Westminster – Fran Roppolo escaped Hurricane Katrina from her home in New Orleans’ St. Bernard Parish with just the clothes she wore. A lifetime of keepsakes and documents, including more than 200 cookbooks, some predating World War I, were washed away. The single-story brick home she owned was submerged in 22 feet of water.
When the levees broke, Roppolo and others spent three days at a New Orleans high school, where people were rationed a half cup of dry cereal with a half cup of water three times daily. They fled the school through waist-deep water. Dead animals, even people, floated by as the survivors made their way to the dry pavement of Interstate 10.
Then, Roppolo waited three days in 98-degree heat, among hundreds of other victims, before being bused to the Houston Astrodome.
Roppolo, 61, now lives in Colorado, where she’s rebuilding her life.
Her two-story Westminster home is neat and simply furnished, the result of donations and bargain hunting by Roppolo.
She lives with a 19-year-old grandson; her daughter, 39; and her daughter’s 3-year-old twin girls.
“I never knew there was so many good, caring people in the world,” Roppolo says of the help she’s received in Colorado.
The American Red Cross, Catholic Charities and Lutheran Family Services are among the non- profit groups that have helped the Katrina evacuee stay afloat.
Family and extended family in Colorado – Roppolo’s son Robbie and his wife, Kristen Tompkins-Roppolo, live here – helped Rappolo get to Colorado and have been helping her ever since, she said.
Fannie Mae, the government- sponsored loan corporation, set up Roppolo, who lives on a fixed, Social Security disability income of $615 a month, in her Westminster home with an 18-month lease for $1.
The lease expires Dec. 14, and Fannie Mae has offered to sell the home to her. But Roppolo can’t afford to buy the Westminster house, in part, because she’s collected only $1,800 from her insurance company for the loss of her New Orleans home, she said.
“My life, as I knew it, died with the hurricane,” Roppolo said. “I planned on dying in that house.”
Roppolo said she is part of a class-action lawsuit trying to recoup funds from insurance claims that have gone unpaid.
“Who knows how that will turn out or how long it will take,” she said. “They can just wait me out.”
Last year, around the first anniversary of the disaster, officials estimated that about 10,000 people fled the Gulf Coast region to Colorado. Some passed through and others settled.
Not counting Gulf Coast states, Colorado was the fourth-most popular state for evacuees, said Derek Jensen, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In Colorado, more than 3,800 Katrina evacuees currently receive assistance from federal programs, Jensen said.
Of that number, 280, like Roppolo, are receiving rental assistance from FEMA.
Since Katrina, the federal government has distributed $21.2 million to evacuees in Colorado, Jensen said. That number includes aid for medical needs, transportation, housing, food and other necessities.
Nationally, the federal government has spent $7.98 billion for aid.
Typically, aid from the President’s Disaster Relief Fund runs out 18 months after the event.
But Katrina was so devastating and widespread that relief deadlines have been extended, Jensen said.
“There is a progression on how individuals recover from a disaster,” Jensen said. “The further out we get, the less people we will have on rental assistance, and the more they will be able to do for themselves.”
By March 2008, anyone still receiving federal rental assistance based on Katrina will start paying $50 a month toward rent, Jensen said, and the amount will increase monthly.
The federal government expects to completely extinguish Katrina rental subsidies by March 2009, Jensen said.
Robert Thompson, a spokesman with the American Red Cross, said he received an e-mail recently from a Katrina survivor in Colorado who sought help because she’s paying two mortgages, one for her Colorado home and the other on a home in Louisiana she’s trying to sell.
“People are still out there, people who still need help,” Thompson said. “These people lost everything. Just put yourself in their place. If you had to go somewhere, would the help be there?”
Roppolo, meanwhile, seeks counseling to help her with nightmare images of Katrina that time and distance have not eased. Still, she’s happy, even hopeful, about life in Colorado.
“We can make new memories and great new treasures,” Roppolo said. “God has been so good to us, to have brought us here.”
Staff writer Kieran Nicholson can be reached at 303-954-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.
