Robin Raxlin and Anna Skrip interviewed by Toronto Star reporter Tabassum Siddiqui said they enjoyed two days in New Orleans oblivious to Katrina untill Saturday when the city started shutting down. By then, transportation out of town seemed impossible to find and the French Quarter establishment where they’d been staying closed due rising waters. The proprietors relocated them to a hotel in the downtown area.
During the early morning hours of August 30, a reporter awakened the two ladies from Toronto who were stealing the first sleep they’d had in two days. They’d just spent “much of Sunday and Monday” on virtual lockdown in a ballroom nicknamed the “hurricane room” with 400 others likewise stranded in the city some of whom managed to get information from the outside using cell phones. “They fed us one meal, but after that, food was becoming scarce. There was no water.” When they heard the roof of the Superdome had been “blown off” they feared for their lives. As this version goes management let everyone return to their rooms only when the worst was over. Then came a knock at the door.
“A Fox News reporter told us that the water levels were rising, and we had to leave now. I’m telling you, if this man did not come and tell us this information, we would still be in New Orleans today,” Raxlin said.
Raxlin and Skrip arrived in the hotel lobby to find “absolute pandemonium,” as frantic guests tried to find a way to leave. But with no taxis and few vehicles in the area, there seemed to be no way out.
Luckily, a hotel worker the women had befriended was able to point them to a family that was driving towards the airport.
“It was a family of seven. This green van pulls up, about a thousand years old, with all of the windows blown out because of the hurricane. There was broken glass everywhere, but they just looked at us, took our bags, threw them in the back and they drove us to Baton Rouge airport,” Raxlin said.
Once at the airport, Raxlin and Skrip’s good fortune continued. Though the airline they had originally booked with would not honour their cancelled tickets, a kind clerk at a Northwest Airlines counter took pity on the exhausted pair and booked them two tickets home for free.
Tourists wait for hurricane over drinks
Mon, 29 Aug 2005
As the storm of the century approaches, Richard Prisco (30) is lounging on a leather seat, beer in hand. The New York lawyer got stranded in New Orleans on his way home from a cruise. But he doesn’t seem to mind.
“We met these lovely ladies from Canada. We’re going to save them,” he joked as he waited in the posh bar of the W hotel for a rare, “potentially catastrophic” category-five storm to hit the low-lying city. Lovely lady number one piped in.
“When we start crying they’re going to comfort us,” Robin Raxlin (29) explained as she lay on a square sofa, Red Bull in hand.
Lovely lady number two has already done her share of crying. Nothing sets her off more than the newscasts. Especially the ones that show graphics of water filling the city that sits below sea level and is often referred to as a bowl.
“When they’re saying there could be 50 000 deaths. I just want to cry and lock myself away,” said Anna Skrip (27). “I feel completely out of control. I just have to rely on other people and I hate doing it.”
[…]
Those with money, and luck, filled the city’s hotels which have strong foundations, storm windows and emergency generators. More than 30,000 people crowded into the city’s main evacuation center, the Superdome sports arena, where indigents mixed with young families and the elderly.
Others decided to tough it out in their homes, even as officials warned them to make sure they had axes so they could cut a way out through the roof as the floodwaters rose.
The gang at the W hotel have only known each other a couple of days, but they say it feels like “forever.” There are inside jokes. Flirtations. Stories about their adventures at the bars of Bourbon Street.
Raxlin chastises Skrip to keep her from worrying too much. Prisco jokes to distract them. His two buddies work the phones to find a flight out and go to the bar to get more drinks.
While the storm may have brought these new friends together, it tore Prisco’s group apart. Of the four who set off for the cruise, just three remained in New Orleans. One headed for the highway in a huff and hasn’t been heard from since.
“He was furious with us because he feels we did not try hard enough to get out of here,” Prisco said. “We heard from a friend of a friend he hitched a ride with some people. They made it about sixty miles in eight hours.”
The nervous Skrip takes comfort in the thought that they’ll be better off in the hotel. They’ve got rooms higher up than worst floodwaters will reach and the men managed to scrounge some water and snacks before the stores closed Sunday morning.
If all goes well, they’ll be back on Bourbon Street by Tuesday.