Common items made all the difference for some hurricane survivors
BY GEORGE PAWLACZYK
Sun Herald
PEARLINGTON - (KRT) - A Tupperware clothing container. A Buck knife. A bra. The tops of a neighbor's hedges.
Common items made the difference for people in the eye of Katrina. Deliverance came from the mundane.
Pearlington was totally destroyed on the morning of Aug. 29 when Katrina struck. Nearly all houses were wrecked.
But at the height of the wind and water, women and men kept cool, and in so doing saved lives.
They live together now in a tent city near the river, surrounded by National Guard bulldozers and trucks clearing the wreckage.
TUPPERWARE
While Kathleen Bello and several adults scrambled in a dark attic where fast-rising water was already sloshing, trying to find something, anything, to use to lower 8-month-old Hayden Bello to a boat below, Bello spotted a plastic Tupperware tub.
Baby Hayden was a snug fit, but inside he went. Kathleen took the container to the attic window.
"We put him inside, sealed the top, looked down at the boat, and just slid him down," she said.
Little Hayden skidded 10 feet down a steep, steel roof into the arms of his father, Frank Bello, family member Claude Bellow and a family friend, Jim Narvaez. The men were hanging onto a boat they had managed to snag.
Claude Bello said, "I knew we had to catch him. I knew we were going to catch him. There wasn't any choice."
After that, the adults slid down and clambered into the boat where things held steady for a time and then got worse. They were jammed into a 12-foot Boston Whaler that was kept from being swept away by the men who held onto a television antenna pole.
The boat's occupants watched refrigerators, cars, boats, houses and a church float by.
And they listened to a weird sound, that once they realized what it was, would forever underscore for them the terror and power of Katrina - the steady banging of refrigerators in flooded houses hitting against ceilings.
They said 6- to 8-foot waves battered them.
"Then the water was getting ready to turn the boat over with the baby in it," Kathleen Bello said. "So the men swam beside it, pulling as best they could, until they got to a doorway where the door was ripped off, and jammed the boat into that.
On Wednesday morning an Army helicopter evacuated Baby Hayden and his father.
"He was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and we didn't have any baby food left," said Narvaez. "We missed his smile, which gave us all courage. But we were glad when they took him to someplace safe."
A BRA
Louis Hyde Sr. and his wife, Melissa Hyde, and their friend Mike Walters tried to ride out the storm at a campsite in a trailer. There were soon running for the camp's restroom on slightly higher ground, and then, when that was inundated, grabbed the branches of trees and hung on.
Melissa said she grabbed a buoyant cooler that was floating by and hung on to it for dear life as a kind of insurance policy in case her torn, bloodied hands could no longer grip the tree branch that kept her from being washed away.
"I took my bra off and tied the handle of the cooler to the tree. That's all I could think to do," she said. That worked for a while.
Finally, after the cooler had held her up for hours, the bra broke and the cooler floated away. Melissa said she then clung to her husband's back for three hours until the water subsided.
A HEDGE
Tim Smith, a machinist with Lockheed Martin in New Orleans, tried to ride out the hurricane but was soon hit by the wind-driven surge. He knew his neighbor, 74-year-old Bobby Baxter, was next door where the water would be just as deep.
"Before I could get to his house I was swimming," Smith said. He was hit by a powerful current and said the only way he could keep going in a straight line was "Mr. Bobby's" hedge.
"I hung on to the hedges and pulled myself along," Smith said. "If they hadn't been there I guess I'd be over there somewhere," he said, pointing to wreckage to the southeast.
After a hectic 24 hours, Smith managed to get Baxter to a dry road and help.
THE KNIFE
Tommie and Penny Dean said they were forced to flee out a window of their house and swim. As they were pushed along by the current they managed to grab on to the side of the house long enough for Tommie to fish a folding Buck knife out of his pants and use it to cut the mooring line on a small bateau. They clambered aboard and floated on that until the water subsided.
What if her husband had forgotten his knife, Penny Dean was asked.
"If he hadn't got that boat loose we would have died for sure," she said. "It would have pulled us away, sucked us under, and left us dead."
© 2005, The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.).
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