TINA: The morning after we had left,
and I was sleepy but the T.V. was still on, and I heard
the Mayor say New Orleans,
80% of New Orleans is under 20 feet of water,
I see it kind of half asleep, and I'm like, 'Wait a minute,
what did you just say?'
LORI: People on bridges
trying to be airlifted...
it was just all sorts of problems here in the City.
TINA: I'm like, 'Wow...
that could have been me out there.'
LORI: We provide daily living skills
for adults with developmental disabilities.
During Katrina,
there was no way we could know that it was going to be
as bad as it was.
So, we leave regardless,
and our plan is intact,
ready to go. We already know who's coming
and who's not coming. People who are not coming
with us and they may be going with family members,
we make sure that their
process of evacuating is before ours.
During Katrina, we went to Columbus, Georgia,
which was about a seven, eight hour drive from here,
and we chose to go that far because of the
amount of rooms that were needed.
TINA: It was
long, hot, miserable.
You know, 'cause we just had too many people,
enrolled at the time.
LORI: The air conditioners doesn't really work when
you're going, you know, two miles an hour.
Those are some of the things that were issues and
concerns, you know, if you got people on medication,
you can't get too overheated, or somebody
could catch a seizure. I needed
each one of my participants to have an individual staff
to secure the quality
of living life, you know, even while we were away.
We did our business with Walgreens, when
we got to Columbus, Georgia there were no Walgreens,
only CVS.
So then we tried to talk to doctors,
our doctors,
who had no access to their computers,
and away from their offices so,
they couldn't help us at all.
The emergency food stamps, they were in line for
like three days in some of those places.
But we,
we had to be diligent, we had to
get that for the people that we were serving.
TINA: For something like Katrina,
I feel that nobody was really prepared
for nothing like this yet, you know, but
my thing: You gotta be prepared for the unexpected.
LORI: The things that we're doing now,
because of Katrina,
we're getting our medicines shipped
while we're out of town
We upgraded our fleet of vans,
you know, more modernized to try to
deal with the slow and go traffic.
Despite the bad,
there was some good that came out of it.
TINA: You know without The Arc, I can't
really tell you, you know what,
I probably would have been...
who knows where?