Senior evacuee reunited with dog
Published: September 27, 2005
Gloria Brown, 73, fled her Ninth Ward house in New Orleans with neighbors, swimming in rancid, neck-deep water with her dog. Queenie, an 8-year-old Chow mix, was floating beside her on a piece of plywood.
They took refuge in an elementary school on high ground a few blocks away. Six days later, Queenie rode with Brown when an emergency boat crew ferried them to a staging area outside New Orleans.
But hours later in Baton Rouge, as she boarded a bus bound for the Bay Area, Brown was forced to leave the aging, arthritic dog behind. She wound up safe in San Francisco with the rest of her family. But, fearing the worst, Brown mourned for her pet.
She didn’t count on Oakland’s Hopalong Animal Rescue and just, perhaps, a touch of
serendipity.
Saturday morning, tears in her eyes, Brown held Queenie in her arms once more. “We’re both going to sleep well tonight — for the first time,” she said.
The homecoming began in an unlikely fashion.
Brown confessed her fears about Queenie’s fate to Jennifer Coffey, a social worker with San Francisco’s Department of Aging and Adult Services. San Francisco, like Oakland, housed more than 600 survivors of Hurricane Katrina, many with compelling needs.
Coffey easily could have uttered consoling words and moved on. Instead, she got a description of the dog and its collar tags from Brown and called Marin Animal Rescue, the lead Bay Area agency for New Orleans pet rescue.
Hopalong, a 13-year-old Oakland nonprofit, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had a team of volunteer rescuers going house to house in flooded sections of New Orleans by boat, rescuing stranded, abandoned animals.
They found animals in desperate conditions. A cocker spaniel had been plucked from a mattress floating inside a flooded home while another dog had been stranded on a bureau in a house filled chest-deep with water.
Hopalong Executive Director Sarah Cohen said they were about to leave for the Bay Area with a vanload of rescued
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