Pawprints of Katrina

by Cathy Scott

  Jeff agreed. “One was friendlier and came up to us,” he said. “We put him in the boat and called the other one. He wouldn’t come to us.” Ken, who owned one of the boats, reminded them about the weight limit and the distance they still had to go to reach the van. “We put the other one back on the ground, because we didn’t want the one to be alone,” Jeff said.

  They still had a half mile to get to the trucks and vans when they heard a dog barking. They followed the sound to an apartment building. “I climbed up to the apartment and got him down from the second floor,” Ken said. A young kitten was at the apartment, too. Ken retrieved the kitten, who was later named Hurricane and fostered out to volunteer Tracey Simmons.

  That night, they got in late to base camp. When Kimberlee heard the van arrive and was told that Mr. Jezebel wasn’t with the day’s rescues, she was visibly upset. “We’ll get him tomorrow,” Jeff told her. “We’re going back.”

  “After that first night when the rescue teams came back and told me that they couldn’t get to our cats, I didn’t call Suzanne,” Kimberlee said. “We had an agreement that I wouldn’t call her until I could see the three kitties for myself and make sure they got all three and they were definitely ours. The rescuers said they were going to try again the next day. I cried and said I really appreciated them going back.” The team left at five o’clock the next morning.

  That second day, Kimberlee said, was especially difficult, because of the conditions in the city. She was worried they wouldn’t be able to reach the American Can Company building a second time.

  “I had that sick feeling in my gut,” Kimberlee said, “and I couldn’t get over it. I spent the day with the kitties who had already been rescued and tried to hope for the best. I heard the rescue van come in that night, and I just couldn’t get out of my tent. I was sitting with Misha, a white Husky. She was my little guardian angel, and she comforted me the whole time I was there.” (Misha’s owner was located, but he was stuck in Texas with no transportation and no money. Weeks later, he borrowed a car and drove to Mississippi. But on that particular night, Misha kept Kimberlee company. Misha was kept tied out on a long cable because she didn’t do well in the ten-by-ten-foot runs and she cried a lot. She was moved to the courtyard area at Camp Tylertown in front of the buildings, where she got regular attention. Ethan Gurney, a dog caregiver and a rapid response worker, sometimes slept on the grass with Misha, and they kept each other company.)

  After a few minutes, Kimberlee left her tent and headed for the transport van. Included with the rescued that day were a small green parrot and three turtles. When Jeff told Kimberlee, “We got your cat,” she broke down. They carried the crates into Kitty City so they could take the cats out. As Kimberlee opened the crate and picked up Mr. Jezebel, she said, “I never thought I’d see him again.” Just then, he scratched her face. “He’s mad at me for leaving him,” Kimberlee said. “He’s never like this.” She called her friends Cem and Suzanne, who immediately drove to Camp Tylertown to pick up Boo and Raja.

  Kimberlee lived in a condominium and owned a Laundromat nearby in the Garden District. Ironically, her house didn’t flood like the Can did. “If I’d stayed there, I would have been fine,” she said. Still, if she’d stayed at her condo, the Best Friends team might not have been notified about the urgency of the animals stranded inside the American Can.

  “I was with Best Friends for a week before they were able to get into the Can,” Kimberlee said. “I was devastated but trying to stay positive. The second rescue attempt was successful, and I got my baby back. It was such a huge relief. I felt as though I could finally begin to deal with what had happened to us. All I could focus on was how to get them all out. Once they were out, I felt like I could breathe again and start to pull my life together.”

  Connie Bordeaux, another American Can Company resident, left her Boxer puppy, Honey, and her two cats, Rusty and Feather, in a fifth-floor apartment. After she was forced to evacuate, she, too, began sending e-mails and calling rescue groups, asking if someone could go to her apartment and break in to rescue them. Honey and Rusty, a Himalayan cat, were rescued. The team didn’t find Feather, a red tabby, despite looking under furniture for her.

  Scott Biggerstaff’s two dogs, Cobi and Bella, were left at the American Can building, too, but he didn’t immediately know that. When Scott arrived at Camp Tylertown on a late September evening, it was with hope. When Hurricane Katrina hit, he and his wife, Teresa, were out of town. In their absence, Scott left Cobi and Bella with a friend, a doctor who lived at the American Can. When their friend evacuated to a hospital, he left the dogs in his apartment. After they began a search for their dogs, the Biggerstaffs learned that the first floor of the apartment building was flooded and no one was allowed into the area. They didn’t know whether their dogs were still alive. They went to the Lamar-Dixon shelter in Gonzales, where nearly two thousand dogs and cats were already being housed. The numbers of homeless animals were so overwhelming that Scott and Teresa resigned themselves to never being able to find their pets.

  When they got word from another friend who was able to get into the American Can that Best Friends rescuers had been there, the Biggerstaffs were hopeful. Scott called the Best Friends sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, and left a message. A couple of days later, he received a call back from Best Friends staffer Jill Dennis, telling him that Best Friends had his dogs. Scott got in his car and headed for Camp Tylertown.

  When he arrived, the sun was just setting. I walked with him to a ten-by-ten-foot run where Cobi and Bella had been staying. When he walked in front of their run, the dogs had about a five-second delay before they realized who he was. They started barking at him and jumping at the fence, ecstatic to see him. Scott got in his car and drove them back to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he and his wife had relocated.

  Later that day, September 16, six more people were reunited with their dogs and cats—most of whom had been rescued from the American Can Company apartments a few days before. The reunions included a Great Dane and a Catahoula.

  Two cats retrieved during the two-day American Can rescue were Cici and Fifi, a tortoiseshell and a red tabby cat. Their owner had taped a letter for rescuers onto the apartment door. It was written as if it were from her cats, and it got the cats home. Here’s the text of the note, dated September 1:

  Our names are Fifi and Cici. We are both cats, one boy, one girl. Please take us to a shelter. Our doctors are located at the Cat Practice.

  If you find us, we are in the restroom. We have enough food to last us 5 days.

  Please contact our parents, Daryl and Tasha, who love and adore us very much, at [and the phone numbers were given].

  Please, we need your help!

  Thank you, Tasha.

  It was the day before the storm when Latasha (Tasha) Ratleff and her fiancé, Daryl Odom, a New Orleans police officer, took their cats to her grandmother’s loft apartment at the former American Can Company warehouse. “The building was made to last through a Level 5 hurricane,” Tasha said, “so we stayed there and rode it out.” Then, at four in the morning on September 1, National Guard officers knocked on their door and told them they were being evacuated and that they had thirty minutes to pack up their things and leave.

  “They said we could only take one bag and no pets,” Tasha said. She was shocked and didn’t know what to do about her cats. Daryl suggested she write a note about the cats with information on how to get in touch with her and leave it for rescuers to find. Tasha sat down, wrote the note, and taped it to the apartment door, hoping someone would find it.

  Her note was found by rescuers Ken and Jeff, and Fifi and Cici were picked up during the team’s first run to the apartment building on September 9. The problem for Tasha was that she didn’t know about the rescue for a while.

  Ken went into the apartment where Tasha had left her cats. “I went in with Jeff, and we got Fifi and Cici,” Ken said. “The note was on the exterior door. I broke down that door. It got ki
nd of chaotic at that point. The sun was starting to go down. One of those cats got Jeff pretty good when we got them from the bathroom. And, man, that bathroom reeked. The urine smell about took our breath away when we opened the door.”

  “It was hell,” Jeff said. “The urine was so concentrated in there, it had turned to ammonia. It was nasty. And those cats were freaked out. I got one of them and caught the second. He was so freaked out, he got away from me. We caught him again in the bathroom, but it took a little while.” He said a little bit of food was still left in the tub.

  When Fifi and Cici arrived at Camp Tylertown, Tasha’s note was put with a stack of intake papers completed by the rescue team who had found the cats that day. But Tasha’s message wasn’t discovered again until a week later when I was thumbing through the stack looking for a pet record. Sean Scherer, a twenty-year-old volunteer from Utah who is a whiz with computers, got into the center’s database and began searching for any information in the records that even remotely matched information in the note. By then, there were one hundred fifty cats at the center. Sean found two cats, one a tortoiseshell and the other an orange tabby, who appeared to be Cici and Fifi. We went into the cattery looking for them and found Fifi. Tasha’s other cat had been fostered out, so we made a note to call first thing in the morning and make arrangements to have Cici brought back to Tylertown.

  By the time Sean found the cats in the database, it was eleven at night in New Orleans. Should workers try the phone numbers on the note and let Tasha know right away that her cats were fine, or wait until morning?

  “Absolutely, call right now,” somebody said. “She’ll want to know. Her cats are like her children. You can tell by the note.” When Tasha was told that Fifi and Cici had been rescued and that her note had been found, there was silence on the other end of the phone. Then she started to cry. “It’s my birthday,” Tasha said through tears. “It couldn’t be a more perfect gift. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  The reunion coincided with the couple moving into a new apartment (one that allowed cats) in the Uptown section of New Orleans. When Tasha and Daryl picked up Fifi and Cici a few days later, the reunions marked the ninety-ninth and one-hundredth pets returned to their owners from the Best Friends rescues, just three weeks after the storm. “You have no idea how important it is to get something this precious back,” Tasha said that day. “You’ve given me my life back.”

  Daryl’s reaction to the return of Tasha’s cats was a simple “I told you so.” She said he’d told her when they were forced to leave not to worry about the cats. As the couple stood on the Camp Tylertown grounds, each holding a cat carrier, Tasha remembered the conversation she and Daryl had had in her grandmother’s American Can apartment just before they were evacuated. “He told me if I wrote a note, I’d get my cats back. He was right.”

  Mia, an eight-pound Chihuahua, was also rescued from the American Can Company, from a patio deck. Mia, who was seen swimming in four and a half feet of water with two other Chihuahuas, wasn’t about to be plucked from the water, no matter how scared she was. Ethan Gurney saw her and waded in the water to get all three Chihuahuas. He walked onto the water-covered deck, following the dogs. However, what Ethan hadn’t realized was that, because the four-foot-deep water was black and he couldn’t see below the surface, he was walking on the deck of a swimming pool. When he took another step forward, reaching out to grab Mia, Ethan went underwater. Meanwhile, Mia kept swimming with the other two dogs. It was the end of the first day at the American Can; the rescue team had filled the boats to capacity, and they needed to leave. They returned to Camp Tylertown without Mia and the other Chihuahuas.

  The next day they found Mia huddled in a recess of the building with just one other Chihuahua. As Jeff Popowich grabbed Mia this time, she bit at his hands. He held on and retrieved the other Chihuahua, too.

  When the team arrived at Tylertown with the load of pets that day, a volunteer walked up to me and asked if I could keep one of the Chihuahuas, the little red one, with me for the day, because she was shivering with fright. She said she’d be back for her at the end of the day. The volunteer never returned, so I named the dog Mia (for Missing in Action) and kept her with me the rest of that first tour, about two months. Mia, who was listed on Petfinder but was never reunited with her person, and Lois Lane became best buddies.

  4

  Base Camp

  WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA MADE LANDFALL in southeast Louisiana, residents of Mississippi, located in the heart of the South and one of five states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, were hit as well. The St. Francis Animal Sanctuary in Tylertown, located midway between Jackson, Mississippi, and New Orleans, was difficult to get to because of washed-out roads, downed power lines, and fallen trees on the streets leading to the sanctuary in rural Mississippi.

  On Thursday, September 2, Paul Berry made it to the animal sanctuary after workers in a power company truck gave him a detour to follow. After spending a couple of days in New Orleans, he knew the storm was not a run-of-the-mill hurricane. When Paul finally realized through radio reports that officials were going to let the city flood and then try to fix the levees after the flooding had stabilized, he knew that it was a major catastrophe and that houses would be underwater. And he knew from growing up there that most people don’t evacuate, and a lot of those people who stay behind have pets. While in New Orleans, he saw animals running all over the place, almost as if they were fleeing a tornado. They were, in fact, fleeing the rising floodwaters.

  Ethan Gurney, Jeff Popowich, and Russ Mead, the first Best Friends team on the ground, arrived at the St. Francis Sanctuary on Sunday, September 5. On Monday, they started building runs with fences as a way to house animals from Franklinton, Louisiana, about twenty miles away, where the Jefferson Parish shelter had evacuated pets. With the help of TV and radio reports in Jackson, 80 of those dogs and cats were eventually adopted out, and through an agreement between the shelter (headed by Bert Smith) and Paul Berry at Best Friends, the Jefferson Parish shelter’s remaining 110 pets were given to Best Friends to care for.

  The agreement also called for Best Friends to care for, house, reunite, or foster out the animals to clear space for more Katrina pets at the Jefferson Parish shelter. That agreement was a pivotal moment in the rescue effort. As it turned out, the agreement not only was a way to help pets at the Jefferson Parish shelter, but also provided the permission Best Friends rescue teams needed to enter the city and get past military and police roadblocks along the way. With a copy of the signed agreement from Bert in hand each day, Best Friends teams were waved on past the half-dozen checkpoints while others were not allowed in.

  In the meantime, back at the command center at the Best Friends sanctuary in southern Utah, phones were ringing off the hook.

  “Calls to Best Friends began immediately when news of the flooding hit,” said Anne Mejia, a Best Friends founder who directed operations at the command center. “Calls were overwhelming the switchboard.”

  It was the same for the Web site. “Within ten days, we received seventy-six thousand e-mails, and it shut down our Web site,” Anne said. Lynn Tharp, a Best Friends employee who works at the sanctuary’s welcome center, was one of those who transcribed messages. She and others worked seven-day weeks to handle the onslaught. “I lifted the messages from voice mail and wrote them all down,” she said. “Other workers would then grab my notes and call or e-mail people back. You know how people wonder when they leave a voice message whether anyone listens to it? Well, I did. I wrote down each and every one of those messages. They followed a pattern: they either called to donate supplies, they wanted to volunteer, or they wanted us to get their animals out of their houses.” Everybody, she said, was contacted, either by telephone or e-mail.

  One such message, in a list sent daily to the Camp Tylertown rescue team, notified them that two cats, Blackjack and Baby Kitty, were left on the second floor of a house when the owner evacuated to Florida. Those two cats were so frightened, th
e owner said, that she wasn’t able to round them up before she left. Her house was locked and the windows boarded. Her other four cats, however, evacuated with her.

  As the Best Friends team and St. Francis employees organized and staged the base camp, volunteers began to show up. Within days, as word got out, they arrived in droves. Where one day only a skeleton crew was working, the next day it was a mini-city. Each night, a bullhorn sounded to announce the arrival of the day’s transport van. On cue, forty to sixty workers headed out on foot for Ellis Island—so named for new arrivals—to welcome the day’s animals from New Orleans. The incoming dogs, cats, and miscellaneous pets were given water and small amounts of food (to allow their systems to adjust to food again) and were put in their kennels until morning.

  The volunteers who arrived daily “were amazing, both at the command center and at Tylertown,” said Anne Mejia, who ran the command center in Utah. “People arrived every day from all over the U.S. and Canada. They ended up staying longer than they had planned, and when they called their bosses to get permission to stay longer, often their companies would say, ‘Stay as long as you need, and we will pay you to be there. It’s our way of helping.’ We were blessed with veterinarians, dog trainers, groomers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, computer technicians, mothers, retirees, corporate executives, students, construction workers, artists, and so many other gifted and amazing people.”