Cat, owner separated by Katrina reunited
Published: December 2, 2005
An almost three-month separation caused by the evacuation of New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina is scheduled to end today for a woman and her cat.
After the hurricane, Mary Marino, 46, ended up in El Paso. Her black cat, Mia, 6, ended up missing. But after weeks of searching, she was recently found in a California animal shelter.
The long awaited reunion is scheduled today, when Mia is flown into El Paso International Airport.
“It’s just miraculous,” Marino said. “I think for anybody to be able to recover their pets after this total disaster — it’s just miraculous.”
Marino said the separation was filled with “a lot of sadness, a lot of tears, just not knowing. It was not just a black cat; to me it was my little girl.”
On Sept. 2, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Marino handed her two cats — Mia and Coco — to animal welfare volunteers patrolling her New Orleans neighborhood, which was being evacuated, she said.
Marino boarded a double- rotor helicopter that landed in an empty lot, and before she knew it she was in El Paso, one of the more than 400 evacuees sent to the city.
The cats ended up in a shelter at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Coco was found in September. But Mia was gone.
LaWanna Lincoln, an Animal Rescue League of El Paso volunteer, said finding Mia was like “finding a needle in a haystack.”
More than 50,000 pets were left behind in the New Orleans area. About 7,000 animals were rescued. But because of the huge number of rescued pets, hundreds of the animals were taken to more than 150 shelters across the nation.
“Nobody knew what shelter she had gone to,” Lincoln said.
To help find Mia, Lincoln spent at least two hours a night on the Internet searching through Web sites helping hurricane evacuees reunite with their pets, she said.
The efforts of the Animal Rescue League of El Paso have helped two men, also hurricane evacuees brought to El Paso, reunite with their five dogs. The two dogs belonging to another evacuee brought to El Paso were also found, but they were not reunited with their owner because she can no longer provide for them, so she relinquished ownership of her pets.
Lincoln said that after weeks of searching for a black cat that met the description, Mia was found at the Marin Humane Society in Novato, Calif.
Shelter officials told Lincoln that the cat, which did not have identification tags, had arrived with hundreds of other pets. It was in a crate with a note that had the name Mia and where the cat was found.
Lincoln said that after many phone conversations and exchanges of e-mails and pictures, they determined the cat was indeed Marino’s pet. Mia was distinct from all the other black cats in that she has a very tiny white spot on her stomach and on her right shoulder, she said.
Finding the little black cat is a bit of consolation among the devastation that hit her hometown, Marino said. She visited New Orleans last week in an effort to recover any belongings she could salvage. The devastation was heartbreaking, she said.
But today, Marino gets a little purring piece of home again.
“It seems I finally have something again from New Orleans,” Marino said. “Part of me is complete.”
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