NEW ORLEANS — Anona Freeman and her teenage daughter swam through
8-foot-deep floodwaters for several blocks, all the while towing a pair
of terrified neighbors from their four-plex who didn't know how to swim.
Lynette Oliver, a home-care nurse, and her quadriplegic patient spent a
day huddled with others under a freeway overpass, one of the rare pieces
of dry ground in the city after Hurricane Katrina.
Ella Ayo had to scramble to keep track of the 30 elderly residents of
the Covenant Nursing Home amid the confusion of being moved from place
to place to stay ahead of swiftly rising water.
They were among a group of seriously ill evacuees strapped into an Air
Force jet on the tarmac at New Orleans International Airport that would
take off Thursday for a base north of Atlanta.
"I don't want to see no more water unless I'm taking a bath," said
Freeman, who rested on a stretcher on the floor of the C-17 cargo jet
while her 17-year-old daughter Ashante sat quietly next to her.
Freeman, a diabetic, said she lost her insulin-regulating pills in
Tuesday's rush to abandon their apartment. She and Ashante later tried
to wade back to get the medicine and a dog they also had to leave behind.
"We went by dead bodies floating in the water," she said, still wearing
a T-shirt stained black by oil and other contaminants. "Once it got up
to my neck, I told my daughter it wasn't worth it."
A boat manned by local volunteers fished them all out of the fetid
floodwaters. Freeman said the ordeal left her physically drained and
emotionally fragile. But Ashante, she said, has been a rock.
"I must have broken down about four times, and she hasn't cried yet,"
Freeman said. "She's been my backbone through all this. I expected it to
be the other way around."
Ashante smiled but had little to add to her mother's harrowing story,
saying only that it felt good to be leaving.
Oliver and her patient, Dave Robinson, thought they would be OK when
they escaped his flooded home in eastern New Orleans and got to a Days
Inn not far away.
But it wasn't long, she said, before the rising water forced them and
others to the hotel's roof. Robinson, in his wheelchair, had to be
dragged step by step up the access stairs. They were picked up by
helicopter, but the question became where to take them.
Oliver said the chopper set them down next to an offramp from Interstate
10, and they took shelter beneath a nearby overpass. They got some help
there from medical personnel and state police.
"They got us out -- that's all I got to say," Oliver said of her
rescuers. "All of them, they're here and they never left. They deserve
the recognition."
Robinson, who had to leave his wheelchair on the roof, smiled at the
memories of his long, open-air wait under concrete and steel beams.
"It was miserable," he said, his voice barely above a whisper. "I was on
the ground the whole time."
Ayo took a seat along the side of the C-17, not far from a dozen or so
Covenant residents secured to the jet's floor. She called Katrina "the
most incredible and frightening experience of my life," and at the same
time she marveled at the instant kinship the hurricane spawned among its
victims.
"I was incredible how people pulled together, how they helped each
other," said Ayo, dressed in light blue scrubs layered in grime. "You
meet strangers and you become friends right away."
The Covenant patients were taken to the Superdome on Sunday night, hours
before Katrina blew ashore. On Wednesday, after the dome sustained
significant damage, they went to the city's basketball arena and on
Thursday to the airport.
While they were just hours away from medical care at Atlanta-area
hospitals, Ayo was still worried about the strain on her elderly
charges, some of whom went out on an earlier military flight.
"They're old and they're frightened," she said, looking out over their
timeworn faces. "They're already frail and they don't understand what's
happening to them."
