[inglor]

Seeing how the other Katrina post was wavering on getting heated, I would like to try something different. Post any articles or stories about people helping each other. Hopefully, it will take some of the sting out of how the gov't, at all it's levels, failed miserably and it was individuals who picked up the ball and ran with it.

Here is my offering:

Prologue:
A football (American) player for Auburn University found out a few hours before game time last Saturday that his little brothers died in the storm.

The "Tiger Walk" referred to in the article is something that the fans do every Saturday before the game. The fans line the street and cheer as the players and coaches walk down the street from the bus to the stadium. It is not a parade, the players walk single file, getting pats on the back and "Good Luck", etc. as the fans let them pass through, no ropes or barracades.

>
> Friday, September 9, 2005
>
> Auburn's Horton finds shelter from the storm
>
> By Gene Wojciechowski
> ESPN.com
>
> AUBURN, Ala. -- Hattie Wimberley drowned in her own house. The flood
> waters chased her into the attic of her New Orleans home and kept
> rising until the sheetrock ceiling melted into mush and dropped her
> into the unforgiving darkness. She was the first of Alonzo Horton's
> relatives to die.
>
> Four days later, only minutes before midnight, Horton's cell phone
> began to ring again. Those same hellish waters of Hurricane Katrina
> had surged into the gymnasium of New Orleans' Marion Abramson High
> School, which was being used as an assembly point for evacuees, and
> created another watery tomb. This time it was Horton's younger
> brothers, Jerry and Delorean, who lost their lives.
>
> "My old high school," says Horton, sitting on a love seat in the
> office of Auburn team chaplain Chette Williams. "The water thing was
> so bad, they said once they opened the door, water came rushing in. It
> was probably 11:58 when I found out. The funny thing about that is
> after I found that out, at 12:01 my phone alarm went off to let me
> know it was game day and that was also my little brother's birthday."
>
> Jerry would have turned 8. Delorean was 6. Depending on the rumors,
> second-hand accounts, and Internet reports -- and Horton has heard
> them all -- very few people emerged from the Abramanson shelter alive.
>
> "September 3rd," says the freshman defensive end in a voice cauterized
> by nearly two weeks of anguish and tears. "That's a day I'm going to
> remember for the rest of my life."
>
> Horton's mother is safe, but his father is unaccounted for. Horton's
> tiny home on 4635 Dale Street in the city's Ninth Ward, not more than
> a 10-minute trip to the Superdome and French Quarter, no longer
> exists. Katrina took everything: family, home, belongings. It even
> tried to take away Horton's will.
>
> "When my brothers were dead and I got that call that they drowned ...
> somewhere still in the back of my mind and my heart I felt they're
> somewhere safe," he says. "I pray about that every night. But when I
> got that call my whole motivation to do anything was gone. It was hard
> for me to function. I was just ready to burst."
>
> And yet, Horton says he'll remember Sept. 3, not only because of what
> he lost, but because of what he gained.
>
> It was on that Saturday, two hours before Auburn was to play Georgia
> Tech in the season opener, that Horton stood crying by himself as his
> teammates and coaches assembled for the game-day ritual known as
> "Tiger Walk." From Sewell Hall to Jordan-Hare Stadium they walk,
> through streets lined with as many as 20,000 Auburn fans.
>
> Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville was one of the first to notice Horton
> standing near the team bus.
>
> "Tears are coming down his cheeks," says Tuberville. "What can you
> say? You don't have a clue what he's going through."
>
> That's not exactly true. When Hurricane Andrew ravaged south Florida
> in August 1992, Tuberville was an assistant coach on Dennis Erickson's
> Miami staff. The Category 4 Andrew (Katrina hit land as a Category 4
> storm, too) made landfall at about 2 a.m. -- Tuberville remembers; he
> set his alarm clock so he could witness his first hurricane. Instead,
> he and his wife Suzanne spent the next five hours crouched on the
> floor as triple-digit winds arrived.
>
> "I never heard a sound like that," says Tuberville, whose home somehow
> survived. Meanwhile, Erickson's furniture was later found in a
> swimming pool.
>
> So Tuberville approached Horton and said nothing. Instead, he hugged
> him. Teammates, many of whom had looked out for Horton ever since that
> first phone call came from New Orleans, did the same. Nobody said a
> peep.
>
> "I looked in their eyes and I knew how much they cared about me," says
> Horton. "I can't have my little brothers with me, but I've got a whole
> team of big brothers with me."
>
> As Horton made his way to the stadium he was showered with love by
> perfect strangers.
>
> "Alonzo, we're here for you!" shouted a Tigers fan.
>
> "Come here," offered another fan, "and give me a hug."
>
> The tears kept welling in Horton's eyes. "But it wasn't so much tears
> of pain and hurt, but it was happiness," says Horton. "Every step I
> took I started to feel better and better. I felt like I was walking to
> the light. Heaven was at that Tiger Walk and at that football field."
>
> An evacuee relocation shelter is located in the Auburn area and
> already Horton has made nearly a half-dozen trips there. At Horton's
> urging, a tour of the campus and facilities was organized for
> evacuees. A visit to the school's equestrian center was arranged and
> horse rides were given to the displaced adults and children. He is
> trying to give them what Auburn fans, teammates and coaches have given
> him: smiles, hugs and hope.
>
> Horton doesn't bother asking why Katrina happened, not when so many
> others have suffered worse. He even refuses to call it a disaster,
> instead choosing to look at it as an opportunity to return the
> kindnesses offered him.
>
> "Right now, I've never been more proud of an 18-year-old kid in my
> life," says Williams, the team chaplain. "Just to see his strength and
> faith. He has a foundation that's carrying him through. There's only
> so much we can do. When the lights are out and he's in his room at
> night by himself, he's there alone."
>
> Perhaps not for long. The Auburn athletic department has contacted the
> NCAA about what the school can do to assist Horton and his family.
> About 30 family and extended family members have been moved from New
> Orleans to the Atlanta area, and there is an effort underway to
> relocate them to Auburn. And a day ago, Horton returned to the
> practice field for the first time since Katrina showed its
> indifference to life and all things man-made.
>
> Horton will never be the same. How could he be? But there remains one
> constant.
>
> Tiger Walk begins at exactly 9:30 a.m. Saturday.
>
> Gene Wojciechowski is the senior national columnist for ESPN.com. You
> can contact him at gene.wojciechowski@espn3.com.

[NeumeIndil]

I'm sitting here in tears. Thank every diety known to mankind for people like those fans and the citizens of Auburn. My area, about an hour and a half north of Columbus, Ohio is getting ready to host evacuees, and so far we have a fund drive and clothing and canned goods drive going on campus to help people get started. We can't give them back their homes, but we can at least say "Welcome to ours."

[Rhapsody]

Gulf Coast Invaded...With Kindness

(CBS) New figures out Saturday show damage estimates from Hurricane Katrina could climb to $200 billion dollars in the coming weeks -- and could top more than $300 billion eventually.

In the meantime, CBS News Correspondent Bill Whitaker reports that help from foreign countries continues to pour into the hurricane zone.

By land and by sea, the United States is being invaded -- with kindness. Sailors from the Netherlands and Mexico stormed Biloxi with supplies.

Dutch Naval officer Stefan Luteijn calls it a bit strange "for a powerful nation to be in need of help."

"On the other hand, anyone can be in need of help, so, even the United States," Luteijn said.

The U.S. has accepted about a billion dollars in foreign aid for Katrina's victims, including a planeload from France and Britain. Even tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka offered $25,000.

Mexican troops last crossed onto U.S. soil in 1846. That brought on the Mexican-American War. Now, the sight of Mexican troops driving through San Antonio has brought out smiles.

"We are so proud to be here to help you in America," said Lt. Ruben Oyarvide of the Mexican Navy.

And President George W. Bush, who last week said the U.S. didn't need foreign help, this week said thank you.

"In this time of struggle, the American people need to know we are not struggling alone," Mr. Bush said.

But some critics say the usually tough-talking Bush Administration is sending mixed signals.

"It's a national security disaster, because it signals to our enemies that we are not as strong as we like to pretend or project that we are," said Susan Rice, former Under Secretary in the Clinton State Department. "That weakness ought to concern us greatly."

But in Biloxi, the needs are great and the people are grateful.

"My whole life, I've seen the U.S. forces constantly going out and we rarely get to see any reciprocating," said Lt. Cmdr. Monte Mechler. "How can you turn that kind of help down?"

At the main staging area on Biloxi Beach, you hear Dutch, Spanish and lots of broken English. The foreign sailors say they'll stay and help as long as they are needed.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/10/eveningnews/main832615.shtml
And
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050911/ts_alt_afp/usweatheraid_050911002857
Another article that might be of interest:

Dutch Lessons For The Gulf Coast
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/09/eveningnews/main832177.shtml

[Alassante]

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard in New Orleans last Thursday, one group of survivors stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about two years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A three-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.

Transporting the children alone was "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead" or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.

"It goes back to the same thing," he said. "How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?"

So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing, but that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which will help reunite families. With crowds churning at evacuation points, many children were parted from their parents accidentally; one woman handed her baby up onto a bus, turned around to pick up her suitcase and turned back to find that the bus had left.

At the rescue headquarters, a cool tile-floored building swarming with firefighters and paramedics, the children ate cafeteria food and fell into a deep sleep. Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.

He said the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building.

The children were clean and healthy -- downright plump in the case of the infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that "time had been taken with those kids." The baby was "fat and happy."

"This baby child was terrified," he said. "After she relaxed, it was gobble, gobble, gobble."

As grim dispatches came in from the field, one woman in the office burst into tears at the thought that the children had been abandoned in New Orleans, said Sharon Howard, assistant secretary of the office of public health.

Late the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in Thibodeaux was searching for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the news. But when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group of seven children, Howard said.

"What that made me understand was that this was happening across the state," she said. "That kind of frightened me."

The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of Social Services, rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night. For the next two days, the staff did detective work.

Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he'd take care of his little brother.

Late Saturday night, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a web site set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to take the children to Texas.

In a phone interview, Williams said she is the kind of mother who doesn't let her children out of her sight. What happened the Thursday after the hurricane, she said, was that her family, trapped in an apartment building on the 3200 block of Third Street in New Orleans, began to feel desperate.

The water wasn't going down and they had been living without light, food or air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the milk was gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a helicopter arrived to pick them up they were told to send the children first and that the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes. She and her neighbors had to make a quick decision.

It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead.

"I told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my life for my kids. They should feel the same way," said Love, 48. "They were shedding tears. I said, Let the babies go.' "

His daughter and her friends followed his advice.

"We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them," Williams said.

The helicopter didn't come back. While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas, and although Williams was reassured that they would be reunited, days passed without any contact. On Sunday, she was elated.

"All I know is I just want to see my kids," she said. "Everything else will just fall into place."

At 3 p.m. Sunday, DSS workers said good-by to seven children who now had names: Deamonte Love; Darynael Love; Zoria Love and her brother Tyreek. The girl who cried "Gabby!" was Gabrielle Janae Alexander. The girl they called Peanut was Degahney Carter. And the boy whom they called G was actually Lee -- Leewood Moore Jr.

The children were strapped into car seats and driven to an airport, where they were flown to San Antonio to rejoin their parents. As they loaded into the van, the shelter workers looked in the windows; some wept.

The baby gaped with delight in the front seat. Deamonte was hanging onto Robertson's neck so desperately that Robertson decided, at the last minute, to ride with him as far as Lafayette.

Shelter worker Kori Thomas, held Zoria, 3, who reached out to smooth her eyebrows. Tyreek put a single fat finger on the van window by way of goodbye.

Robertson said he doubted the children would remember much of the helicopter evacuation, the Causeway, the sweltering heat or the smell of the flooded city.

"I think what's going to stick with them is that they survived Hurricane Katrina," he said. "And that they were loved."

[Rhapsody]

Beautiful Al


A mother's mission

Jake Weber, 24, moved to New Orleans in June 2004 to train as a chef. His mother Barb Schroeder, 57, lives nearly 1,000 miles away in Grinnell, Iowa. A week after Hurricane Katrina, she spoke to the BBC News website's Richard Allen Greene.

He had a half a tank of gas. He knew [even] with a good truck he couldn't probably make it, and he had a truck that was starting to stall on him.

He says, 'Mom, I know sitting in a truck with a hurricane coming at the rate this one was, if I'm on that road I won't have any luck. So we're going to wait it out.'

Then he called me Sunday night and he says, 'Mom, there's no gas and [the evacuation is] mandatory now. How the hell are we supposed to get out'.

[After the hurricane,] I found a picture of his dog on a rooftop on a website, sitting all by himself.

I did not know if my son had drowned and the dog was sitting there because dogs wait for their masters or if they had been airlifted out and they had to leave the dog.

That picture was taken on Tuesday. I heard nothing, nothing.

I have a picture that's showing me the dog sitting in the water and I don't know where my son's at.

Jake has tattoos, and in the back of my mind I see my son's arms in a morgue. And I'm only going to be able to identify him by the tattoos on his arms.

Friends were telling me they had to make themselves turn away from the television.

I don't have that luxury. I'm looking for a face. I just wanted to see my son's face.

I didn't have to talk to him. I didn't have to touch him. I just wanted a face to know he's up and he's walking.

But it never happened.

Unexpected call

And I stayed up north. I knew it would be horrible down here. I did not want to get in anybody's way. And I have friends saying, 'Get down there, drive down there.' I couldn't.

He finally called me, and he goes, 'Mom'. First of all he couldn't even talk. I knew it was him because he used his cell phone and I saw 'Jake'.

When he called and I saw that number I had totally given up, I really had.

There's a sign: Emergency vehicles. Hell, if we aren't an emergency vehicle, I don't know what is

He says, 'Mom, we're OK. We've had water, we've had food, we're in the French Quarter. The dog and the cats are with us. We're all right. We're trying to get out.

'But we're running out of food and we're running out of water.'

I said: 'Jake, I'm coming down. I'm on my way.'

He said: 'You'd do that for me?'

I said: 'I've just been waiting for the phone call.'

He says: 'OK, you get in Mom mode and you get down here.'

He called me Saturday at 2:30 in the afternoon. We pulled out of Grinnell, Iowa at 5:30.

Mom mode got me within 20 miles - and nobody will let me near him.

We get all the way to the parish line and we were told to turn around and leave.

A cop says: 'You're blocking my road. Go.'

There's a sign: Emergency vehicles. Hell, if we aren't an emergency vehicle, I don't know what is.

I've been sitting in Iowa so I won't be in anybody's way and I'm down here because I heard from him and they won't let me near him.

Circling like vultures

We don't know our way around here. We're trying to figure out a way in.

We were turned away at four o'clock in the afternoon [on Sunday]. We're exhausted.

We're hearing of people getting ripped out of their cars and the cars are getting hijacked so people can get out of town.

We're sitting in a parking lot and we start getting circled by cars. They're circling us like vultures and they are looking at us.

I haven't been afraid for my life in a long time.

So we move.

The police would not talk to us - this is not a criticism, they are so overwhelmed and tired. One woman came up to us and said: 'We can't help you. We're sorry, but we can't.'

They shouldn't be doing this work - they should be being taken care of themselves.

We go out looking for a place to stay and can't find anything. So we come back one more time. We don't even get the car turned off, I don't know where these cars come from, they're right on us.

And they're circling us.

We put ourselves in harm's way trying to get a person out of harm's way.

We got circled one more time, so we say: 'OK, either we got to find a place to stay or we got to get out of town.'

We go to get gas, and it's getting dark.

We've been on the road for 24 hours now, driving straight down, turned away from two places that we fought our way to get to. And we're getting circled by cars.

We're hearing of people getting ripped out of their cars and the cars are getting hijacked so people can get out of town.

It's eight o'clock at night. Dead tired. No sleep.

All we wanted to do was get a family member out. We had everything we needed. We just had to get him to us.

Barb, her son Andy and her daughter Laura spent Sunday night with an acquaintance of Jake's in Baton Rouge, 70 miles from New Orleans. The next morning they drove back to the city. Shortly after they spoke to the BBC, they were reunited with Jake, who had hitched rides to meet them. He, his girlfriend and their pets were all fine.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4218576.stm

[inglor]

I just heard this morning that Alonzo Horton's little brothers and father were found alive and well in a shelter in Houston.

Prayers really are answered.

http://www.al.com/sports/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/sports/1126603283287090.xml&coll=2

Inglor

[NeumeIndil]

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050917171609990003&ncid=NWS00010000000001#

78 year old man found alive after 18 days. Stayed for a later evacuation time b/c he wanted to go to church first.