Carol Roshto-Smith was so frantic about her brother missing after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana that she forgot all about her son’s sixth birthday, until he reminded her.
“You know how important it is. Poor guy. He doesn’t know what’s going on,” the New Orleans transplant said from her home in Breckenridge. “He understands enough to know I’m crying indiscriminately.”
Those tears of anguish turned to joy, finally, when Roshto-Smith heard her brother’s voice on the phone after 10 days of anxious waiting.
“I’m fine,” Michael William “Whitey” Roshto said Thursday from a motel in Kinder, La., where he had been holed up since the storm but unable to access an outside phone line. “I knew everyone was worried about me. My wife cried for a while when I first got through, and my sister cried also. I still haven’t talked to my brother, and I still haven’t talked with my mama.”
With thousands feared dead in the aftermath of the hurricane, reunions like that of the Roshto family are welcome bits of good news.
Denver attorney Daynel L. Hooker was at a wedding in Boulder on Saturday night, monitoring her two cellphones when she got word about her grandfather and two aunts. Each had been rescued by helicopter from rooftops and taken to the New Orleans convention center before being sent by bus to Texas.
“My mom called screaming, telling me that they’d found them alive, and I cried,” Hooker said Thursday. “It was just a tremendous roller coaster.”
Now, 12 days after the hurricane made landfall, the messages on websites and electronic bulletin boards from those searching for lost loved ones are becomingly increasingly frantic.
More than 117,000 people have registered online with the Family Links registry operated by the American Red Cross, and an additional 45,000 have called the organization’s toll-free hotline at 877-568-3317, although no stats are kept on reunions.
The humanitarian organization has struggled with the same communication problems facing many in Katrina’s path.
“Remember that storms mean power outages and downed phone lines. Please keep trying and be patient,” the organization advises in a statement. “Phone lines are often overwhelmed after a disaster. Try sending an e-mail if you can – sometimes e-mail works when phones don’t.”
The confusion is understandable. The Red Cross is sheltering more than 159,000 hurricane survivors in 650 shelters spread across 17 states; others have found shelter with friends and relatives; still others, like Roshto, fended for themselves, safe in available hotel rooms but unable to make contact.
He told of hearing the emergency broadcast on a crank-powered radio that the levees had been breached and reluctantly leaving three cats behind at his home in Jefferson Parish, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
“The water was rising all around us,” the self-employed exterminator said. “We had to get out of there.”
His wife, Martha, who had sought higher ground with friends during the storm, returned to their home briefly this week and found it mostly undamaged by the storm and the cats hungry but alive.
And young Davis Smith, Roshto’s nephew, had a happy sixth birthday after all on Wednesday.
“I ran out and bought him a cake,” his mother said. “He frosted it himself, and he loved it.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
