Sept. 18, 2005, Updated Mar. 5, 2006\r\n\r\nThank goodness for being scientists, for the HCA corporation’s rented helicopters, and for the Jewish congregation (Chevei Tzedek) that welcomed us during our exile in Baltimore, our temporary city, where we had no friends or relatives. It is an extremely terrible thing to see a unique and wonderful city that you have lived in for 33 years destroyed before your eyes and to know that so many people were hurt or killed. It is easy to be sad when I think about the senseless, and avoidable, loss of life and property in New Orleans; our NO friends; the wonderful struggling but great institutions that we loved there (symphony, local theater, zoo, etc.); the beauty of the city; our lost biological samples; and our house which 6 feet of water for weeks after Hurricane Katrina. \r\n\r\nMy husband Ken and I arrived at my daughter\'s house in New York late Saturday night, one week after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The short version of our story is that PRIVATE helicopters had to save us, doctors, nurses, and other researchers from a rooftop Thurs. morning with thugs not far behind us in the hospital garage and a few Tulane police as the barrier between the thugs and Tulane personnel and families My heart aches for the people from my city who suffered so much worse than we did or died because of the aftermath of the hurricane, for the physical beauty and vibrant spirit of NO, and for the completely avoidable destruction of this unique city and home to so many good people, poor and rich, because of outrageous incompetence and neglect, some of which my husband, Ken, and I witnessed.\r\n\r\nWe left for my lab and office on the fourth floor of Tulane Medical School on Sunday afternoon for our fifth evacuation there during a hurricane alert. I knew that all my students and postdocs had safely evacuated from phone calls or email messages before Tulane’s server was shut down on Saturday. Ken and I knew as we left our house that this might be the last time we would see it, although we expected its demise to occur from wind damage. We brought along a few very special items, like a star-of-David necklace from my grandmother, much food that I had cooked that morning, and dry food items. We brought our Monopoly game to play with others at Tulane, as we had done before during “upwards” hurricane scare evacuations. All the other alerts had resulted in no hits to New Orleans. This one was so very different, precluding any games. As soon as we arrived, I consolidated important tissue samples and other types of temperature-sensitive materials from my three ultrafreezers to two and stuffed the freezers with Styrofoam boxes because I knew that items in packed freezers can retain the cold better if the power fails for a short while. Ken helped me to put dozens of coldpacks into regular freezers that contained thousands of dollars of enzymes and diverse samples. I tended to several very special FSHD muscle cultures in my CO2 incubator that one of my graduate students was growing to use and to store after receiving them from the Netherlands. After enjoying dinner, which had been heated in my office microwave oven, my husband and I slept through the hurricane that night on camping air mattresses in my cell culture room, far from windows. There were about 100 other researchers and their families or friends in the two research buildings at the Medical School.\r\n\r\nThe morning after the hurricane, the sun was shining, we had emergency power, and Ken and I took a walk for a few blocks to City Hall. The damage from the hurricane was really not very bad. Most of the tall buildings had only a few broken windows and there were many downed trees but the city could have easily recovered. The horror began the following morning. When we woke up and looked out of the window of my office, we saw 3 feet of filthy water all around the Central Business District and then watched it gradually rise until it deprived us of power, running water, and telephone communication. We saw looters outside and occasional amphibious trucks from a trip to the top of the Medical Center garage.\r\n\r\nMany of us (researchers and family members) helped each other trying to get more diesel fuel set aside for the Medical School generator (by contacting the only senior official we could find to communicate with, namely the head of Tulane Police), sharing Tulane news, and watching TV news when we had emergency power. Also, we helped Dr. Tyler Curiel, head of Hematology/Oncology and Dr. Mike Brumlik, Asst. Prof., save many of their precious samples in our ultrafreezer after the power failed for the first time on their freezer on the floor of the neighboring building, where there were no emergency outlets. We all quickly moved their samples that they had transported, just before the elevators failed, to my one empty ultrafreezer. Their samples were OK in my ultrafreezer until Ken realized the next day that it was loosing power after the emergency generator had been turned off and back on again. (We observed water lapping at the base of this emergency generator that had been placed only 4 feet above the ground outside and visible from our hall’s picture windows.) Then, Ken and I helped them to move their samples to a different, almost empty ultrafreezer that Ken found on our floor. On Wed, when the water was very high and it was clear that the emergency generator was off for weeks, we (Ken, me, Mike, and Tyler) quickly moved the best samples we could quickly locate, including muscle tissue samples so kindly shared for my muscular dystrophy (FSHD) research, to the little bit of remaining room in large liquid nitrogen-cooled dewar tanks. Despite the gloom, with the power out, we shared room temperature-brewed tea and lemon with home-baked bread and butter with a number of new-found friends at Tulane and had a great candlelight dinner with baked salmon, bread, muffins, and cupcakes previously cooked at home by me and a $2000 bottle of fabulous wine provided by Tyler, a collector of great wines. He is a dedicated researcher and physician, who worked ceaselessly to save and evacuate as many patients from Tulane Hospital and the public hospital next door known as Charity Hospital. He even risked his life rowing to Charity Hospital and being accosted on the way by dangerous individuals with guns, who fortunately let him pass and stayed an extra day to help in the terribly understaffed Charity Hospital until the small number of remaining patients were moved from Charity to the Tulane garage heliport and then evacuated by helicopter.\r\n\r\nOn Wed. at 7 AM, we were told that we had to go immediately across the bridge connecting buildings to the hospital garage. There was no source of communication with the outside world there except for one or two radios. We had been limited to one small piece of luggage per person in the garage in anticipation of squeezing as many of us together at one time into helicopters. I gathered my lap-top computer, some of my most useful research notes, my thumb drives in a shoulder bag, and filled a small suitcase with my and Ken’s clothes plus some food because I am on a wheat- and gluten-free diet (as a celiac patient in excellent health since I was diagnosed and put on the diet).\r\n\r\nThere was a long line of medical and research personnel extending from the first to the top floor of the garage. On the top floor, patients were on stretchers; physicians were manually pumping balloons to keep oxygen flowing, and IV bottles were hanging from pipes in the ceiling. One patient died that afternoon in the garage. Just below the helicopter landing, normally used for transplant specimens, both hospital patients and staff and researchers and their families awaited helicopters. All patients (both Charity and Tulane Hospital patients) were evacuated by private helicopters by the end of the afternoon. A female police sergeant invented a chant “Make a hole,” which was echoed with glee by children and adults each time a car came to deliver desperately ill patients from the first floor of the garage to the top floor.\r\n\r\nThe long line of staff and families, including well-behaved small children, slowly snaked up toward the top two floors of the garage during the course of the day, Wednesday, as small groups of people at a time were removed by helicopter. Every time the enormous wind and noise of an approaching helicopter was felt and heard, there was cheering and arm-waving from some of the people awaiting rescue. About 2/3 of the ~400 people were evacuated by nightfall. We were with the rest of the group at the back of the line. We were told that two more helicopters, which held 15-30 people) might come that evening to evacuate some more of us but the only one that did was a US military copter that dropped supplies but removed nary a person. To calm us and our hurricane “family” of five (including an Indian Farsi and New Orleanian evangelical) hospital workers next to us on line, we sang several songs, including my singing a Pete Seeger folksong about singing in times of great distress, a Black spiritual, and a Jewish folk song), before we slept on the garage floor. We slept on the ground of the top floor of the garage on top of thin hospital blankets with the corners of the garage and a big plastic bag fronted by a hospital screen as toilets. Of course, we avoided food and beverage as much as possible. \r\n\r\nAt 4 AM there was a huge explosion that lit up the whole sky, at which point many of us thought (without vocalizing it) that the immense fire would consume the city, preventing helicopter rescue, if indeed, there were any more planned helicopters rented by HCA, the company that owns Tulane Hospital. Fortunately the blaze, but not the smoke, eventually died down, and we surmised that the origin was across the Mississippi River in a chemical or oil plant. About an hour later, some of us huddled around a radio and cheered NO Mayor Nagin\'s speech, in which he ordered the President to come to look at Hurricane Katrina’s damage. (Pres. Bush did the next day, but his airplane\'s arrival delayed bus evacuations from the airport for several hours, our friends told us.) We eagerly awaited dawn but helicopters did not start arriving until 10 AM. We went to a small Louisiana airport, waited there all day, and then were taken to a hospital for obligatory \"decontamination showers,\" and changes of clothes to hospital scrubs and booties. That night we were bussed to a makeshift shelter with wall-to-wall mattresses. At the shelter, which was overly air-conditioned, we accepted free sweatshirts and socks. HCA arranged all transportation, including free plane rides wherever we were going (our first plane was chartered by them to take us from Shreveport to Houston), the hospital check-in, and free prescriptions to compensate for lost ones, and the overnight shelter stay. They also generously gave us $100 per family. Thank goodness that HCA was so well-organized and caring of its employees at Tulane hospital and treated researchers at Tulane, who were not on their staff just as if we were their staff members.\r\n\r\nNow I am being hosted in the lab of Prof. Robert Bloch, a muscle and FSHD researcher at the University of Maryland at Baltimore School of Medicine, who has been so kind to me. He carved out room in his lab for three people from my lab, helped arrange for me to be a Visiting Professor at his university. While I was so fortunate to receive many offers of lab space, the Baltimore one is perfect because Ken, also a scientist, will be temporarily working at Johns Hopkins. Four other colleagues helped and encouraged me so much. Despite my Tulane email address being nonfunctional and my being incommunicado for 3 days until we were airlifted by helicopter, Daniel Perez, President & CEO of the FSH Society, independently tracked me via an online wedding announcement for my daughter from the Times Picayune to my daughter’s mother-in-law’s phone number to find out how I was and to offer assistance. Also, Prof. Peter Laird, a cancer research collaborator at the University of Southern California, independently traced me via the internet to my daughter’s home before I arrived there. Daniel’s use of the FSHD Society’s Listserv to briefly describe my evacuation brought many generous offers from FSHD research colleagues that helped land us in Baltimore. This Passover in Baltimore we will understand better than ever before the idea of exodus. We will especially appreciate the feelings that holocaust survivors most have had when they came to this country weighed down by a huge emotional load due to recent catastrophe while most people around them were oblivious.\r\n\r\nKen and I will return to New Orleans this summer. We hope then to have a new home, 8 feet higher in the air than our present ruined house and on the same site, near Cabrini church and Paris Ave. At that time, we will no longer have to think like people in two places (Baltimore and NO) at the same time. Although we initially rejected the idea of investing money in New Orleans, the courage of many of the people who have returned there and the outrageously shoddy treatment of this great city by the Federal government have inspired us to come back and take an active part in the healing of this unique and vibrant place. This is a worthwhile goal for which to fight.