Where there's smoke, there's fire

A photographer from the Long Beach Press Telegram captured the moment on camera as a firefighter gently brought Ellen back to life with an oxygen mask.



For years, I harbored a fear that I knew was irrational: that my home would burst into flames in my absence.

The phobia wasn’t fostered because I own items with great monetary value. It’s my animals I worry about—that they will end up as tiny charred bodies in a closet, suffocating to death, wondering where I was when they needed saving.

At least, I used to think it was a completely irrational fear. Until I met my friend Danny Parizek in Los Angeles.

Shortly before we became acquainted, Danny was on a day trip to San Diego on Christmas Eve 1999 when he got the phone call that plays in my worst nightmares. His brother was on the line with bad news. The apartment occupied by him and his partner was on fire.

“We raced back,” Danny said.

The apartment building had been constructed in the 1920s to house naval officers. The suspected cause of the fire was faulty wiring going to a hallway closet light.

Danny remembers that when they got inside their place that night, the Christmas tree stood in the living room, its melted ornaments still attached. All possessions were destroyed. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Their two cats had been trapped inside during the fire. Jack, a three-month-old kitten, had sought refuge under the bed. He was dead.

“We were devastated, we were heartbroken,” Danny said. “We wouldn’t wish a fire on our worst enemy.”

But this horrible tragedy was wrapped in a miracle.

Three-year-old Ellen was more savvy than baby Jack, and stationed herself at the only open window. There in the front room, she managed to breathe in clean air and survived until firefighters arrived to douse the flames.

As for me, I'm like a mother with children. Not truly relaxed unless I see my babies are safe in front of my eyes. But for now, I'm trying to let my fear of fire go up in flames.

Facing the eye of the storm

It was gratifying to watch Shelly's instant connection with shelter staff at Whatcom Humane Society when she was in Washington State last week. Hooking people from our field together is one of my favorite pastimes. It creates rescuer synergy. Here Shelly's engaging in "shelter speak" with superstar WHS volunteer Lynn Graham.


When it comes to bonding experiences, outrunning a hurricane together is high up on the list.

For Shelly Patton and I, the event nourished a friendship in progress, one that had already begun to bud in the wasteland left behind by natural disaster.

New Orleans first hurtled its way into my heart when I helped rescue animals there in 2005 following the devastating floods of Hurricane Katrina. Like most animal rescuers, I couldn’t stay away from the city that had been washed away, even when the initial mission was over.

I’ve returned several times since that fateful event to document the recovery and try to make sense of it all.

It was during my one-year anniversary trip there in 2006 that I first met Shelly Patton. She works at the Louisiana SPCA, the state’s lead animal welfare agency. The shelter had lost eighty percent of its staff and its entire facility to the floods. Shelly and the rest of her team were working out of trailers, the animals housed beside them in a makeshift shelter formerly operating as a coffee warehouse.

I was in New Orleans writing about the city’s animals for a piece that ran in Modern Dog magazine.

But it ended up being a very human story.

The tales told gave me hope in humanity. Researching how people risked life and limb to save their pets. How local and out-of-town rescuers worked side by side to achieve miracles amidst tragedy for the animals who were left behind to die.

When the three-year anniversary came along in August 2008, the city decided to erect a monument at city hall to the animals who suffered through the floods, and to the people who risked their personal health and safety to save them.

I knew I wanted to be there to see the statue unveiled.

Unfortunately, Hurricane Gustav had decided to be there too. The giant storm was scheduled to hit New Orleans on August 28th, the exact same day Katrina had made landfall three years earlier.

With the levee system still in tatters, it was quite possible that the city would flood again.

Rescuers who went to the ceremony were poised to help if the worst happened. Instead of spending a peaceful afternoon of fanfare down at city hall remembering what was saved and mourning what was lost, we left the ceremony on the hunt for survival supplies: ice, water, food for several days. Coolers and gas cans filled with extra fuel.

It would be days before the hurricane hit, but that night I returned to my hotel to find a flyer had been slipped under my door. City officials had ordered the hotels to close down the following day, and to turn guests out of their rooms. Visitors were instructed to leave the city at once.

But I didn’t feel like a visitor.

I had a job to do. Now that FEMA had new rules in place, laws had changed. The pets were going with their people for the first time in history, and I wanted—no, needed— to be there to write about it.

I decided I wasn’t leaving. I had planned to ride the hurricane out in my car. Then Shelly Patton saved the day. She invited me to join the Louisiana SPCA’s team, to write and photograph their efforts to help the animals for the organization’s website. Every hotel room just outside the storm zone was booked solid, but they graciously invited me to squish into one of their rooms.

There would be three people, five dogs and a rabbit sharing the space for several days. And all the rooms occupied by shelter staff were just as chock full as ours. The hotel’s generator was operating only to serve food in a dining room, so the rooms had running water but no electricity.

But it was still a refuge compared to the alternative.

I won’t forget the eerie drive out of town that day to Baton Rouge. By the time animal rescuers left the city, it was just hours before Gustav’s scheduled landing. The highways leading out of New Orleans were jammed in every direction but one: the path of the hurricane. Three of us were driving in a convoy. Shelly, SPCA staffer Ginger Morvant and me.

We were taking our animal-laden vehicles out using the only wormhole left.

While people sat for hours on freeways waiting to escape with the rest, we drove free and clear, the only three vehicles on the road for most of the two-hour drive.

Traveling a path that’s separate from the one everyone else is taking is simultaneously liberating and terrifying. But sometimes it’s the right road.



After we parked our cars in the hotel lot, Shelly asked me to move mine closer to hers. Good thing she did, because I had been parked in this empty space. It wasn't empty for long. The wind snatched the metal hotel sign taking it down effortlessly, like it was a spindly toothpick.


Two city workers setting up a barricade parked a little too close to the water's edge, and their truck slid right into the drink. They had to climb out the back window to escape. They were quite embarrassed when I interviewed them at the water's edge, and weren't anxious to have their photos taken.


I had the chance to interview one of the country's most famous mayors, Ray Nagin. For months his face was plastered all over the news as he led the city's recovery from Katrina, and negotiated with state and federal officials. Nagin stopped by the pet evacuation center to see how the efforts of animal rescuers were progressing.


While visiting our local shelters last week, Shelly also met Whatcom Humane Society executive director Laura Clark, who gave her a tour of the Williamson Way shelter.

At a loss for words

One year after the storm, most neighborhoods were still lifeless. Only the grass came back. Houses were tossed about like toys, landing on different streets than the ones they belonged to.


Early last week, I promised to post Katrina coverage in chronology until I had the whole story outlined. I had intended for my stream-of-consciousness series to coincide with the four-year anniversary of the devastating storm.

It was about time I finally told this story right.

I’ve made many trips to New Orleans since the deadly flood in 2005 decimated the city. I couldn’t stay away. In fact, three out of the previous four years, I’ve been in the Big Easy at this time of year. Though "Easy" it wasn’t.

On all of the other anniversaries except the second, I was there to document the rescue and recovery mission.

But despite the volume of material I’ve gathered over the years—notes, photographs and stories from people willing to tell me how they survived it—so far, I haven’t told the story well. I’ve not been able to bring myself to sit down and write this epic from end-to-end.

Instead, I’ve been etching it out in bits and pieces.

Every time I went to write it, I’d sit there in front of my blinking computer cursor and freeze up. The tunnel of pain I had to crawl through in order to get to where I needed to go as a storyteller stopped me dead in my writer’s tracks. Even looking at photographs of the moldy houses we entered was enough to start me dry heaving as I remembered what we saw and smelled.

This year, I'd hoped it would be a healing exercise for me. I’d planned to start from the moment I stepped on a plane to rescue, and write through the mission following the progress as it continues now, so people would know what New Orleans is like today.

I put out the call to people who were there with me, and to those who are living there now. People I love and respect. We started to talk about it together. To share memories, stories, and photographs.

With four years passed, I had believed the pain wouldn’t be so fresh.

Was I wrong.

If you’ve been reading, you’ll know that I started to tell it.

Hope is born in a barn, Wednesday, September 2
Look into the light, Thursday, September 1
The silver lining after the storm, Monday, August 31

I had predicted I would be able to write six to 10 stories depending on my ability to achieve mental balance, and shut the story off when the writing was done.

Three stories in, and it’s already become too much. For me, and—I’d imagine—for some of you.

When I started writing it, I was right back there again. Reliving it in full color—the sights, the sounds, the smells. The nightmares.

Often it’s the same nightmare that plays repetitively, and I know others who have had it too. The animals are crying, and we are in the streets looking for them, crawling under rubble and searching. But we can’t find them. And when we do, we can’t catch them. They simply cry and die as we stand by helplessly.

Two years ago, this repetitive nightmare had me crawling off the opposite edge of the bed in the middle of the night. Just like when I had inched my belly along the ground under houses and mobile homes looking for animals who were lurking in the coolest hiding places they could find in the baking Louisiana heat.

I didn’t wake up until I crash-landed on the hardwood floor, breaking or cracking a couple of ribs. I’m not sure how many or how severe the damage, because I didn’t see a doctor. But I couldn’t walk for a week, and I was sore for a long while after.

Thousands of animal rescuers returned from New Orleans, but we didn’t really leave. I can’t even grasp how the locals feel. They tell me their stories and share their pain in gut-wrenching detail, but how can it be truly real to me when it wasn’t my life that was swept away?

This wasn’t our home, yet it became the place our hearts lived for a time.

And some hearts never returned. Umpteen marriages and relationships were destroyed when people who had been in the hot zone returned home changed, with altered definitions of what life meant to them.

Many refused to return home at all, preferring to erect new lives from the rubble. An animal sanctuary founder, a newly-minted animal control officer, a horse rescuer. They would all make New Orleans their new home.

Addictions took hold. Locally, and within our rescue community. The suicide rate in New Orleans tripled. Even some animal rescuers who witnessed the destruction succumbed, taking their own lives. People who had rescued beside us, who now couldn’t bear the pain of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder compounded by the tragedy that was already their troubled existence before Katrina annihilated what was left of their faith in humanity.

I noticed there was a common thread that strung all of us together. The ones who came on the scene to help, and those who called the city their home. People who stayed in New Orleans and abandoned their old lives. And the ones who deserted New Orleans to go on to new lives.

It was the guilt. That’s what claimed us all.

The feeling that we didn’t do enough to save the city, and its people, and the animals.

When in the end, we barely saved ourselves.


Trash piles were almost a relief because they signaled life was returning to the dead city.

Hope is born in a barn

Miracles happened amid destruction. These orphaned kittens were born during the storm. Here we are in the barn tending to them. The seats we're sitting on were pulled out of all of our vehicles to make more room for animals. They formed an impromptu sitting area for volunteers on a rare break.


I am accustomed to being treated like an oddball when I venture into the public domain. People’s negative reactions towards my viewpoints about animals might range from suspicion to outright ridicule.

A party, a shop, even a restaurant aren’t places where I can completely let my guard down and relax, because I never know where the hits will come from next. Even a task that appears as benign as getting a meal can turn hostile. One time, I tried to order vegetarian at a restaurant in San Antonio, Texas. The waiters were so outraged that you’d think I’d threatened to throw rotten eggs at the Alamo.

It’s happened so frequently over the past two decades that the hostility whirs like an operating system in the background of my social interactions. I’ve grown so used to it being there that I’m barely phased anymore, and don’t pay it much notice.

At least, I hadn’t noticed it. Not until it was gone. Four years ago, I rocked up to the borrowed barn operation being run by Pasado’s Safe Haven. With New Orleans without power, water, or sanitation thanks to Katrina’s merciless blow, shelters had popped up around the city’s perimeter. This makeshift shelter was 45 minutes south. It was a haven for the frightened, orphaned animals left behind.

But it was a safe spot for the people, too—like-minded volunteers who had gathered together in one place for a singular life-saving mission. People like me, who didn’t have to explain to each other why we were risking our health and safety to help the animals, and not the humans. Everybody on that 150-acre property felt just like I did.

Amidst the hell we would come to experience in the months to come, here was a tiny piece of heaven. The beauty of that unexpected effect juxtaposed against the ugliness we witnessed made the phenomenon all the more profound and awe-inspiring.

I stepped out of my minivan and immediately got to work with the other volunteers, scrubbing down carriers, walking dogs, and cleaning cat cages.

The condition of the animals was shocking. The rescuers who had infiltrated the city in the early weeks had faced greater numbers of pets roaming and locked up in houses than we saw, though there were still plenty of animals left requiring rescue. But those who came to rescue later in the mission found the animals when they were in terrible shape—emaciated, scared. Aggressive in some cases.

The appearance of the animals should have prepared us for what we would encounter when we got into the city. They were skinny, cut and bruised, and smelled like something I have never experienced before. A rank odor that I hope I don't ever smell again. Mold, toxic waste, garbage, and the dead carcasses of animals and people.

Katrina’s floodwaters rose and carried it all with her, turning the basin city into a soup of slime that coated everything when the waters finally receded. Including the animals. And us, when we waded in.


This puppy was rescued from a house with his sister. He died shortly after this photo was taken, and his black and white sister (next photo) died after I delivered her to a veterinary clinic near the airport. I named her Daisy Ray.

Daisy Ray survived a little longer than her mate before succumbing. No food and water for a month was too much for her tiny body to survive.


The animals were fed, watered, even washed when their demeanor was calm enough to allow it.


We found many black cats. This was one of the lucky ones. He almost seemed to know someone was on the way to get him. We labeled his carrier so he wouldn't get shipped out of state by mistake.

The cats were kept in stalls inside the front barn to keep them calm and away from the barking dogs.


Dogs were staged in cages in the back barn, waiting for transport out of the area.


Another photo of the back barn.

Donated supplies came rolling in. Animal lovers from around the country were following our progress on the Pasado's Safe Haven website. We even received a letter of support from Jane Goodall, the renowned primatologist! Donors sent food, leashes, brushes, toys, anything you can imagine...plus a few things that left us scratching our heads, such as several pairs of stiletto heels. In the end, they did make themselves useful by inspiring an impromptu chorus line. The ridiculous shoes made us laugh when we needed it most.


The barns were quieter during the day, because many volunteers headed into the city each morning. Others stayed behind to care for the survivors.


As night fell, curfews kicked in, and rescuers had to leave the city or risk tangling with the military. The barns turned into organized chaos as rescuers from all over the country descended there with animals they had found roaming the city or locked up in houses. Animals were logged in, triaged, and settled into kennels.


Follow me on Carreen’s Rescue Blog…

As I head into the decaying city, I’ll describe what we encountered when we arrived.

Look into the light

The scale of destruction is impossible to convey in a photo. Trees were uprooted like toothpicks. It took my breath away.


Like a bat signal beamed into the sky, the call for help shone out and spoke to each of us when Katrina’s storm surge rolled in. Independent of each other, animal rescuers flocked to a city in trouble.

But the lighted cry for help wasn’t coming from anything resembling the fictional Gotham City Police Department. Far from it. In fact, it wasn’t put out by an official agency of any type.

It was the continuously looping news footage broadcasting from flickering television sets and computer screens that drew rescuers to New Orleans, where we would sneak into a drowned city to save the pets despite myriad dangers.

The animals were residents of New Orleans too, and the government had denied their passage to safety, causing great anguish to the people who loved them. And their inexorable suffering also brought pain to humans they didn’t even know—the animal rescuers.

We responded en masse. The cries came from the animals, but also from their guardians, who telephoned our temporary shelters in the coming weeks and months begging us to break down their soggy doors to save their starving, dehydrated pets.

Locals from the rescue community worked alongside out-of-towners to do the job together, a rescue effort that was too big for locals alone. Seasoned rescuers saved alongside animal lovers who had never been in the field before. Veterinarians and vet techs, cat trappers and dog trainers, shelter staffers and animal welfare volunteers. In a rescue community known for squabbling, we put aside our differences in order to perform this history-making, life-saving mission.

The rescue would test us, and it would define life’s meaning in a way the rest of our lives never had.

I made my first trip there four weeks after the storm had passed. I had no idea what to expect. I was traveling alone. When I go into dangerous situations, I tend to feel safer by myself. At least my own behavior is predictable to me.

I carried directions to places outside the city where different groups had assembled makeshift shelters. Their locations were being kept under wraps because people had been stealing dogs from temporary shelters, which eventually ended up being under guard. But if you were connected to the rescue community, you could find out where the shelters were.

The United flight into New Orleans didn’t appear to contain residents, who still weren’t allowed to return. Instead, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials, Red Cross workers, and insurance agents filled the seats.

A dirty, skinny collie was sprinting down the runway as the plane descended into Louis Armstrong Airport, swerving off the pavement to escape the roaring bird that chased him. Slipping through a hole in the fence, he was gone. The airport, one of the few gathering places left as people travelled in and out of the deserted ruins, likely lured the hungry dog because of its garbage output. It was the first glimpse of the horror I would witness in New Orleans in the days ahead.

When passengers disembarked at the terminal, the luggage carts had mysteriously disappeared. Carts had vanished, yet wheelchairs were parked crazily everywhere. Perhaps that was because this airport had served as a triage center for days, a hellhole where the sickest residents were kept alive before being transported away from the city to safety. If they survived that long.

I had watched them suffering and dying on the news, and as I waited for my luggage to roll down onto the carousel, I imagined the sights and sounds of misery that must have permeated this building a few weeks before.

I had two large duffel bags filled with survival gear including a tent, sleeping bag, carbon mask, gloves, boots, and enough snacks to last two weeks. I liberated one of the wheelchairs to haul my stuff. When I got to the rental car parking lot, it was a mess. The vehicles were dirty, nearly empty of gas, and strewn in disarray.

“Take any car you want. The keys are in them,” the clerk said wearily.

I looked at the cars for a moment before choosing one, weighing my concerns about finding gas with my need for a large vehicle to haul animals. Then I decided on a minivan. Someone would know where to find gas, I figured.

I thought the hours spent watching coverage of the floods on the television had prepared me for what I would encounter. I was wrong. Dead wrong. The scale of destruction eclipsed my imagination’s outermost boundaries, leaving its residue of despair in my mind long after I came home.

Most of us—though not all—would return home from New Orleans eventually. As for Katrina, she stayed with us.


The force of the storm uprooted this tree effortlessly, taking the sidewalk's paving stones with it.


Coming up next on Carreen’s Rescue Blog…

Find out what I encountered when I arrived at the triage shelter set up by Washington state-based animal welfare group Pasado’s Safe Haven. A kind attorney and his wife living near New Orleans in Raceland had reached out over the Internet to offer Pasado's the use of their 150-acre farm.


The carriers stand outside the barn, washed and ready for their next trip into the city.

The silver lining after the storm

Photos in this post courtesy of Pasado's Safe Haven, the Washington state-based animal rescue group I joined up with shortly after I arrived in the destroyed city.


I’ve never celebrated the anniversaries of tragic moments. I don’t even retain the dates. I see people remembering death and destruction on the days they fall annually by the calendar, when I just want to forget.

But this time, I’m making an exception. I can’t help but pay homage to the largest natural disaster in the United States. Because it was the biggest. And because I was there to witness its aftermath.

Four years ago today, I was glued to a TV screen watching the tragedy unfold with horror, knowing what was coming next. What would happen to the animals? I wasn’t the only one. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina had made landfall on the Gulf Coast, and the weeks that followed were nail-biters for animal rescuers across the U.S. and Canada.

When the storm surge came in Katrina’s wake, most of the levees protecting Greater New Orleans were breached—53 in all. Within hours, eighty percent of the city that’s nestled into a land basin was submerged, with water reaching 20 feet deep in some places. People ran and swam for their lives.

But citizens were forced to leave their most treasured belongings behind—their pets. As was tradition, the government refused to allow animals on the evacuation buses. Early footage began trickling out showing animals clinging to treetops, swimming beside boats, and paddling for their lives while they struggled to survive an abandoned city.

Because of widespread looting and violence, the city was locked down under a state of emergency, Louisiana’s version of martial law. The military threatened to shoot trespassers. And that included us.

But animal rescuers—a gritty and determined group—were infiltrating the city anyway. We are naturally programmed to help creatures in trouble. We couldn’t stand to sit back idly and watch. We had to get in.

Rescuers on the scene in the early days of the disaster were reporting their tragic findings via the Internet, telling us we could self-deploy, but no one would be responsible for our health and safety.

Noah’s Ark may not have been on hand to save the animals when the storm struck, but a cavalry of sorts wasn’t far behind. Independent of each other, thousands of rescuers of all stripes traveled to New Orleans to help with the largest animal rescue in world history.

Many thousands of pets would make it out alive thanks to people who ignored official orders, but obeyed their own laws of the heart.

As a result of Katrina, federal laws would be changed forever.

And so would we.




What’s up next on Carreen’s Rescue Blog…

Over the next few days, I’ll be writing short pieces on what we experienced in the field. Stories of tragedy and destruction, but also of hope and inspiration. It was a life-altering experience for those of us who tended to the victims of the floodwaters, and I'll take you there to see it through my eyes.

Rescuers train for when the worst happens

Delta riding instructor Julie Coles demonstrates how fingers can look like carrots to a hungry horse, and warns rescuers to feed with a flat hand.

When disaster hits, it's not just cats and dogs who will require rescue. The people who are running from the fires and the floods will leave a virtual Noah's Ark behind in their wake. Horses, chickens, cows, roosters, even exotic birds and reptiles will need passage to safety.

That's when groups like Noah's Wish swoop in. Named after the boat in the Bible that was built to rescue pairs of animals from the floods, Noah's Wish has a singular and noble mission: to save animals during disasters.

The Northern California-based organization conducts eight or nine training sessions a year in the U.S. and Canada for people hoping to join their rescuing ranks. Last weekend, they brought their road show to Richmond, British Columbia.

Animal control officers, veterinary technicians, shelter staffers, independent rescuers, and an animal communicator participated in the two-day sleepover held at a union headquarters near the Vancouver International Airport. To mimic disaster conditions more closely, participants were instructed to bring their own supplies, including air mattresses, sleeping bags, food and water.

Rabies, pet CPR, animal intake procedures, and disaster safety were covered in the classroom. But the liveliest part of the demonstration was the animals that were on hand for rescuers to practice their techniques on -- a snake, a skink, chickens, a rooster, a dog, and a set of bottle-feeding kittens. And two horses, who held up the event by an hour and a half because they were stuck in traffic.

Spending the night together allowed the rescuers to mingle and get to know each other better, which can bode well when disaster strikes if they end up converging on the same scene.

"When you're in an unfamiliar situation and you meet people you saw before, it makes it a little bit easier," said JoEllen Cimmino, director of animal health services for Noah's Wish.

She also put the rescuers through their mental paces. At the end of a long day of learning that starts early in the morning, JoEllen always covers a topic that has psychological repercussions. This time it was loss and bereavement.

"I want them tired and emotional, so they recognize if this is too much for them," she said.

In 2005, Noah's Wish rose to prominence for their high-profile response to Hurricane Katrina. The temporary animal shelter they set up outside of New Orleans in Slidell, Louisiana operated for several months, and housed up to 2,000 animals at one time.

Last year, the group responded to nine disasters, including wildfires in California and floods in Iowa and Indiana.

"When you're in this business, you want people to have a plan," JoEllen said. "You're educating from the ground up. People need a plan for the two-legged, the four-legged and the winged."

Val Lofvendahl of Reptile Rescue brought Charlie the skink to the seminar as a teaching tool for the others.

Everyone suits up for a session on decontamination.

Roger the rooster visited from the Richmond Animal Protection Society. He was a great model in all but one respect -- he was too well-behaved! His good-natured temperament isn't representative of the average rooster.

Riding instructor Julie Coles demonstrates how to get more control over a frightened horse with help from Molly.