• James Mercadel
  Seventh Ward, New Orleans
• Andy & Morgan Kennedy Skilling
  Gentilly/Fairgrounds, New Orleans, LA
• Victoria Cooke
  Mid-City, New Orleans, LA
• Brittany Gaugis
  New Orleans East, New Orleans, LA
• Scott Black & Julia Cohen-Black
  Uptown, New Orleans, LA
• Roy & Ume Maggio
  Esplanade Ridge, New Orleans, LA

I couldn’t leave because my car didn’t work. I went to my friend Pat’s house because it was on high ground, had a second story and lots of room [for her two Corgis and three cats]. So we were going to ride it out.

It was around 5:00 AM, Monday, [Aug. 29] and I remember watching the ceiling fan slowly stop turning and that’s how I knew the electricity was out. It sounded like being inside a tornado. When a wind gust hits a house during a regular storm, it hits one side of the house and bangs a shutter. Katrina was hitting the house on all sides and pulling the walls out. All of the shutters and the French doors downstairs were being pulled out and banging against the walls. The trees were waving back and forth. Someone’s roof blew into the yard.

Then a couple of windows blew out upstairs. The dogs were running from room to room. We heard this crash and we ran into the room to find plaster all over the floor. We heard a crash in another room and there was more plaster on the floor. Rain was coming in under the roof and under her dormer windows into an unfinished part upstairs so the ceiling started caving in downstairs in the parlor.

We had a battery-operated TV from my mom. First, we were getting sporadic reports and everything was very confusing. We went outside with the dogs and looked around. It felt cool and breezy. We looked up and down her street and thought it wasn’t so bad.
Then reports came in about flooding. We watched one of the newscasters get a call from her brother who lived near me in Mid-City. He told her, ‘The Bayou [St. John] is flooding, something is wrong,’ That’s how I knew my neighborhood was flooding.
At dusk, the mosquitoes came out. It got dark really fast because there was no power and it was still cloudy. Now and then, we’d hear helicopters going over, or a car going down the street. We realized that two single women alone could not stay there. It was not safe.
The next morning, we turned on the TV and saw what was really happening. The newscasters said, ‘You have got to get out of the city.’ We decided to take the dogs and leave the cats with food and water because [authorities kept saying] we could come back in a few days. I would never have left them otherwise.

Pat has an electric gate in front of her driveway. I don’t know how we moved it but we did. We picked up some smaller, fallen trees and got to the car. She has a Range Rover, so we managed to drive over or through the debris, thank god. People on the radio were giving directions on the only way to get out, over the Crescent City Connection. Everything looked okay until we saw the roof of the Superdome and the windows blown out of hotels.

Once we got out, we watched the Baton Rouge channels 24 hours a day. The looting went berserk and that worried us. Two major fires broke out within a block of her house. We were having heart attacks because it’s her house and my cats were inside.

We kept trying to find someone to get them for us, but time was running out. Pat registered with the LA/SPCA and the Humane Society, giving permission to break into her house to get my cats. We were hitting a brick wall with everybody because although the animal rescuers were very well-intentioned people, they were in such a panic to save the animals that they didn’t put together a cohesive plan to keep track of them and contact the owners. Now it’s such a mess and there doesn’t seem to be a way to fix it.
The LA/SPCA told me ‘rogue groups’ were going in and breaking into owners’ homes without permission. I found that to be very alarming as a home owner because I hope they were resecuring the houses.

They’re rescuing thousands and thousands of animals and were only giving six weeks for owners to find them. Thankfully, now it’s up to six months. I’m not in a shelter, I’m staying with my parents seven hours away, but I don’t have a car and I’ve been on Petfinder every single day and nothing. What about someone who is elderly or blind and unable to access or use a computer? What if they’re in a shelter and can’t physically go there? The burden is on the owner to reunite with the pet but so many owners don’t have access to the tools you’re supposed to use.

The frustration made me want to scream on the phone, but I didn’t want to act like a crazy person. I know the volunteers care about the animals. Obviously, they are better off not perishing in a house, but when you’ve lost everything in your home and your friends are scattered all over the country, you need to know you can retrieve your animals from somewhere inside the shelter system.

I have judged myself for [leaving the cats] more than anyone could judge me. I was delusional. I asked myself a million times how I could leave them behind.
While at my parents’ house, [her senior Corgi] Mrs. Parker had to go to the vet and have a tumor removed. My other Corgi, Pippin, freaked out. He wouldn’t leave my side. It was like he thought I had gotten rid of the cats, now I had gotten rid of Mrs. Parker and now I’d get rid of him, too. My dogs are very close to the cats, they miss the cats. They can tell when something is wrong. I just don’t know what to do.