by Cathy Scott
Forced to leave, Bart left Bubba and Bugsy in a second-floor office. As soon as he arrived at a rescue center in Dallas, he had people send out pleas for someone to retrieve his cats from the Regions Bank on Judge Perez Drive. That’s where Best Friends and the Dateline crew found Bubba. Unfortunately, Bugsy, who had diabetes, didn’t make it.
Bart had left a note with the cats. Rob Stafford, a correspondent in the field with NBC that day, read the note and then sent an SOS message to his NBC newsroom for help. NBC employees, in turn, were able to locate Bart’s mother on the People Finder online search engine. Bart’s mother, after being called by Dateline, notified her son, who was staying in a Dallas hotel, that Bubba had been rescued. Bart, who had lost everything he owned, rented a car and drove ten hours through the night to Camp Tylertown to retrieve his long-haired gray cat. Rob, who ended up fostering a Katrina dog he’d helped rescue, was at Camp Tylertown with his film crew to videotape the reunion.
Tiny and Tinkerbelle were reunited, too, but with their owner’s mother, not with the man who had raised them. Their person, David Carruthers, returned to New Orleans only to find that his two small dogs were gone and his house had been destroyed. As the storm was about to hit and just before he evacuated, he’d put his two dogs in a boat that was tied to a tree in his front yard. He had no way of knowing that the boat would later drift off. It ended up a couple of blocks away, landing on debris in the yard of the Evangeline apartment building, from which the Best Friends team retrieved his dogs.
David was devastated by the loss—so much so that he took his own life by hanging himself from the same tree. His dogs, however, did find their way home. The day after David’s death, his mother received a phone call from a former neighbor telling her that he’d watched the Dateline NBC segment and recognized Tiny and Tinkerbelle being rescued.
David’s dogs, who had been placed in separate foster homes after their rescue, were returned to base camp. Two weeks later, David’s mother, Karen Burns-Carruthers, drove to Camp Tylertown to pick up Tinkerbelle, a West Highland White Terrier, and Tiny, a Chihuahua. Karen called it a miracle to have located her son’s dogs.
A Cocker Spaniel mix named Agustas was in foster care as well. When his people saw him on TV, they, too, notified Best Friends and were put in touch with the New Hampshire foster home that had been taking care of Agustas, and he was returned.
Annette Gilligan learned what had happened to her Maltese, Ketel, and her parents’ Boston Terrier, Son, when she received an excited phone call on a Sunday night. “I just saw my dog on TV,” her mother squealed into the phone. She had also seen Annette’s dog, but Annette was skeptical. Her mother couldn’t tell her the name of the show, just that she remembered that the animal group was Best Friends.
The Saturday before Hurricane Katrina touched down on land, Annette’s mother had gone to work at Chalmette Medical Center in St. Bernard Parish. Annette had left Ketel with her parents for a visit. The next day, Annette’s father joined his wife at the hospital.
“On the Sunday before the storm, my father packed up the dogs, Ketel and Son, and took them with him to the hospital to ride out the storm with my mother,” Annette said. On Monday, the hurricane hit. “No one ever imagined the actual damage Katrina would do. At four thirty a.m. I was evacuated to Baton Rouge and watched the coverage with friends.”
The storm “took the homes of every family member I have and, for six weeks, it took my two dogs, too. The past three and a half years of my life have been spent with an eight-pound Maltese named Ketel who has been not just my pet, but my baby as well.”
Her parents had been trapped at the hospital, where the water had risen to ten feet. “They had generators, food, and medical staff, but no escape,” she said. The dogs stayed in a hospital room with them. A few days later, a military helicopter landed on the roof to begin evacuating the medical center. Annette’s parents packed one bag with clothes and left the other empty for stowing Ketel and Son, and then they headed for the roof. Once there, however, they were told “No dogs allowed” by hospital personnel, just as Julie Willheit had been. Ketel and Son became two more pets Dennis Rizzuto agreed to look after.
Annette later picked up her parents from Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and that’s when she learned the bad news. Her mother cried when she told her daughter about how they were forced to leave Son and Ketel. Annette immediately registered both dogs on the Petfinder Web site and went twice to the Lamar-Dixon shelter looking for them. She drove to Noah’s Wish in Slidell and the Louisiana SPCA shelters. They weren’t there. So, when her mother called her and said she had just seen the dogs on TV, Annette didn’t believe it. Her mother insisted, however, that she’d seen them being carried out of Dennis’s apartment building by two men. She was right. Ethan Gurney and Jeff Popowich, members of Best Friends rapid response team, had been videotaped rescuing Son and Ketel.
Annette tracked down Best Friends to its base camp in Tylertown, Mississippi, and drove there with her mother in search of their dogs. They were shown photos and information about pets in both the rescue center’s database and in binders. There, Annette’s mother saw photos not only of Ketel and Son, but also of a dog named Buttons who belonged to Annette’s friend. They learned that the three had been fostered out to different homes, and arrangements would be made to return them to Camp Tylertown.
In the meantime, they called their friends the Dominos to let them know that Buttons had been rescued and had been placed in a nearby foster home in McComb, Mississippi.
As soon as Annette got the call that her Maltese and her parents’ Boston Terrier were being flown in a private plane by Best Friends staffer Juliette Watt—back to Camp Tylertown from foster care in Chicago—she sped to Mississippi to meet them.
Back home in Gonzales, Louisiana, Ketel and Son appear unscathed from the ordeal. “They’re fine and as spoiled as ever,” Annette said in a phone interview. “It’s like they were on holiday the whole time.” Her advice for those who lose pets is simple: “Keep looking. Don’t give up.”
Sal Domino, who picked up Buttons a few days later, credited his dog with keeping him alive after his bypass surgery months earlier. During the hurricane, Sal and his wife, Joan, along with Buttons (so named because she chewed the buttons off Sal’s shirts), stayed at the Chalmette hospital, where Joan worked as a housekeeping supervisor. After they were evacuated and had to leave Buttons, Sal’s world fell apart. He was grieving for his dog.
Once the family relocated to Tickpaw, Louisiana, they began their search for Buttons, but without any luck. They went to the Louisiana Humane Society and to Chalmette High School, where animals also were being kept, then to the large temporary shelter in Gonzales, and finally to Tylertown. Sal didn’t believe he was going to get Buttons back until he saw her being carried to him by her foster mom, Sarah Booker, a veterinary technician who had driven her to base camp from her home a few miles away in McComb. According to Sal, Buttons meant the world to him. He had given up, telling his wife that was the last trip he would make to look for Buttons. His search was over. As a crowd of volunteers stood by, Buttons licked Sal’s face when she first saw him. Sal was overcome with emotion. His family said having Buttons back in Sal’s life made all the difference. She gave him a reason to live.
12
The Twister Sisters
ON SEPTEMBER 24, HURRICANE RITA touched down on the Louisiana-Texas border. Because of the landing’s close proximity to Mississippi, volunteers at Camp Tylertown battened down and prepared for the possibility of a hurricane.
Professional stormchasers Peggy Willenberg, from Plymouth, Minnesota, and her partner Melanie Trockman, from nearby St. Cloud, were at Camp Tylertown to record the storm. Peggy and Melanie are known as the Twister Sisters. Two National Geographic documentaries have aired segments about the pair’s storm-chasing antics. They follow storms for Fox News, Channel 9, in Minneapolis, where they report on severe weather from April through August, traveling and chasing
along the way during tornado season.
The two had planned to volunteer, not as storm experts, but just like any other volunteer—until Hurricane Rita was about to make landfall. As the weather changed for the worse, they set up their computer equipment and created a mini-storm central at base camp. Studying storm data on their laptop computer under a tarp, they provided reports every fifteen minutes as volunteers and staffers staked in all the kennels, tightening down everything that could be picked up and blown about.
By afternoon, a dark, ominous cloud rolled in and hovered nearby. That, the Twister Sisters explained, was the edge of the storm.
Five hundred plastic igloos had been delivered the day before—straw was placed inside for bedding—to shelter the dogs from thirty-mile-an-hour wind gusts. Igloos were placed in each run for every animal. Everybody kicked into high gear as workers buttoned up, battened down, and prepared for the possibility of Hurricane Rita bearing down on the Best Friends relief center. While the Twister Sisters did their thing, other volunteers broke down tents, removed tarps from kennels, and picked up anything in the yard that could become a projectile. As the day progressed and the storm mass shadowed base camp, the dogs took cover inside their new igloos. The smallest dogs, those in Toytown, were taken inside the three bungalows on the property, and volunteers who’d been sleeping in tents moved inside and prepared to sleep on the floor.
By afternoon, photographer Clay Myers, who doubled as a maintenance repairman when needed, was working on the roof of an RV where four staffers slept, fastening something that was about to blow away. I ran over to where he was working with his back to the cloud and shouted against the wind, “Clay, look up!” as I pointed toward the incoming cloud. “Wow!” he shouted back. He made his way to a ladder, climbed down from the RV, grabbed his camera gear from indoors, and shot photos of Rita.
That day’s rescue crew, on their way to St. Bernard Parish, was called back, just to be on the safe side, because Hurricane Rita was forecast to hit New Orleans hard. The dogs and cats at base camp were restless, so volunteers sat with them to help calm them. Then everyone hoped for the best and waited as the winds picked up and clouds emptied over Camp Tylertown. Throughout the night, rain poured and wind lashed, and it sounded like the roofs of the bungalows were being ripped apart. Some runs filled with water in the middle of the night, and volunteers and staffers, fighting the wind and rain, moved the dogs to runs that hadn’t flooded.
Volunteers packed into the loft above the main building—a laundry room and cattery with a kitchen and a bathroom—to get out of the storm. I slept on the floor in the office, as usual, with my foster Chihuahuas Lois Lane and Mia shivering with fear as they hid under the covers, cringing in their smallness from something so big. They seemed sure the storm was going to get them. And it sounded like it would, especially in the middle of the night when the storm seemed the worst. I imagined the dogs in their igloos must have thought that Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on them once again as it rattled their plastic shelters. The wind tearing at the roof sounded like it was going to rip it away.
Peggy and Melanie—who in reality are friends and not sisters—braved the storm in their tent along with a few other daring campers. Everyone else at camp had taken cover elsewhere, either inside a building or in cars and campers. Peggy and Melanie camped on the grass, sleeping through Rita. By daybreak, their tent was the only one that hadn’t been damaged by the torrential rain and winds.
Although small items had been scattered about camp, most everything else had stayed intact. No one, including the animals, was hurt.
The people and pets of New Orleans didn’t fare as well. It took a week to pump dry the newly flooded areas left in Rita’s wake, leading to more pets being displaced and causing more damage to homes.
Surprisingly, Rita had a silver lining. When the storm blew away, she took with her swarms of love bugs, providing a welcome relief from the billions that had taken up residence in the region. Before Rita, the amorous flies—dipterans, also known as June bugs, that form large, dense swarms—thickened the air around Camp Tylertown. They were everywhere and landed on just about everything, forming a black blanket and claiming every object—including food—as their territory. We had to be careful not to breathe too deeply while outside or we’d capture a mouthful.
Love-bug mating season was in full swing, and the air and everything they landed on was thick with the buggers for what seemed an eternity. Hurricane Rita, in her vigor, carried them all away.
13
Other Homeless Critters
RESCUE TEAMS MADE TREACHEROUS TREKS through sewage and diesel-contaminated floodwaters to retrieve not only dogs and cats, but also pot-bellied pigs, birds, geese, ducks, turtles, snakes, exotic fish, tarantulas, ferrets, and an emu left stranded by the storm. Regardless of their species, all kinds of animals were rescued from the streets of New Orleans and taken to the Tylertown base camp.
A tiny Muskogee duckling was found in mid-September, swimming in a pond with two other ducks. A team, including volunteers Rochelle Fraser and Jeremy Glover, dog handler John Garcia, and two volunteer veterinarians, was searching St. Bernard Parish for pets when they spotted a house that was spray-painted with the words “Cat in Garage” and “Ducks Out Back.” The team walked to the back of the house. “There they were,” said Rochelle. “Three ducks swimming in this dirty pond. Someone had left them a big bag of dog food opened and on the shore.” Two white ducks “and this little ugly duckling were swimming. The duckling didn’t look anything like the other two. The vets said they needed to look at him. He didn’t look very healthy. He was small and spotted and pretty dirty.”
It took a good hour to round them up. “If you’ve ever seen a bunch of animal lovers try to catch a duck, it’s hilarious,” she said. “We threw rocks in the opposite direction of where they were swimming to see if they would swim the other way.” It worked. “Whichever way we tossed the rocks, they swam the other way. One walked out of the water, and we put him in a crate.” To lure the others, they carried the crate, with the duck inside, to the edge of the water. “He started squawking, and the other two walked up to the crate. We put them all in the van in the large crate. They stood up and looked at us through the wire door.”
With the ducks safely in the van, the team opened the garage door to rescue the cat. “The cat meowed and came right to us,” Rochelle said. “He was in pretty good shape. Someone had left him food in the garage.” It felt good to rescue the four, Rochelle said, because earlier in the day they’d gone to a property where several horses and dogs hadn’t made it. “It was the most ghastly thing I’d ever seen.” She remembers one of the team members saying, “There’s nothing we can do for them. We need to get out of here and rescue.” They happened to turn down one particular street, and that’s when they spotted the words painted on the house about the ducks and the cat.
That night, they arrived at base camp with the rescued animals. Mary Lichtenberger, a volunteer from Ohio who handled intake and foster paperwork, was there for the baby duck’s arrival. Mary, who knew how to care for ducks because she’d had one for ten years, made a makeshift habitat for the duckling in a large crate in the laundry room in Kitty City. The laundry area, which also served as a grooming room, was the entrance to the building, so volunteers going in and out became all too familiar with the vocal duckling. Everyone called him Ducky. He made sure to greet everyone who walked through the door by flapping his wings and making noises, but he didn’t quack. The sounds emanating from that duckling are difficult to describe, but whatever he was trying to say, he said it with gusto.
Mary exercised him at least twice a day by filling a large sink with water so he could splash around and swim. Ducky vigorously flapped his featherless wings, which looked like fuzzy pink sticks because he was still a baby. But he splashed around in the water like he was a full-grown duck. After his baths, he sat wrapped in a towel on volunteers’ laps as they input computer data. He seemed to enjoy it.
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But Ducky was growing fast, tripling in size in just six weeks. It became obvious that he needed to be around his own kind, so he was fostered out to a couple who had fifty other domestic ducks and geese just outside of Becker, Minnesota. Soon, he was all grown up and doing well at the twenty-acre hobby farm, swimming in ponds and splashing around in mud areas with other ducks. He was named Louis after his native Louisiana. Once it was determined that “he” was a “she,” however, the duckling was quickly renamed Louise. From the start, Louise’s new best friend at the hobby farm was a young Guinea hen named Pop. When Louise went into the water, Pop was close behind, but the hen soon realized he wasn’t a duck when he nearly drowned. Like a big brother, Pop watched over Louise, regularly running interference with the geese stepping in her path.
Louise’s diet in her new digs is similar to the food she grew up on—spinach, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and fruit. Now, she also regularly eats cantaloupe, grapes, and watermelon, with bread and lettuce as treats. In addition, just like when she was living in Camp Tylertown, Louise still eats cracked corn and oats. During the warmer months, she swims in a one-acre pond. Her favorite activity, according to the farm operators, is diving for peas as they sink in the pond water. Her once-sparse feathers have grown iridescent, and her guardians report that she’s both beautiful and happy.
Other birds arrived at Camp Tylertown, too, including a half dozen chickens rescued in late September from a hiding place behind coolers at a Chevron station on Chef Menteur Highway in Gentilly. Their rescuers reported that it appeared they were being fed, possibly by residents who had returned to the area. The chickens—which were a mixture of red, white, and black in color—were eventually placed in a foster home in Bellevue, Colorado, on a large piece of property.
