense of closure which didn’t come along very often on the Gulf Coast. Everyday the teams would transport dozens of dogs and cats back to Jackson or another temporary intake facility that HSMO workers Brian Thomas and Linda Campbell had established in Gulfport. These animals – somebody’s pets – would then be shipped to Hattiesburg, then most likely to another state, leaving the workers to wonder whether they ever would be reunited with their families.
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At the Gulfport shelter, Campbell would both counsel and console the families that would come looking for their pets. In some cases, the pets may have been there, but they since had been moved along to another shelter. In other cases, displaced residents came with their pets but would have to give them up because they were no longer in a position to care for them. Campbell found it heart wrenching.
Campbell met an elderly man and his wife, who were looking for their 10-year-old tabby named Marmalade. The two had decided to stay at home with their dog and cat during the hurricane and found themselves washed out of their home in the storm surge. The man managed to hold onto his dog, but he lost his grip on Marmalade. The man had spent a couple of days in the hospital recovering from his injuries. Now the couple was looking everywhere for Marmalade. Could she be here? Had anyone turned her in?
Campbell said the couple looked as if “they simply could not get their lives together until they found that cat.” And yet she was unable to offer anything but sympathy.
But some stories offered the promise of a happy ending. One happy reunion began with a call from Frank Leach, the emergency operations commander in Ocean Springs, to his Missouri friend Tim Rickey. He had a sister-in-law who left a couple of cats behind at her home in New Orleans. She had a neighbor who had left some poodles. Is there anyway you guys can help?
Well, as it so happened, Rickey and Huff took that call in New Orleans. Their boss, Kathy Warnick, had dispatched them there at the request of the Humane Society of the United States. They’d see what they could do.
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It was about that time that Debbie Hill began to wonder how the Humane Society of Missouri was going to sustain the rescue effort. This adventure was much bigger than anyone had bargained for. HSMO had a disaster reserve fund of $15,000. The lease on the RV the organization was using cost $1,000 a week, then there was the cost of gas at sky high prices, the food, and the salaries for what was then eight staffers working nearly around the clock. Broken equipment needed to be repaired or replaced.
Neither Hill nor Kathy Warnick had any idea how much the whole operation would cost, but it was soaring well into six figures.
Hill had been so busy for so many days that she hadn’t had time to recognize how the disaster relief effort, human and animal, had gripped the nation. She could easily see how it had brought thousands of volunteers down to the Gulf Coast to do what they could. What she didn’t know was the impact her daily reports were having as they were posted on the Humane Society of Missouri’s website. Animal lovers were rapt. Equally compelling were the pictures sent in by Mike Bizelli, a local photographer that Warnick had sent with the team.
“Am I going to have enough money to replace people’s boots?” Hill asked chief financial officer Anne Goechner after the team had returned from another long, grinding day.
Well maybe so. In recent days, animal lovers had donated $110,000 to their cause.
Stunned at first, Hill later wept over that good news. And so did many members of her team after she shared it with them. Americans wanted the stranded animals rescued, cared for, and returned to loving homes. It made the heat and the heartache just a bit more bearable.
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As Brett Huff and Tim Rickey drove their launch through the flooded streets of New Orleans’ Lakeview section, they checked a map and counted blocks until they reached the 6000 block of Louisville Street.
They were looking for Brenda Reilly’s home and, more particularly, for Snowball and Murphy, the two cats she had left behind a couple of weeks earlier.
When the two found Reilly’s house, they feared the worst. The waterline had reached nine feet. They had to kick and pry their way in through the door. As the two entered, they felt nauseated and dizzy. It wasn’t just from having spent the day sweltering in dry suits under a broiling sun with a heat index of more than 116 degrees. But it was also what they saw – and smelled. They could tell this home had once been beautifully maintained and a great source of pride to Reilly. But now its walls were caked in mold and it stank like an open sewer. If it felt like 116 degrees outside, it felt like 130 degrees inside. How could cats survive in these conditions?
Well, not so badly, as it turned out. Murphy and Snowball had taken refuge upstairs. They found one of the kitties in the master bedroom; the other under the bed in the guest room. Huff and Rickey could tell that despite their ordeal, these cats had been pampered all their lives. They were, in fact, fat.
Under normal circumstances, the two would have taken the pets to the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center where Brenda Reilly could have driven to pick them up. But they didn’t for two reasons.
Huff and Rickey remembered what Reilly’s brother-in-law had done for them in getting Mississippi officials to allow them to get going with their rescue efforts. They wanted to return the favor in the best possible way. They also had a selfish reason. For weeks, now the two had been rescuing one animal after another and putting them on vans and trucks to be shipped to God knows where. Not once had they seen a pet reunited with its owner. Now they had that chance.
So one night, Huff drove the 90 miles to meet up with Reilly at the Humane Society base camp in Jackson, Mississippi. Reilly was nearly overcome when she saw her pets. She gave Huff huge hugs.
How did the cats react? “Well, they seemed happy to see us,” Reilly said. “But you know it’s hard to tell with cats.” Read Chapter 8 .
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