Elks Lodge, community aid local Katrina victims

By ROGER MORRIS Western News Publisher

Keena Wood thinks of herself as luckier than most residents of the Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans area even though she has lost nearly everything.

Wood and her daughter Ysbella, 8, were recently given a check for $1,400 from the Libby Elks Lodge, who held a pasty dinner and silent auction in October. Altogether, Libby residents have provided about $6,000 in relief and donated items to Wood and her daughter, who lost all their personal possessions and remain homeless four months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast area.

Her mother, Kendra Gaustad of Libby, held a shower at the Elks Lodge in October to help replace many of the personal possessions lost in the flooding.

"I've never been crazy about having family far, far away but this time it was OK," Wood said. "All my friends couldn't have fundraisers because all their families were right there in the same area."

Wood is a member of the Louisiana National Guard medical group that rode out the hurricane landfall and the week afterward taking care of 700 elderly people at the Superdome in New Orleans. She spent 10 days living in the Superdome, whose population swelled as more and more people arrived after the hurricane looking for help.

"It felt like a month," she said of the 10 days.

"Scary is the word," she continued about living through the hurricane in the Superdome, which sustained considerable damage from the 100-mph winds and rain. "As depressing and scary as it was, I'm glad I was there because I wouldn't have believed anyone if they told me about it."

Medically it was an interesting time, too, Wood said.

"For the last three days, there wasn't anything to do," she said. "We just kind of waited."

While Wood was in the Superdome, her daughter Ysbella was staying with friends in a safer place. Ysbella was evacuated with neighbors to Alexandria, La., and was living with her "Nanny Kim" in Lafayette, La.

But the Wood home in Arabi, part of St. Bernard Parish, had 6 1/2 feet of water inside with as much as 8 feet of water surrounding the home. The Woods dog survived the hurricane with a neighbor who lived in the attic of his house for several days until flood water receded. The family cat survived the flood by floating on a mattress in Wood's bedroom. A neighbor reported the cat alive two days after the hurricane but he was ordered out by gunpoint to evacuate. The cat has not been found for quite a while and then turned up in good condition.

Two and half months later she was there," Wood said. Apparently she was living in the area and returning to the house periodically."

An animal control person told Wood that numerous cats survived in nearby wooded areas with some returning occasionally to their former homes.

Wood was allowed to return to see her home.

"It was yucky," she said. "We gutted out the house."

She lost nearly everything in the house.

"I was able to save some things from the house that were metal and could be cleaned," she said.

And in the attic, untouched by the flood waters, was her artificial Christmas tree.

Estimates to repair the house are projected for a year from now. Everything is waiting on a decision of what happens to the nearby levy that broke

"I think it's going to take more time," Wood said.

She returns to the home when the opportunity allows but she finds the neighborhood "beaten up." And she's afraid she will lose many of her neighbors.

"People are moving away," she said. Many of them didn't have insurance and we had a lot of elderly there and many of them won't be back."

In the days following the hurricane, she has been stationed outside of Baton Rouge, La., and as of Sept. 29, was moved to Camp Beauregard in Alexandria, where she is expected to remain until July 2006. Wood is on extended service with the National Guard and living, with her daughter and working in central Louisiana, near the town of Colfax, northwest of Alexandria.

"When the hurricane hit and they told us we'd be on extended service, we all said 'Thank God,'" Wood said. The business she was working for is still not up and running yet, she said.

"I still can't imagine it," Wood said of the whole experience. "It happens to people on the other side of the world, not to us."