Pawprints of Katrina

WHEN KIMBERLEE LAUER ARRIVED at Camp Tylertown about a week after the storm, it was for one purpose: to let rescuers know that dozens of pets were trapped inside loft-style apartments at the American Can Company complex in Mid-City.

Those stranded in the turn-of-the-century converted factory included Kimberlee’s Himalayan cat, Mr. Jezebel, and other animals. Kimberlee and two friends had left their three cats in a fourth-floor apartment in the high-rise building on New Orleans Avenue overlooking Bayou St. John. The American Can Company was surrounded by a seemingly endless wasteland of toxic water with animals inside homes just hanging on. The building was touted as hurricane proof. “It’s a hundred feet off the ground,” said Kimberlee, who had moved to New Orleans three years earlier. The problem was, no one could get to it, except by boat, and then only if they could get past the police and National Guard checkpoints. In that regard, residents were locked out.

Kimberlee didn’t even live in the building. She’d gone with Mr. Jezebel to a friend’s apartment in the American Can to ride out the storm. “We were on the roof, and you could see the whole city,” Kimberlee said. Because the hallways didn’t have windows and were completely dark, “everybody walked their dogs on the roofs, which connected the buildings. There were about two hundred people in the buildings. There was a little water in the street, and we figured we could drive out the next day.”

The day after the levees broke, the water was rising at the Orleans Avenue entrance to the apartments. The cars on Toulouse Street, at another entrance to the complex, were submerged. Medics and National Guard officers evacuated patients from the hospital next door. Kimberlee and others looked down from the American Can roof and watched the evacuation. “The medics had to push the patients in wheelchairs and on gurneys through the standing water,” she said. “It was difficult. The ground was uneven. The water was above the cars. We had two weeks’ worth of food and water. We figured we’d stay there till it was gone.”

After spending four days at the Can, Kimberlee and her friends Suzanne O’Neill and Cem Cakir, who had two cats between them, were ordered to evacuate by National Guard officers and were then taken by helicopter to the New Orleans airport, where they waited for a flight out. “When we got to the airport,” she said, “we discovered that some people had been allowed to bring their pets, and we were so jealous and angry that we weren’t allowed to take ours.”

They thought about nothing but their cats—Mr. Jezebel, Boo, and Raja. Despite what Kimberlee described as disorganization and chaos at the airport, they were each given MREs (military Meals Ready to Eat), and the restrooms and air-conditioning worked.

They called friends who had been evacuated, too. “A friend’s dogs were rescued by some Australian journalists, and another friend’s cat was rescued by someone who rode his bicycle into the city and then treaded water for twelve blocks. All these stories made us happy and desperately jealous at the same time. We just felt so powerless.

“We posted our info on all the pet sites we could find,” Kimberlee continued. “We even posted a reward on Craigslist, asking if someone could go into the Can and get the cats safely back to us.”

“Suzanne suggested one of us go there and plant ourselves with the rescue group in the hope that making direct contact would give us a better shot,” Kinberlee said. “So that’s what we did. I volunteered to be the one to drive to Tylertown that day.” From San Antonio, Kimberlee flew to Missouri to pick up her car from a tenant who had borrowed it to evacuate to Texas. Then Kimberlee headed for Tylertown, Mississippi. “I even picked up a stranded dog on the way, a Chow who was accepted at Tylertown.”

Kimberlee arrived at Camp Tylertown and told Paul Berry and Russ Mead her story. She also went to work, helping at base camp. “Kimberlee was one of the first volunteers to arrive here,” said Heidi Krupp with the St. Francis Sanctuary.

Kimberlee’s plan worked. A team, which included volunteer Ken Ray and Best Friends rapid response members Ethan Gurney and Jeff Popowich, decided to go to the American Can Company on September 9 to rescue at least two dozen pets trapped in the apartment complex. Back at base camp, Kimberlee called her friends—and some other residents she’d gotten numbers from—to let them know that a team was going to try to rescue their pets.

Because the complex was surrounded by water, there was no way to get close to it by car. The team took Interstate 10 to an off-ramp, and then got a boat into the water. Even so, it took a long time to reach the building. “The water wasn’t all that deep, and we had a person we met along the way guiding us there,” said rescuer Jeff Popowich. “We had to maneuver along the side of the road to keep in deeper water. And, of course, there were animals along the way and we were stopping and picking them up.”

They came across an empty boat floating in the floodwater, which they towed behind them and used later to transport some of the crated animals. Before they reached the American Can, they came across a woman who had been wading in the water, also trying to make her way to the building. She had keys to some of the apartments, which she gave to the rescuers. She pointed out the way out to the Can and then waited for them to return. When they boated back to her, she recognized a black Lab puppy in the boat. The dog was named Beauty, and the woman said she could give the puppy to his family, because she was in contact with them. The team returned the keys, and the woman took the puppy.

“We took two boats with us that day to the American Can Company,” said Ken Ray, who was with the team the first day. “There were two groups of us. We launched from the same place we had been launching from before. It took us about an hour and a half to get there, because there were a lot of downed wires, and the water had dropped a lot. That was the day we had to tote the boats one hundred fifty yards over land. We divided up and each took different floors.”

By that point, it was getting dark. Kimberlee had warned them that looters might be in the building, or at least nearby. The team ran out of time and daylight. They didn’t make it to the fourth floor where Mr. Jezebel and Kimberlee’s friends’ cats were left. They headed back.

They ran into an island—what appeared to be a rise in the road—that was one hundred fifty yards long. “The boats were overloaded and had to be emptied to carry them over the rise in the road,” Ken said.

First they emptied the boats, carried them over the patch of dry road, and lifted them back into the water. Then, one by one, they carried the animals to the boats and reloaded them to continue motoring back to the transport van.

As they got into the boats, “two Rottweilers on dry land came toward us,” Ken said. “They were friendly and healthy. These were 125-pound dogs. Those boats only hold 725 pounds each. I started doing the math. With the dogs, Jeff, Ethan, and me in the boat, I said, ‘This isn’t good. We’re at the limit. We’ll sink.’ The dogs looked as healthy as anything I’d seen down there, and they were friendly.”

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 kind 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.