Hurricane yields a miracle
Published: September 17, 2005
John Paul Rogers, born one month early by Caesarian section at Bridgeport Hospital, came all the way from New Orleans to enter the world and escape the devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on his parents’ hometown.
John Paul was delivered Wednesday — believed to be the first birth to the roughly 600 people evacuated to Connecticut from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
The boy’s parents were displaced from their New Orleans home Aug. 28 and flew north to stay with relatives in Shelton.
“John means the graciousness of God — that’s why we called him John. God has been gracious to us,” said the Rev. Miner Rogers, John Paul’s father. He said his wife, Shawn, endured many complications during her pregnancy.
That’s part of the reason why the family fled New Orleans as soon as they did, nearly two days before levees broke and flooded the city.
“I had a very bad feeling about this storm,” Rogers said of Hurricane Katrina. “I knew it was going to be bad. I knew we had to get out of there.”
The Rogers family had made arrangements to have their baby delivered by Caesarian section in New Orleans, but the mass evacuation of the Crescent City abruptly changed that plan.
They found a willing team of doctors at Bridgeport Hospital to take on their case, and they’re glad they did.
“They’ve been wonderful, phenomenal,” said Shawn Rogers, who held her baby Friday morning while doctors who performed the surgery visited her.
“I feel good,” she said, smiling despite the surgery she’d been through Wednesday afternoon.
Dr. Kenneth Thomas and Dr. Robert Stiller were among the physicians tending to her.
“What happened in New Orleans [with the hurricane] was a tragedy, and everyone wanted to find ways to help,” said Stiller, who suggested that Bridgeport Hospital taking on the high-risk pregnancy was a good way to help someone from the stricken city.
John Paul is the couple’s fourth child. Also in the family are son Keland, 18; daughter Lindsey, 12; and son Corban, 3.
The next step for the Rogers family is to find work in Connecticut, since their jobs in New Orleans were wiped out by the hurricane.
Miner Rogers is a full-time Baptist minister, and Shawn Rogers is a mortgage originator.
“We probably could go back to our house in New Orleans, but there are no jobs,” Shawn Rogers said.
As for the congregation of 10,000 at Miner Rogers’ church, Beacon Light International Baptist Cathedral, “we’re scattered all over the country. We’ve evacuated as far west as Arizona and as far east as Connecticut,” he said.
The family is staying with relatives Orlando and Kim Soto in Shelton. Orlando Soto is a sergeant with the Stratford Police Department.
“We’re trying to deal with what we need to do if we don’t go back to New Orleans,” Miner Rogers said.
The Rogers family isn’t the only one in that predicament.
Elsewhere in the Naugatuck Valley, a partnership of the Valley Council of Health and Human Service Organizations, the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Valley Needs and Opportunities project announced a plan Friday to assist Hurricane Katrina evacuees who have relocated to the area.
The task force has identified eight families with 15 individuals being housed in the Valley, and is seeking to identify others that it may be unaware of. TEAM Inc. has offered to assign a case worker to work with the evacuees and serve as their advocate to identify specific needs they may have, and connect them with government and nongovernment resources. Help may include housing and household items, employment, financial assistance and health-care services.
“With the assistance of the Valley Chapter of the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, our case worker will meet with each of the families and individuals next week and hopefully by the end of the week we will ensure that they have been connected with FEMA, the state Department of Social Services and other state agencies and that we have identified the specific needs of each of them,” said Richard Knoll, executive director of TEAM, in a statement.
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