Slow motion disaster, one agonizing day at a time

Slow motion disaster, one agonizing day at a time

Michael Mayo

News Columnist

September 1, 2005

This much the rabbi knows. As of Wednesday morning, his sister, brother-in-law and their seven children were alive after spending two days on the second floor of their flooded home in suburban New Orleans.Everything else is uncertain."They're safe for now, thank God," said Rabbi Yisroel Spalter of the Chabad Lubavitch synagogue in Weston. "But I'm very concerned."After two days of agonizing worry, Spalter feared the worst."The phones were dead, the cell phones were dead," Spalter said.But his brother in-law, Rabbi Yosef Nemes of Metairie, La., was able to slosh through the receding water and borrow a neighbor's cellular phone Wednesday to make a brief call to Spalter's mother in North Miami Beach. Nemes left word that the family was safe, but low on food and water, and would attempt to evacuate by nightfall. He said they would try to escape their neighborhood, just blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, in the family's van.But Spalter was unsure if surrounding roads were navigable, if the van was operable, or if the family had enough fuel to make it someplace safe.Hurricane Katrina is long gone, but for thousands of storm victims in New Orleans and friends and relatives around the country, this is a disaster in slow motion.It keeps unfolding one excruciating stage at a time, one day's survival leading to new hurdles the next.And nobody, save for those in the middle of it, really knows what's going on."He said the waters were receding on his street, which is a miracle, but I can't really figure it out," Spalter said. "I look at a map, try to understand what's happening, but it's hard to get a handle on it."At the NOLA.com Web site Wednesday, there were message boards and forums with people asking about neighborhoods, addresses and stranded and missing loved ones, but the questions far outnumbered the answers.It was eerily similar to the heart-rending missing fliers that sprouted in Manhattan after the World Trade Center terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, only this was in cyberspace for all the world to see.One of thousands of posts Wednesday, from Angela Flaherty: "I'm hoping you get this asap. My parents, brothers and niece are still in New Orleans on Burdette Street [1937]. Please get them out in any way, shape or form possible. They hear the helicopters overhead but no one sees them. Thank you in advance for anything you can do."On Tuesday, a frantic Rabbi Spalter called his congresswoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, to find out about the family. Her staff tried to reach the Coast Guard and FEMA, but everyone is so swamped, the effort was futile.Spalter said his sister, Chana Nemes, tried to leave town with her children on Sunday, but traffic was so gridlocked they returned home. The family has six girls and a boy, ranging from 5 months to 15."They were afraid they'd be stuck on the road when the storm came," Spalter said. "She figured they'd be better off at home."Rabbi Nemes planned to remain in Metairie to be with his congregation. "In this type of situation, they probably need a rabbi more than anything else," Spalter said.Spalter said there were 13 people in the home when the storm hit, including a niece from England and three stranded tourists, a family who didn't make it to the Superdome after being evicted from their hotel.Spalter said he didn't know how high the water rose in the house, but the family called after scrambling to the second floor on Monday."They were ready for the worst," he said. "But nobody has been through anything like this."Spalter said his brother-in-law discovered that someone had siphoned gas from the family's van. "He tried to move it from their driveway and he saw it had gone from 3/4 of a tank to empty. These are the types of things going on."Spalter also said his brother-in-law had to plead with his neighbor to use the cell phone Wednesday because the battery was running down."Every minute is precious," Spalter said.And precarious.

Michael Mayo can be reached at mmayo@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4508.
Copyright © 2005, South Florida Sun-Sentinel