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Six-year-old hero of the Katrina evacuation
Hurricane rescuers found seven children wandering together at an evacuation point in central New Orleans.
The children's desperate parents had handed them up to a rescue helicopter after four days spent trapped in their flooded home without food, light or air conditioning, and no milk for the baby. The crew who took the terrified children promised to be back to collect the parents in 25 minutes. They did not return. Thousands of children have so far been reported missing by parents displaced by the flooding. Snapshots of their smiling faces are posted on websites with urgent appeals for information, alongside pictures of rescued children who have no idea where their parents are. Three of the group of seven were about two years old, one wore only a nappy. A three-year-old girl led her 14-month-old brother by the hand. At the Baton Rouge shelter where the children were taken, relief workers distracted the children with toys and began to coax information from them. Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put the children into
the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans, described taking
them out alone as "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life", knowing that
their parents were either dead or that they had been abandoned.
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