Surviving Katrina

Originally published in TC Dog in 2005.

The barking began around 6:30 in the morning. The constant bark, bark, bark, bark traveled to my tent, over roaring generators, through foam earplugs and a pillow pressed over my ears. But it also made it hard to oversleep and easy to remember where I was, even before I became fully conscious.

Camp Katrina, Tylertown, Miss. That's what our volunteer team named the massive camp set up by Best Friends Animal Society (www.bestfriends.org). Since Best Friends arrived two weeks earlier, their rescue teams had gotten over 1,000 animals out of New Orleans, beginning their efforts only days after Hurricane Katrina hit. Animal Ark No Kill shelter in Hastings, Minn. put together our own team of volunteers, and we drove down to help. When we arrived, the volunteers swarmed us like wolves on a fresh kill. The moment we stepped out of our vehicles, we were approached by worn-out, sweaty strangers asking whether we could help feed some dogs, set up more fencing, help match up animals with their paperwork. At Camp Katrina, there was no settling in. There's so much to do, you hit the ground running and never stop until you go home. In a disaster, there is no other way. * "These ladies need our help," Melvin said. It was after dark, and most of our team had straggled back to camp after an impossibly long first day. Melvin, one of our team members, had found the women still working in the cat building, where they'd been all day. "Last night, we got in over 20 cats," said Susie, a tanned woman with sandy hair. "We have to get ready for more to come in tonight." We followed her, and when we got to the cat room, we stopped short. It was like walking into a store that had been recently looted and having someone tell you: "Organize it."

Sean and Sandra ripped into the first box containing a cage, and began to put it together. Dorothy and I started moving cats into smaller cages. No one knew how many cats would come, so we had to be ready for anything. We stumbled over piles of dishes, shoved aside folded towels, wrestled with extension cords, carried frightened cats from room to room and back again. Susie told us, "This is a miracle. Thank you so much. We've been here all day; there's no way we could have done this ourselves."

By 11:00, we'd cleared some walking space and set up stacks of new cages. Even after the six of us worked on the rooms for two hours, they were still a mess. It was obvious that we could stay there all night and still not finish. We decided we had to stop; we had to go to bed.

I clicked on my flashlight and walked back toward the camp entrance toward the Porta-potties. On either side of the gravel driveway, the dogs were riled up by something. They paced back and forth, barking. People passed me with quick strides, headed toward the entrance gate. Just inside the gates, an enormous van growled, engine idling, headlights beaming in my face. People milled around and clustered around the back of a big white truck.

Intake. The same truck had left early that morning, filled with empty cages and a team of animal rescuers. It had been to New Orleans and back, with rescuers getting whatever animals they could before dark.

People squeezed their hands into rubber gloves, grabbed leashes, and stood craning their necks to see into the van. Two men disappeared into its depths then appeared at the back door to lift down crate after crate into waiting pairs of hands. Deep inside, dogs barked until it was their turn to be lifted down. Huge Rottweilers, matted terriers, labs, pit bulls and mixes of every kind were shuffled out of the truck and into the row of dog runs we called Ellis Island. They stared out, legs braced against the shifting motion as each one was carried to an empty run.

More volunteers waited to take each dog out of its crate to get water and a quick walk. The vet inspected each animal for injuries or sickness. Those would go straight to triage, while the rest went back into crates to rest until morning. Eighteen dogs came off the truck that night. The energy was high, with people running back and forth while the rescuers stood in little clusters, retelling stories from the day's work.

All I knew was that if they had gotten any cats, we were ready. I walked back to the Animal Ark camp and fell into bed without changing my clothes. Ten feet away, dogs barked, and a generator whined in the sticky night air. In the oppressive heat of the next afternoon, I sat on a bale of straw among loose papers, half-consumed bottles of water, dog leashes, and Polaroid photos. A tough-looking guy named Ken brought a small yellow dog and attempted to hold her still while Evan, the only Canadian at camp, snapped a Polaroid and handed it to me. He said, "Okay, this one is a female, yellow lab mix, recently had pups, no collar..." While he swept the microchip scanner over her shoulders, Dana, another Animal Ark volunteer said, "Let's call this one Savannah." I filled in the information on the form, writing "Savannah" below where we'd stick her Polaroid photo. "No microchip," Evan said. Dana wrote an ID number on a collar and buckled it around Savannah's neck. I put the paperwork and photo in a Ziplock bag. That bag would go wherever the dog went. I handed it to Ken, who went off to get the next dog.

When it went well, the whole process took about 10 minutes. Some dogs were terrified, perhaps had never had a leash around their necks before. Those ones, Ken carried up to our little station, where we used bits of roast beef sandwiches to get them to look at the camera. Other dogs jumped in our laps; some knew how to sit. Several dogs came in wearing collars with names, some with phone numbers. But phone numbers meant nothing. Phone numbers were attached to houses that were no longer habitable; houses that might be bulldozed. They were connected by phone lines that didn't work anymore, and maybe never would. Their owners could have evacuated to another state, could have died. All we could do was try the phone number, and then add their photos to the growing online database and hope someone would find them there. So we processed, gave the dogs extra pats, lots of treats, and hoped for the best.

*

Later, I headed up to feed, walk, and do treatments for the dogs in triage. Just as I started to gather food dishes, the bullhorn sounded off a short distance away. Someone yelled into it, "Reunion! We have a reunion!" I put down the dishes.

I fell into step behind the woman with the bullhorn as she talked with a young man who looked a lot like Lenny Kravitz. "I called everywhere." He told her. "I was so glad to find you guys-my kids have been missin' these dogs." As they walked, onlookers joined up like lint. Just like intake, people dropped what they were doing to watch reunions. Ken was standing with the pressure washer, blasting out the carriers from last night's rescue. "Hey, it's a reunion," I told him.

Someone asked, "Which dogs are his?"

Bullhorn woman said, "It's the boxers-the white female and the brindle boy."

Ken put down the sprayer and followed the group.

When we got near a row of dog runs, the man let out a sharp whistle. The two boxers stood staring at us, then they went nuts. "It's definitely them," he said. The dogs climbed over one another to get to him, while a Best Friends employee took their paperwork off the cage and opened the door, clipping leashes to their collars. Everyone stood back to watch, snapping pictures of the man and his dogs. While the boxers weaved between people, getting petted by all, the man told us that he lived in an apartment building and that they'd stayed until the water began rising and then had to leave. "We thought we'd be coming right back," he said. He dumped out 30 pounds of dog food and evacuated to another state. It had been three weeks.

He wanted to know how the rescue team had gotten in to the locked apartment. The way it worked was that human search and rescue teams entered buildings before animal rescue groups went in, breaking down doors and busting locks to get in. They'd often find animals inside, but had to leave them to wait for animal groups to come back. The boxers were lucky. Sometimes no one came back. The dogs settled down a little and someone came and began filling out another form.

Soon the bullhorn woman herded the man and his boxers out to where his family waited. Ken stood a ways off, watching two little boys scream and jump around the dogs, setting them off again in a frenzy of licking and more bounding around. "Pretty amazing, isn't it?" I asked.

"It is," he said, "I was out on rescue the day we got those dogs."

I wondered why he didn't seem happier. Wasn't the whole point of this work to help people get their animals back? "That was the hardest day." He said. "We got them when the city was still flooded. We knew there were a lot of animals in the apartment building. It was on the other side of a rise, so we took the boats as far as we could, then had to get out and carry them 70 yards over dry land to get there, and then 70 yards back."

Now the man whose destroyed apartment he'd gone into, whose animals he'd saved was here. Those dogs would be okay. "What's that like for you to see dogs reunited with their owner?" I asked.

"It's good and bad." He said.

Maybe to him, the boxers' owner didn't seem grateful enough, or he worried the dogs weren't well-cared for. I started to worry that he knew something that made him sad to see them go with their owner. I asked Ken what the bad part was about watching that reunion. He stopped walking to face me. "There were so many we couldn't get." He said. "Once we filled the boats with kennels, we had to leave the rest. It was terrible." I didn't know what to say. It was awful enough to stand there and hear about it, but to have been in the boat, passing animals by-a reunion reminded him of the hundreds of dogs and cats that no one would, or could come looking for. And worse, the ones we just couldn't get. * A few days later, Ken went home to Alabama. The ever-shifting roster of volunteers came and went, just like the animals we rescued and then sent out. Some pets were reunited with owners, others fostered out to smaller organizations where they would be held for six months and then adopted out. People needed time to get to their animals after what had happened to their homes, their city, their lives.

The day before we left, I went to visit some of our team doing the late night duty in the cat building. Peggy was spoon-feeding a gray cat, Sandra dumped out a litter box, and Dorothy comforted a tiny kitten. The rooms that had been so chaotic only a few days earlier were now under control, even tranquil at the moment. In the short time we were there, volunteer workers had insulated the rooms, installed air conditioning, screened off one side as a kitty play room, and stacked cages three or four high-each with a cat or two inside. The next morning, we'd be gone. New volunteers would take our places, and the work would continue.

Editor's Note: Since writing this article, Kelli Ohrtman, along with the next wave of Animal Ark volunteers, has returned to Camp Katrina to help in the rescue of more animals. Kelli will continue to write follow-up articles on her experiences for TC Dog.

To keep abreast of Katrina rescue efforts, visit www.animalarkshelter.org, where Kelli and the other volunteers update their activities on a daily blog. Animal Ark is in desperate need of donations and foster homes for the animals brought back from Katrina as well as for Minnesota animals in need. Katrina animals will be placed in long term foster care, with the hopes of eventually reuniting people with their pets. They have already located or reunited the families of six rescued pets and expect that number to increase as Animal Ark receives Katrina animals every two weeks upon return of their volunteers. Beginning March 1, 2006 unclaimed Katrina animals will be available for adoption.