'We had to help' says selfless city hero

Richard Austin almost smiles about it now. He and two friends were close to exhaustion last Thursday after 48 hours paddling a stolen pleasure boat around the flooded streets of his neighbourhood in New Orleans, saving people from the water, when they heard a commotion.

"There was this baby floating down the street," recalls Austin, 45, who is now among the 15,000 evacuees sheltering in the Houston Astrodome.

"The baby was floating in the water inside this refrigerator. The door had been ripped off and the baby's parents were using the refrigerator as a flotation device."

The baby was dozing contentedly, but the yelling had started because the fridge had somehow slipped away in the current. By the time Austin's boat arrived, the baby's parents had caught up with it. They said they didn't need help.

What became of that family, nobody here can tell you. But Austin and his shipmates, Louis Lazard, 27, and Jerry Bastion, 18, know this: in those two days before outside help arrived, they plucked more than 100 people from the water and ferried them to higher ground.

"They were clinging to whatever they could cling to, roofs and balconies, anything."

Austin, a burly man who used to work for a New Orleans construction company, looks sheepish if you suggest he and his friends were heroes. Someone had to help his neighbours, who in most cases could not swim.

"I was never thinking about myself at that point. We made a commitment to do something for those folks and we did."

It was just hours after the storm had subsided that he saw the water was rising fast. Then they found the 5.5m craft tied up outside a private house.

"We commandeered the boat. We had no idea who it belonged to, but that was irrelevant at the time."

Altogether about 16 men, he says, took control of five boats, forming a citizens' rescue flotilla.

The only way to move was with paddles. They had no food and almost no water to drink. Austin survived for two days on chocolate bars.

The men started out unarmed, but that changed after one of the other boats was set on fire when gangs tried to steal it.

"People were panicking. Other people with weapons were trying to interrupt what we were doing and we had to get guns of our own."

Austin, whose family are safe in Dallas, has never fired a gun in his life, and says with relief that he didn't have to last week either.

Mostly they were looking for the old folk. They found one man, aged about 70, perched by his chimney after hacking his way out of his attic with an axe.

A woman in her 80s refused to leave her house, insisting the proper authorities would be coming soon to find her. They doubled back on the second day. Still she would not budge and still the authorities hadn't come.

At first, they were taking people to buildings in a housing project that were at least three storeys high. Most of those had to be picked up a second time and ferried to a highway used as a boarding point for buses taking evacuees out.

That he had to take on the role of rescue worker strikes Austin as very wrong.

"It was noon Wednesday [local time] before the Coast Guard showed up. They knew half the city hadn't evacuated. These people are too poor to evacuate."

Today, Austin has only the clothes he is standing in. But he is safe and plans to look for construction work in Houston. He is not sure if he will return to New Orleans. And if he doesn't call himself a hero, others can, especially those he pulled from probable death.

Stirring into action

* National Guard soldiers and United States marshals are finally patrolling hurricane-stricken areas of New Orleans.
* Coast Guard helicopters are stepping up work to pluck survivors from roofs.
* In the poor 9th district, police launched search missions with small speed boats.
* Officials said they could handle 1000 bodies immediately.
* A total of 54,000 military personnel are now involved, including 40,000 National Guard.
* The military is now going door-to-door, by foot or by boat, in many of the harder-to-reach sections of New Orleans and more remote areas of Mississippi.
* Air Force units have evacuated more than 3000 patients out of New Orleans International Airport - mostly on stretchers.
* Crews have also shuttled more than 15,000 people out of the swamped region and flown in more than 4600 tonnes of supplies.

- INDEPENDENT