Sarah Cohen: Saving Katrina's Smallest Victims

Oakland (CBS 5)  -- New Orleans resident Gloria Brown weathered Hurricane Katrina with little trouble. But when the levee near her home gave way, she barely escaped with her life. Neighbors helped her to safety, but it was this week’s Jefferson Award winner who gave her the reason to go on.

"All of a sudden, the water just started gushing in and I just said I can't believe this," recalls Gloria.

A levee overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina sent floodwaters surging into Gloria's New Orleans home. She had seconds to grab a bag in one hand, and her beloved dog Queenie in the other.

"When I ran to the hallway, the water was gushing in the front door and Queenie was scrambling to get on top of the sofa," she says.

Gloria and Queenie were forced to swim for their lives. Though the pair escaped disaster together, they had to part at the rescue shelter.

"I cried when they took her cause we had never been parted. We always had been together," Gloria says.

Like countless hurricane survivors, Gloria had to surrender her constant companion, a dog she considered part of the family. It was these heartbreaking good-byes that drove Bay Area animal advocate Sarah Cohen to hit the road for the disaster zone.

"There were thousands of dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, birds," Sarah says. "There were vets doing triage all night. And there were animals needed to be cared for…sometimes we would get addresses to look for animals, but they were underwater and we couldn't get through."

As director of Oakland's Hopalong Animal Rescue, Sarah rallied vets and volunteers from Bay Area shelters and rescue groups. Together they made the trek to the hurricane zone, rescuing abandoned pets, nursing them back to health, and reuniting them with their owners.

"We went into a house, we broke down the door because we heard barking, and there was a dog on the bureau and a dog floating on the mattress,” Choen says. “They'd been there for two and a half weeks, floating!"

With shelters all over the south out of commission, Sarah's team brought dozens of pets back to the Bay Area, raising money to care for them and finding new foster homes, careful not to use resources already in place for Bay Area animals. Then she returned to New Orleans, again and again. The work never got easier.

"The air was so bad that even with the masks, I kept having to pull the team out because we couldn't breathe right in there. But for every animal we got, it was worth it," Cohen says.

One of the animals they got was Queenie.

"When she came back with Queenie I was a happy person! It was just like I was in another world," Gloria recalls. "Queenie is my heart. I just love her."

"When she saw her mom, her whole back end started wagging, and Mrs. Brown started crying, and the dog jumped into her lap," Sarag says. "That was the first time I cried."

Those are the moments Sarah says make all the work worthwhile.

"We knew that when people lost everything, that it was really important for those who had animals to be reunited because that would give them a reason to go on," she says.

For reuniting disaster survivors with the pets they treasure, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Sarah Cohen.

Sarah’s team is still making trips to save pets from the aftermath of Katrina. To see how you can help, please visit: www.hopalong.org.

By Kate Kelly

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