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The calm after the storm

October 2, 2005 1:06 am

By MELISSA NIX

HEN HURRICANE KATRINA unleased its fury on the Gulf Coast, 550 people were counting on John Thorhauer.

It was Aug. 29, the Stafford County native's first day as director of an Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport, Miss. It overlooked the ocean, separated from the water by 300 feet.

He was hired to supervise 416 residents, 50 of whom required nursing care.

He would fear for his life--and the lives of the people in his care--long before lunchtime.

"There was a resident sitting in a wheelchair sitting in waist-deep water. I turned around as I was standing in the hallway with water up to my waist. All the furniture was floating."

And then he saw a wave crest and head toward him.

"I'll never forget that wave coming up behind us. It was strong enough to knock you over."

That's when Thorhauer got scared. And yet he managed to help everyone, including his family, survive.

John and Laura Thorhauer had been in Gulfport for only 14 days when Katrina hit--taking everything they owned with it.

On Tuesday, they spread out before-and-after pictures on a coffee table in their rented Fredericksburg apartment.

In the first picture, their modest Gulfport ranch home has reinforced storm windows and a neatly trimmed row of hedges.

In the next picture--post-Katrina--the hedges are still there, a bit battered. But their home is completely gone, vanished, except for a couple of stubs of concrete.

Now the North Stafford High School sweethearts are trying to put their lives back together here. Their daughter Kirsten, an eighth-grader, started at Gayle Middle School on Monday.

"We never thought we'd land back in Stafford," Laura said. "It took a hurricane to do it!"

They're trying to stay positive.

"You either sink or swim," Laura said. "We're optimists."

"We were going to have a little hurricane party," Laura said.

She and Kirsten joined John in the retirement home the night before Katrina hit Gulfport. Another 50 families--all relatives of the home's employees--also moved in to weather the storm.

"It was very routine," John added. "The Navy Seabees showed up to board up windows and get everyone prepared--just like they've done hundreds of times before."

But it soon became clear that this was no ordinary hurricane.

"At least three times I thought we would die," Laura said.

It struck at 6 a.m. The couple's first sign of serious trouble came at 7:30.

"One of his assistants came by the room. She didn't like the way the windows were moving, and asked John to get up. Eighteen Seabees had run down a hall to hold up a wall--it was literally bowing--so that we could go in and get our dog."

"That's when I grasped how severe it was. I thought we were going to die."

John coordinated movement of patients, residents and families within the 11-story assisted-living complex. They moved to lower floors as the wind raged, moved to higher floors to escape floodwaters.

It was a terrifying time.

"The second time I thought, 'Gosh, we're goners,' was when we kept getting evacuated to higher levels. I was in the stairwell with the dog and Kirsten. I prayed, 'Please, we need to survive and get these people to safety.'"

But much more was still ahead.

"We didn't realize how much worse it was going to get," John said.

As the water rose, John was busy evacuating 50 residents from the lower-level nursing home to higher floors.

"When we started the water was an inch deep. In a matter of minutes it went from an inch to waist-deep," he said.

"The noise of it too," added Laura, "It was like a freight train, the sound it just went on for hours."

"We had no water, no power, no communications," John said. "You're in the dark, the elevator shafts have flooded, you're running up stairwells and you can hear windows breaking."

When the the hurricane finally died down, Laura still felt as if she was in the thick of it.

"I was still spinning internally."

Late the next night, buses from the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington arrived to rescue the residents and families.

Kirsten, Laura and their dog were on the first bus out.

As their bus drove north on the highway, Laura saw the blue lights of a FEMA convoy heading south.

"Oh, my god, that can't be the first FEMA force. They're just arriving," she said out loud.

She was incredulous.

"We had been through hell the day before and hell the day after."

John stayed in Gulfport an extra week.

He remembers how dazed the region's survivors looked.

"There were a lot of people just walking around and completely dumbfounded. Shocked."

Laura felt that way too.

"It's almost like we had died but we were still alive--that's the only way I can describe the first couple of days after the storm."

Though they're regrouping in Stafford, the Thorhauers don't plan to stay.

"Stafford's changed a lot," John said. "It was kind of country-like [when we grew up].

"It's a zoo now just getting on the highway," added Laura.

So they're thinking about the Southwest--Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas.

"But nowhere near the coast of Texas," Kirsten said.

John is still employed by the retirement home, but won't be much longer, he said.

"I was never prepared for the emotions," John added. "This is the first time I've been off work this many days since I was 15 years old."

"We'll be OK for a while. We have planned for our future. But it's not a fun thing to spend your life savings."

The Thorhauers have set up a little workstation with a laptop in one corner of their living room. Every day begins at 8 a.m., with Laura typing resumes and both of them searching for work.

n n n

JALEELA BAKER has good days and bad days at Colonial Beach High School. The freshman misses her old life in New Orleans.

Though Jaleela never complains, her mother knows she's having a hard time.

"She's struggling with her homework. She's worried about her friends," Iris Johnson said.

Johnson understands. As newcomers to Virginia, "We're forced to live a life we don't know."

If it weren't for Jaleela, Johnson said, she would have stayed put in their flooded townhouse in New Orleans' Ninth Ward--the part of the city that got hit the hardest.

"Where was I going to go?" asked the lifelong New Orleans resident.

Johnson had been unable to reach her younger sister in Colonial Beach. The power in her house was gone. Her cell phone had no signal. The water was rising.

"God, I was confused," she said. "I didn't know if the water was going to go down and we were leaving for nothing."

She felt despondent, but then realized that Jaleela and her other daughter, who is several months pregnant, needed her strength. They left the house and spent the night on a highway.

The next day they caught a bus west to her son-in-law's house in Montpelier, La. And they finally got in touch with Johnson's sister.

They arrived in Colonial Beach two weeks ago. Jaleela began school right away.

It's some help that Jaleela's cousin, Ashley Rockwood, attends the same high school.

Ashley has found mentors for Jaleela in every one of her classes, said high school counselor Greg Forbes.

"It's been pretty rough for Jaleela. She sees a group of friends laughing and it catches her off guard," said Forbes, who has been meeting with Jaleela three to four days a week.

But Forbes said she's making friends, and he is glad she feels comfortable enough to seek his help.

Unlike the Thorhauers, Jaleela and her mother plan to stay in Colonial Beach for at least a year. Extended-family members from New Orleans have joined them.

But Johnson is having a hard time finding a job without papers or a car. "Sitting around all day long--it's not my thing," said Johnson, who said she has years of experience in banking and collections.

She doesn't know whether she still has a home in New Orleans--and if she does, whether it's even livable. But she's still paying the mortgage.

Things are getting a little better. On Wednesday, Johnson found an apartment. On Thursday, she had an interview with the credit union on the Dahlgren naval base.

As for Jaleela, "She's smiling a little more," Johnson said.

n n n

LEAVING HOME in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, wasn't the hard part for Dr. Fidelma Rigby.

"We had evacuated to Atlanta, thinking we could go back in," Rigby said.

The day after Katrina hit, she flew out of Atlanta with her husband, who is also a doctor, and their three children. They headed toward Culpeper, Rigby's hometown.

"When we were flying up Tuesday, my main concern was that I had to be back for an in-hospital call on Wednesday," she said.

Both Rigbys worked at Louisiana State University's medical center in downtown New Orleans.

"Once the levee broke, then I knew. That was the beginning of the end," she said.

It got worse. "Waking up for those five or six days to see more flooding, more people dying, more looting--what got me through it was being able to go and look out at the mountains. To realize we were together and were so lucky. Culpeper--which is where I grew up--has always been such a comforting presence."

Her husband has returned to Louisiana to practice at another LSU center in Lafayette. She will stay with the children in Culpeper for the rest of the school year.

Their house was not badly damaged and is "more or less livable," Rigby said.

But the children can't return to their schools in downtown New Orleans.

"The one thing we could offer the kids was stability by staying up here," she said.

They're attending Grymes Memorial School in Orange County, Rigby's alma mater.

She said her 11-year-old daughter has been the most emotional of the three. But once she found out her best friend was safe, things got a bit better.

She's been elected to the student government and is playing field hockey at Grymes.

Rigby, a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine, misses her work. She often worked with high-risk pregnancies and low-income patients.

"If I could split myself in two and go down there, I would. Spiritually, half of me is still down there. It's really, really hard."

To reach MELISSA NIX: 540/374-5418 mnix@freelancestar.com