Memories of Katrina still sting woman who found new life in Warner Robins

It was New Orleans, 2005. Robert, the love of her life, had just died. Then Hurricane Katrina came and drowned two of her cats. A tree crash-landed on her two-story brick house. Rainwater flooded the first floor.

Within days, a rescue crew told her to take shelter in the Superdome, half a dozen miles to the northwest on the other side of the Mississippi River. They sent a school bus to pick her up.

But Alison Caruso had other ideas. Like getting the heck out of Dodge.

The day before Katrina hit was her 55th birthday. Now she was alone, save for two surviving cats.

She packed a couple of changes of clothes, some bottled water, fruit and granola, and headed out in her Ford Explorer with feline companions Daisy and Georgia in tow.

It took eight hours to weave her way out of town. She left behind the tree-lined street where she and Robert, whom she refers to as “my soul mate,” had lived for nearly a decade.

He was a mechanical engineer who worked on oil rigs. A few months before Katrina, Alison says he fell ill with stomach cancer and died.

Alison, a former stock trader, had moved to New Orleans in the early 1980s. She was an animal-rights activist, a daily churchgoer and a stickler for emergency preparedness.

As the storm rolled in, she was ready with an ample supply of water and canned goods, her SUV full of gas just in case.

“I was gonna batten down the hatches,” she says, “thinking it wasn’t gonna be a real bad one.”

A TV-news anchor came on the air, choking up, saying something about how New Orleans would never be the same. When he said that, Alison says, “Bam, the electricity went off.”

She didn’t panic.

“And then it came,” she says.

The wind roared. The roof ripped open. A tree hit the house.

“It kept getting worse and worse and worse,” she says. “The noise was deafening. You’re thinking you’re gonna lose your mind.”

Most of her neighbors had evacuated.

A few days after the hurricane, she heard trucks. The National Guard. They said she had to leave. They told her to head down to the corner, that a school bus would take her to the Dome. She didn’t like the sound of that.

“I was always told not to go to a shelter unless you’re with somebody,” she says. “Because if you go by yourself they steal from you. Or knock you over the head.”

So she slipped out of town in her Explorer.

A lot of people headed for Texas.

“But I didn’t want to go west,” Alison says.

Her only kin was nearly 500 miles away in the other direction.

Though she’d once had a son, he had died. Her mother had also passed. Her father, though, he was three states away. In the middle of Georgia.

It was 2:30 a.m. when she pulled up at his place in Byron.

Two weeks later, she returned to Louisiana. She gathered what belongings she could. Alison says she couldn’t afford the house, that the bank took it.

She bid New Orleans adieu.

“You just have to let go,” she says. “Try not to live and dwell in the past.”

She shares a Warner Robins apartment with a white dog named Molly. She has found a new church, new friends. She volunteers at animal shelters.

Occasionally she’ll reflect on the past decade, about how her life and how so many lives have changed.

Alison, sitting in a chair next to some decorative birdhouses in the breezeway outside her front door, says, “It was a total culture shock moving from New Orleans to Warner Robins. ... I didn’t intend to stay, but going back, it was so, so bad. That’s not where I needed to be anymore. The Lord had opened other doors.”

She doesn’t have any pictures from Katrina. Too painful.

“For years,” she says, “I had nightmares about it. I don’t anymore. Of course, it’s been 10 years this weekend.”

Her 65th birthday was Friday. She and Molly wore party hats and celebrated with rotisserie chicken -- the dog’s favorite -- and cupcakes.

“I love it here,” Alison says. “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

To contact writer Joe Kovac Jr., call 744-4397 or follow him on Twitter@joekovacjr.

This story was originally published August 29, 2015 at 9:27 PM with the headline "Memories of Katrina still sting woman who found new life in Warner Robins ."