Hurricane Katrina Rescue

by Kate Messner

  Clare lifted the bandanna to her mouth and breathed through it. Was Nana in this awful place?

  Ranger stepped through the mob, toward a row of people sitting up in chairs by the wall. The Nana smell was getting stronger.

  There! Ranger barked.

  “Nana!” Clare called out and ran to her. Nana was slumped over in a folding chair, but when Clare shouted, her eyes fluttered open.

  “Oh, Nana!” Clare sank to her knees and buried her head in her grandmother’s lap.

  Nana lifted a hand and stroked Clare’s hair. “Praise the Lord,” she said. Her voice was dry and gravelly. She coughed and couldn’t stop for a long time. When she did, her eyes were red and watery. “Your father will be right back,” she said.

  “Oh, Nana.” Clare’s eyes filled with tears. Nana was so confused she still thought Dad was coming back with the car. “He got stuck somewhere when he went out to put gas in the car. We have to get out of here, to safety. The buses …”

  Clare sighed. She didn’t believe in buses anymore. They might as well have been waiting for fairies or unicorns to rescue them. She’d found Nana, and what could she do for her? Nothing except wait and hope.

  Clare took a deep, shaky breath. “There are buses coming,” she said. “Eventually. They’ll take us to safety.”

  Clare tried to sound confident. But she knew Nana was struggling. What if the buses arrived too late?

  Clare had been so strong. Now she slumped against the wall beside Nana’s chair. After a few minutes, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  Nana started singing the song she’d sung when Clare was little. “This little light of mine … I’m gonna let it shine …”

  Tears filled Clare’s eyes. But her heart filled with hope. Even with Nana’s raspy, dry throat, she was singing. It made Clare feel like she might be able to sing, too.

  “This little light of mine …” Clare sang. “I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine … I’m gonna let it shine …”

  A woman shuffling by with a baby in her arms stopped. “Let it shine,” she sang with them. Another woman joined in. “Let it shine, let it shine.”

  Clare felt her frustration and fear and rage lift away with every note. But when the song ended, she and Nana were alone again.

  “Your father will be back any minute,” Nana said.

  “Thanks, Nana.” Clare couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. Dad wasn’t here. And she didn’t even know if he was alive.

  Soon, Nana was snoring quietly. Clare hugged her dad’s orange jacket to her chest. Somehow, it still smelled like her father on a boating day — like sweat and shaving lotion and blue crabs. “Where are you?” Clare whispered into the dark. “Why can’t you find us?”

  Find? Ranger sat up.

  “What is it, dog?” She looked down at the jacket. “This is Dad’s,” she said. “But he’s not here.”

  Ranger pawed at the jacket. Clare held it out, and he sniffed it. It smelled like Clare and floodwater and fish, but there was another smell, too. A person smell.

  Ranger barked and stood up. Clare looked down at Nana’s purple bandanna. The dog had used it to find her. Could he find Clare’s father, too?

  Clare looked at Ranger and felt an impossible hope. She tied the bandanna around his neck and gave him a quick hug. “Go on then, dog,” she whispered. “I have to stay with Nana, but go. Find Dad if you can.”

  Ranger sniffed the jacket again and walked into the crowd. There were so many smells here. Spoiling food and sickness and sweat. He waited until someone opened a door and slipped outside. He walked up and down both sides of the street. When he was almost back to Clare and Nana, he hesitated.

  There! It was faint, but it was there. Ranger tracked the Dad smell to the end of the block, up to a big truck where two men were handing out water. He ran up to the taller man and barked.

  “Whose dog?” the man said, looking around. He shook his head and went back to work.

  Ranger pawed at the man’s leg. The man looked down, scowling. But then he reached out and touched the purple bandanna around the dog’s neck. His face changed. He turned to the other man and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  Ranger led the man into the building. He pushed through the crowd until he saw Clare and Nana. Then he barked.

  Clare looked up. “Daddy!” She raced into his arms.

  “Praise the Lord,” he whispered into her hair. He held her back to look at her, then knelt beside Nana. “You found her!”

  “She found me,” Nana said. “I told her you were here, but she didn’t believe me.”

  Her father laughed a little. Then his eyes filled with tears. He turned to Clare. “There was no gasoline anywhere. I had to leave the city to fill the tank. And then …” He blinked hard. “Then they were turning people around. I tried every back road you can imagine. When the storm swept in, a tree fell in the middle of the road and I got stranded.”

  “How did you get back?” Clare asked.

  “Walked,” he said. “Thirty miles, best as I can tell. I found Nana yesterday and hooked up with guys from my army unit to help out with supplies. It’s been a mess, but buses will be here in the morning. Now that we found you, we can leave for Houston.” He motioned for Clare to sit down. Then he settled next to her and pulled her in close. “Try to get some rest,” he said. “And hey … where’d the dog come from?”

  “I’m not sure,” Clare patted Ranger on the head. “We adopted him. Or maybe he adopted us.”

  Her father looked at Ranger and ran a hand over his collar. “He looks pretty well cared for, Clare. Probably just got separated from his owner in the storm. Hope he finds his way home.”

  Ranger curled up next to Clare, beside the garbage bag. His first aid kit was in there, still quiet. Hadn’t he done his job? He’d kept Clare safe. He’d found Nana and Dad. When would he get to go home?

  * * *

  In the morning, a long line of buses stretched down the street. A man in a uniform motioned Clare’s family into line. But when they got to the bus, he held up his hand.

  “No dogs,” he said.

  “I can’t leave him behind,” Clare said. Not now. She couldn’t.

  The man knelt and put a hand on Clare’s shoulder. “I’m afraid you’ll have to. But there are groups working to gather pets left behind. He’ll be cared for. They should be able to return him to you when you come home.”

  Clare looked at the shaggy golden dog. She put down her garbage bag, knelt, and hugged him. He had a home somewhere. She knew that. But she was so glad he’d been hers for a little while. She tugged gently at Nana’s purple bandanna around his neck. “You can keep this, okay? It looks good on you. And it’ll help you remember us.” Clare gave him one last squeeze and started to tie her garbage bag shut again.

  But Ranger pawed at the bag. There was a quiet humming sound inside. It was already getting louder.

  “What do you want, dog?” Clare opened the bag, and Ranger’s first aid kit fell out onto the sidewalk.

  “Oh!” Clare said. “That’s yours! Here …” She put the leather strap around Ranger’s neck. She couldn’t hear the humming, but Ranger already felt heat growing at his throat.

  “Clare, let’s go, baby!” her father called from the bus.

  “Good-bye, dog!” Clare gave him one last squeeze, and whispered, “I hope you find your way home, too.” Then she ran to the bus. Her father had already helped Nana into a seat. Clare sat across from them by a window.

  Ranger watched more people file onto the bus. The first aid kit was humming loudly now. Light was beginning to spill from the cracks, but he kept his eyes on Clare’s face in the window until the bus finally pulled away. The humming had grown so loud that it drowned out the bus motors and people talking. The light grew brighter and brighter. Finally, Ranger had to close his eyes. He felt as if he were being squeezed through a hole in the sky.

  When the humming stopped, Ranger opened his eyes and saw rain pouring down.


  The sky rumbled. But it was home thunder. And Ranger was standing next to his dog bed, right there in the mudroom where he’d left it. Ranger walked over and lowered his head so the first aid kit dropped onto his bed.

  “Don’t worry, Ranger,” Luke said as he walked in with the ketchup and mustard bottles. “It’s not a very big storm. Should pass by soon, and then we can go back outside.” He looked down at Ranger and tipped his head. “Where’d you get the bandanna? Have Sadie and Noreen been dressing you up again?”

  Ranger pawed at the bandanna. Luke knelt down and untied it. Ranger took it gently in his teeth and dropped it in his bed. “That’s fair,” Luke said, laughing. “If they want to tie some weird purple scarf around your neck, I guess you can do whatever you want with it.”

  Luke headed into the kitchen. “Come on, Ranger! Dad made peanut butter cookies!”

  Ranger barked, but he didn’t follow Luke right away. Instead, he pawed at his blanket until the first aid kit and the faded purple bandanna were covered up. He’d miss Clare’s neck scratches and her singing. But somehow he knew that Clare was safe now, too.

  Outside the thunder rumbled again, but it didn’t seem so bad. Ranger was glad his work was finally done. Just like Clare, he was safe with his family now. And there were cookies waiting in the kitchen.

  Clare Porter is a fictional character, but her story is based on the experiences of real-life people who survived Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in 2005. Katrina was one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history. When the storm surge arrived in New Orleans on the morning of August 29, the flood protection system failed in dozens of places, leaving 80 percent of the city underwater. At least 1,836 people died, and more than a million more had to leave their homes, including around 160,000 children like Clare.

  Even though New Orleans was under a mandatory evacuation order, many people couldn’t leave before the storm hit. Some didn’t have cars. Some had elderly or sick relatives who couldn’t be moved. Some didn’t have enough money to leave town. New Orleans’s poorest residents were hit the hardest. The sequence of events Clare experiences in this story is based on real people’s recollections, shared in books, museums, online, and in personal interviews.

  Rising floodwaters forced many people, like Clare, to break out of their attics and wait on rooftops for help. Some Lower Ninth Ward residents took their small boats out to rescue neighbors. The woman in the helicopter who rescues Clare and Ranger from the roof was inspired by Sara Faulkner, a real Coast Guard rescue swimmer who was working in New Orleans in the days that followed Hurricane Katrina.

  Sara, who was the first woman to graduate from the Coast Guard’s rigorous training program and then serve as a rescue swimmer, was kind enough to talk with me about her work that week and walk me through what Clare would have experienced when the helicopter arrived.

  Clare’s story of being turned away on the bridge, sadly, is also based on a real event. On September 1, 2005, hundreds of people who had been forced out of their homes and hotels were trying to walk over the Crescent City Connection to the nearby city of Gretna. Police officers blocked pedestrians from crossing the bridge. Gretna was closed, they said. Officers ordered the flood survivors back to New Orleans and fired shotguns over their heads. New Orleans residents were angry that even elderly people and children were turned away, and there were accusations of racism. Most of the officers were white, and most of the people in the crowd were black. One of the officers reportedly told the crowd, “We’re not going to have any Superdomes over here.” Gretna’s police chief defended his decision to close the bridge. He said no one warned him people would be coming from New Orleans, so his city was overwhelmed and not prepared to handle the large crowds trying to escape the flooded city.

  Many residents of the Lower Ninth Ward remain angry about how they were treated in the days that followed Hurricane Katrina. They’ll never forget how long it took the federal government to send buses and aid. A photograph of President George W. Bush viewing the flooded city from the safety of a helicopter high above hangs at the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum — a reminder of how forgotten people in the Lower Ninth Ward felt as they waited for help to arrive. But this tiny museum in a formerly flooded home also tells the story of a community that came together — neighbors rescuing neighbors, heading back into the flood to do the work they feared no one else would.

  Another New Orleans museum, the Presbytère, has a Hurricane Katrina exhibit with personal accounts and artifacts from those late summer days in 2005. Among them is an artifact from one of Katrina’s most famous survivors, musician Fats Domino, who was rescued from his Lower Ninth Ward home. His piano didn’t survive the flood; what’s left of it is on display in the museum’s lobby.

  Before Hurricane Katrina, Clare’s Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood was known as a place where neighbors gathered on their porches to visit over sweet tea and music after supper. It’s a community full of pride and history — the first area of the Deep South to desegregate its schools during the Civil Rights movement. Ruby Bridges, an African-American girl who had to be escorted to school by federal marshals to protect her from angry white residents, attended William Frantz Elementary in the Ninth Ward. This was also the first area of the city where African-American people who had once been enslaved were able to own property. Before Katrina, the Ninth Ward had one of the highest rates of home ownership in the city. Houses had been passed down from generation to generation, and more than half of the fifteen thousand people who lived there owned their homes outright.

  When I visited the Lower Ninth Ward in December of 2016, the population had only recovered to around 2,800 people. Eleven years after Katrina, just two of the neighborhood’s seven public schools had reopened. Many homes are still in ruins. One hundred percent of the houses in the Lower Ninth were uninhabitable after the storm. Some were completely washed away. Those that weren’t were full of toxic black mold because water was left standing so long after the storm.

  The scars from Katrina still run deep as you drive through the streets of this neighborhood. Many houses were never rebuilt. It’s not uncommon to see porch steps leading to nowhere.

  Some buildings still have what’s known as the Katrina cross spray-painted on the siding. It was a system rescue workers used to show which homes had been searched, how many people had been found alive, and how many hadn’t survived.

  Ranger’s experience being left behind when the buses pulled out of the city was one that happened to tens of thousands of New Orleans pets. While some rescuers allowed people to bring pets along in boats and helicopters, there was no official policy on rescuing animals, so many also refused.

  An estimated 250,000 pets were left behind when their owners evacuated due to Hurricane Katrina. While animal rescue groups worked heroically to help stranded pets and reunite them with their owners, more than half of the pets stranded by Katrina died or were never found.

  This led to some changes in both state and federal laws. In 2006, Congress passed the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, or PETS Act, which authorized federal rescuers to rescue pets along with people in natural disasters. After Hurricane Katrina, officials realized that many people who refuse to evacuate in advance of a storm make that decision because they don’t want to leave their pets behind. Because of this, they expect that the PETS Act will save not only animals’ lives but people’s lives as well.

  While there have been some positive outcomes after Hurricane Katrina, residents of the Lower Ninth Ward still feel ignored. Some say that construction debris left in the streets, broken fire hydrants, and uncovered storm drains make them feel like the city of New Orleans has given up on them.

  But for many, the Lower Ninth Ward will always be home. An organization called lowernine.org has been working since the storm to help the residents return and reclaim their property. Since 2005, the group’s workers and volunteers have rebuilt eighty-four houses and completed 250 more renovation projects.r />
  The damage from Hurricane Katrina was devastating. But every year, volunteers make a little more progress as they work with members of the community to bring a neighborhood back to life. If your family or class would like to help with that work, you can make a donation at http://lowernine.org.

  If you’d like to read more stories about Hurricane Katrina and real-life search-and-rescue dogs, check out the following books and websites:

  “Eye on the Storm: Hurricane Katrina Fast Facts” by Brian Handwerk, via National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0906_050906_katrina_facts.html

  Marvelous Cornelius: Hurricane Katrina and the Spirit of New Orleans by Phil Bildner, illustrated by John Parra (Chronicle Books, 2015)

  A Place Where Hurricanes Happen by Renee Watson, illustrated by Shadra Strickland (Random House, 2010)

  Sniffer Dogs: How Dogs (and Their Noses) Save the World by Nancy Castaldo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

  Two Bobbies: A True Story of Hurricane Katrina, Friendship, and Survival by Kirby Larson and Mary Nethery, illustrated by Jean Cassels (Bloomsbury, 2008)

  What was Hurricane Katrina? by Robin Koontz, illustrated by John Hinderliter (Grosset & Dunlap, 2015)

  I’m grateful to Laura Paul from lowernine.org for sharing her group’s story and showing me around the neighborhood, and to J. F. “Smitty” Smith for sharing his reflections of living through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Mr. Smith wrote his own book about the disaster, called Exiled in Paradise. He was especially helpful in talking with me about the frustration and sense of betrayal that people in the Lower Ninth still feel, more than a decade after the storm. “This was a tough blow for all of us,” he said. “You spend forty-five years getting your house together, and all of a sudden it’s gone. And the state, local, and federal government doesn’t want to help you out.” Both Paul and Smith read early drafts of this manuscript, and I’m so thankful for their helpful feedback.