By Tim Carman and Bernard Unti

Monday, September 5, 5:56 p.m.

HOUSTON – On Monday, August 29, as the floodwaters slapped against the front steps of Lewis and Latasha Serrano’s home in the City Park neighborhood of New Orleans, Latasha’s mother, Joan Lodge, finally decided she had to seek refuge at the temporary shelter at Delgado Community College. There was only one problem: The shelter didn’t take dogs. Or cats. Or birds. Or any animal for that matter.

Lodge was forced to make the trek to the shelter without her daughter and son-in-law’s four-year-old dog, Jass, whom she was watching. Six days later, on Sunday, September 3, as Lodge finished her lunch in a makeshift cafeteria—a converted, cavernous exhibit hall in the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, where the Big Easy’s hard-luck victims shared a meal and misery—she took small comfort in her decision while recounting her horrific walk to the temporary shelter.

When Lodge stepped from the front steps and into the river coursing through the streets, the floodwaters reached only her waist. At times during her four-block journey to the shelter, Lodge practically had to arch her neck to keep her head above water. A trip that would have usually taken minutes soon became a life-or-death struggle, as the currents retarded her forward progress and open manholes threatened to swallow her whole. Debris and dead animals drifted past her. Lodge’s short trip took her more than an hour to complete.

“There’s no way that little dog could have made it through those waters,” Lodge says. “He was safer where he was at home.”

And maybe he was. As Lodge describes it, her daughter’s home is a split level, with about 19 steps leading to the front door. When she left, the water was only half way up the steps. And if the waters kept rising, Jass could have sought even higher ground on a sofa or bed, so the water would have to climb many more feet to submerge the 10-pound dog. Lodge said she left plenty of food and water for Jass.

Rescue Phase Begins

The only way to know if Jass survived, of course, would be through a direct rescue. And in the first few days after Katrina, after the levees broke in New Orleans, no one other than the National Guard was allowed to enter the ravaged city. Members of The HSUS’s National Disaster Animal Response Team (DART) were finally given access on Sunday, and along with the animal control staff of the Louisiana SPCA, they set out to save those pets still stranded in the once Superdome, rescuing dozens of animals left behind when evacuees fled the city.

Jim Boller, director of shelter and field services at the Houston SPCA, said he heard from Laura Maloney, executive director of the Louisiana SPCA, that teams rescued about 150 animals in and around New Orleans on Sunday alone. Maloney also recently told The Miami Herald that a small group of volunteers have been entering homes where evacuated residents have indicated they left pets, breaking into the residences if necessary to save the animals. Those rescues, unfortunately, represent just a fraction of the life-saving operations still to come.

Maloney, after all, told the same Herald reporter that there “are countless thousands of abandoned pets in the city, and hundreds and hundreds are stuck inside their homes.” Officials at the Houston SPCA, which is sheltering many of the animals from New Orleans, said they are bracing for an onslaught of potentially thousands of pets once rescuers target more densely populated areas.

HSUS Sends More Rescuers

By Monday, the number of HSUS DART team members in Louisiana had grown, with staff members active in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Gonzales, and Metairie. DART rescuers in New Orleans joined animal control officers from the Louisiana SPCA in efforts to rescue animals by boat, trying to reach high priority locations to save the greatest numbers of animals. Unfortunately, biohazard risks thwarted the day’s major objective, a hospital where dogs and cats were being harbored.

But DART team member Bruce Earnest, an animal control officer from Iowa on board one of the rescue boats, joined members of the Sheriff’s Office in evacuating a family that had refused to leave their homes without the family pets.

In the meantime, the HSUS’s Disaster Call Center (1-800-HUMANE-1) continued to log phone requests for rescues of animals trapped around New Orleans. “People are frantically calling and telling us their cat is on the third floor of an apartment in New Orleans, or their horses were left in a pasture,” said HSUS President & CEO Wayne Pacelle.

Panic is understandable for Crescent City pet owners. Many fled before, or right after, Katrina’s wrath, and their animals have run out of food and clean water. The Miami Herald reports that pets are dying from starvation, and that some dogs have formed packs which are roaming the streets looking for sustenance. Similarly, the zoo in New Orleans is struggling to feed an estimated 1,400 animals with its dwindling supplies, the paper says.

Responding to the situation’s urgency, Pacelle sent additional staff from The HSUS’s Washington headquarters into the areas hammered by Katrina’s furious force. Specialists in companion animal and wildlife care joined their colleagues from HSUS regional offices at bases of operation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in Hattiesburg and Jackson, Mississippi.

Racing Against Time

A few happy stories began to emerge on Monday, as in Metairie, where HSUS staffer Bob Reder made an apparent match between a man and his missing cat being held in Baton Rouge. But the thoughts of most animal rescuers were fixed on the animals of New Orleans.

“Time is absolutely critical at this point. Every day that animals are forced to wait in New Orleans for a rescue team is another day they are forced to live without food and fresh water. No one needs to tell you what the outcome of that situation will be,” said The HSUS’s Pacelle. “The city needs all available hands on deck to save those thousands of animals who are counting on us.”

Hattie Falkins, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing a DART rescue team enter her daughter’s home near Xavier University in New Orleans. Her daughter, Sandra Branch, had to leave behind two “mutts,” as Falkins calls them, when Branch and her one-year-old child fled the Big Easy for higher and drier environs.

Over a cold sandwich and a plate of fruit in Houston, Falkins relates how the stranded dogs only add to her family’s MIA list. The mother of four daughters, two sons, eight grandsons, one granddaughter and three great grandchildren—all of whom lived in New Orleans before Katrina struck—would appear to only know the whereabouts of one daughter, Sheryl, who is eating lunch right next to her.

Finding her daughter’s dogs would shorten Falkins’ list and perhaps ease her mind a little. Just as finding Jass would ease the mind of Joan Lodge, who seems to harbor something akin to survivor’s guilt at leaving the dog back in the flooded city. Her only salve is knowing that animal rescuers are doing all they can to rescue as many pets facing Jass’s plight as possible.

Tim Carman is the managing editor of hsus.org. Bernard Unti is the senior policy advisor and special assistant to the president at The HSUS.