After the levees broke:

[thedrifter]

After the levees broke: New Orleans' Harry Pryer says his `Ninth Ward Rangers' saved hundreds
BY DON SCHANCHE JR.
Knight Ridder Newspapers

MACON, Ga. - (KRT) - Harry Pryer was a junk man on the poor side of New Orleans. He wasn't powerful and he sure wasn't rich. But when Hurricane Katrina drowned his city, Harry Pryer possessed three things of great value: a boat, a paddle and a determination to save his neighbors.

"What was on my mind was, save who you can save," he said. "Get `em now, get `em as quick as possible."

Pryer figures that he and a half-dozen neighborhood men who nicknamed themselves the Ninth Ward Rangers saved 300 or 400 lives.

"I wish I coulda did more than what I did," he said with a catch in his voice. "But then I look at it and say the Lord let me did what he wanted me to do."

He is a quiet and friendly man of 64 - gray haired with sad brown eyes and a wispy goatee. His speech is spiced with the Cajun inflections of south Louisiana. He got his education on shrimp trawlers and tugboats at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

This week, Pryer found himself far from home: plucked out of the Delta and transported to Middle Georgia. Airlifted from New Orleans on Sunday, he ended up with 600-some other evacuees at Rock Eagle 4-H Center in Putnam County.

He came with nothing but a baseball cap, the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet. He was eaten up with worry for his wife and family, who wound up in Texas.

But Pryer willingly paused awhile to tell what happened after the levees broke.

In a week that showed a stunned nation how quickly "civilized" life breaks down in a disaster, Pryer and the Rangers showed just as vividly how some people find what is best in themselves and in each other.

"We're just local fellas that's in the neighborhood, comin' up together," Pryer said. "Before this happened, we always looked after each other."

Retired from life on the river, Pryer picked up junk and sold it. Michael Knight down the street did mechanical work. Another man did plumbing.

"Mike would come around say, `You need anything?'" Pryer recalled. "We all hung together. We all stuck together. We all hustled together. We did anything to try to keep a dollar in our pocket."

As Katrina loomed over the Gulf Coast, Pryer made plans to flee with his neighbor Eddie.

"Eddie had an old Cadillac. I told Eddie if he seen that wind coming from the lake, come and pick me up."

Pryer and his wife, Dorothy Hills, were staying in the home of his grandchildren, about four miles east of downtown New Orleans. It was a one-story cinder-block duplex in the Ninth Ward, a mostly poor and mostly black neighborhood between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. They had cooked some chicken for the trip. Pryer had set out his shotgun and hunting rifle in the living room and went back to the bedroom to collect his identification.

"I figured I'd have time. I said, `Durn, Eddie ain't blowed yet.' Cause if he'd a blowed, I'd a left everything and went with him. And when I walked to the door, the wind started blowing, picking up. I said I oughta go out there and see what's keeping Eddie. I'm glad I didn't. Because when I shut the door, the lights went out."

Then there was a loud boom.

And then the water rose.

---

The flood was startling for its suddenness. Pryer had been through more than a few hurricanes. Always, the rainwater fed a gradual rise. But this time, the torrent nearly killed Pryer and his family before they could react.

"It came through so fast, time I walked from the back door to the front it was up," he said. "It came straight up (near) the ceiling. It crept in and kept going up, up, up, up. My granddaughter jumped on the bed. My wife and my daughter and all jumped on the bed. The mattress just rose up toward the ceiling."

There is an anomaly in Pryer's tale: This was on Sunday night, Aug. 28, before the hurricane even made landfall. Although news accounts from New Orleans mark Aug. 29 as the day of the floods, Pryer and some of his neighbors are adamant that the flooding began the day before. That's what some Ninth Ward residents told the New Orleans Times-Picayune in an article published online Aug. 31.

Pryer is convinced the sudden rush of water came not from Lake Pontchartrain, where it was anticipated, but from a breach in the Industrial Canal levee, about 10 blocks west of his home.

"The water broadsided us," he said. "If the water would have kept coming `with the storm,' people would have got out of there. So many people wouldn't have died."

When the water found its level, Pryer said it covered the top of the door frame. He had to dive down to get through the door.

"I went down, unlocked the door, the iron gate and shoved it open," he said. Outside, he saw a neighbor clinging to the side of the house.

"I told him get on the roof," Pryer recalled. "He said, `I can't swim Mister Harry.' I swum over. The current was hard. I swum over and grabbed his hand, and then I swung around, and he caught the roof."

Pryer brought out his 9-year-old granddaughter Danielle and passed her up to his neighbor. But the wind was so fierce, they couldn't keep their seats. So Pryer ripped out a roof vent and tore a hole in the roof large enough to lower them down into the attic. He brought out his wife and daughter-in-law Dawn the same way.

"When the water crept up on the roof, that's when I said, `We gon' have to get outta here,'" Pryer said.

He added, "The Lord work in mysterious ways."

Down the street was a church. And as Pryer glanced in that direction, his friend Michael Knight stuck his head out the door. Knight had managed to get his motorboat started in time, and brought his family to the church for safety. Knight quickly retrieved Pryer, his family and neighbor.

But another neighbor wasn't so lucky.

"Her daughter, her sister and her cousins got drownded," Pryer said. "They was in the back room like we was in our back room. She was coming forward when the rain hit the door. When it hit the door, it blocked `em in. And by the water raising, they couldn't get out."

The hurricane shrieked around them, but the church held fast. And as the wind and the rain died down, the survivors began to collect themselves. They broke into a snack machine at a nearby sheriff's office to quiet their hunger. They moved from the crowded and mud-filled church to the roof of Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. And the men began to organize. They decided to do what they could to help.

continued...

[thedrifter]

"We had to stay," Pryer said. "Wasn't nobody else. Wasn't no sheriff, wasn't no police, wasn't no soldiers, wasn't no Marines. Was nobody else to do nothin'. We was the only ones there."

Knight had a motorboat. Pryer, raised on the river, was a skilled boatman and long-distance swimmer.

"I know how to paddle a pirogue," he said. They scrounged up a small, flat-bottom boat and began scouting the neighborhood. And as they worked together, calling out to other flood victims in attics and on rooftops, they bonded.

"That's why we called ourselves the Ninth Ward Rangers, `cause we organized ourselfs together," Pryer said. He could not stifle a sob, remembering their bond in the face of devastation. "Once we joined together, we had power."

Knight was a leader. Another group of Rangers, led by a pool-hall habitue nicknamed All-Night Shorty, stayed nearby on the Claiborne Street bridge over the Industrial Canal. Shorty's group had a boat and a trailer. While they scoured the neighborhoods by the river for survivors, Pryer's group searched around the levee.

Pryer said he would paddle his skiff, calling out to anyone who could hear. When he found a living soul, he would tell Knight, who came back in his motorboat.

"A lady was pregnant. Had three or four children, had a set of twins and a couple of fellas on an upstairs roof," Pryer said. "Kept hollerin' at me. I said, `Don't worry, we'll get you out.'" The Rangers brought them to safety.

Another time, Pryer said, he passed by a house where he had already called several times without any response. This time, he found an old man. The man had been hiding in the attic for a week.

"I said, `Didn't you hear me whistlin' and hollerin'?'" He said, `I heard you.' I said, `Why didn't you come down?' He said, `The water was too high.' I didn't know he didn't know how to swim."

Sometimes, Pryer said, he helped animals to safety, pushing them with his paddle to a piece of driftwood or a pile of trash. And sometimes the neighborhood dogs helped him rescue a human. Pryer said the dogs had a distinctive bark when there was someone trapped in a house.

"I'd take off and I go toward the sound. `Fore you know it, (I'd hear) `Hey man, send somebody to get me.' ... Michael come over with his crew, bring `em to the school. We did that every day for seven days."

There were moments of horror.

Pryer said he discovered why his neighbor Eddie never showed up with the Cadillac. Eddie had been trying to get to a house across the street where a family had taken refuge on the second story.

"Eddie was trying to make it over there to them and get outta that water, and he went down and never came back up," Pryer said. "So after the water got up high, I went looking for Eddie and I found him. His legs was hooked up in a tree, and his body down in the water."

Pryer said that was one of his worst moments.

Tuesday, Pryer said, he sent Dorothy, Dawn and Danielle to safety. When a rescue boat arrived, Pryer made them promise not to take his family to the Superdome or the Convention Center. He later learned they had caught a plane to Texas.

Pryer opted to stay with the Rangers and keep combing the neighborhood.

"I got in the boat and just distribute myself around again," he said. "I went backwards and forwards, about a mile this way. I went all the way to where the water was. It looked just like a lake had moved in. No houses - where houses was, wasn't no houses."

Eventually, he and the Rangers came to the attention of the journalists who came to cover the flood. An ABC News crew filmed Pryer and Knight on the water.

The Rangers told the news people to look at the holes in the nearby roofs. Those were places where Pryer and Knight broke through to free people trapped in the attics.

"The evidence of their work is everywhere," ABC reported in an account on its Web site. "Every hole in a roof represents another family saved."

By week's end, the Rangers were no longer finding survivors. Instead, there were bodies. And it became clear that it was time to go.

"The water begin to smell foul," Pryer said. "I went back and I told Mike, I said, `Bro, we gotta get outta here.' He said, `Get outta here for what?' I said, `I smelled the water coming from St. Claude Street. It smelled like the sewer coming this way. I said it's gon' be contaminated bro, we ain't gon be able to breathe that air `cause it's gon' be toxic. All this oil coming from down the parish and the sewer coming and it mix up? And all them chemicals?' I said, `Bro, we stick our finger in that water, and we get burnt for the rest of our life.' Michael said, `Let's go. We packed up the little things we had and we headed toward St. Claude Street."

---

They caught a helicopter out to the Louis Armstrong International Airport where military transport planes were airlifting the evacuees to shelters all over the country. Knight went to Georgia. Pryer wanted to go to Texas and find his family.

"I went in the bathroom in the airport and missed the plane," he said with a laugh. The next flight was to Atlanta. So Pryer took it. He marveled at the reception that Georgia gave to him and his fellow Louisianans.

"I give a shout out to Georgia. I give a shout out to Atlanta," he said. "When we got off the plane in Atlanta, the whole burden that we had on our shoulders was relieved," Pryer said and sobbed. "Them people made us feel like we was a god or something. Everybody there, even the marshals, the troops. All of them shook our hands. They gave us a greeting. They took the burden off our hearts."

Then there was a bus ride to Putnam County. Some of the evacuees were nervous. They feared they would end up in some kind of concentration camp. Instead, they were settled in cabins beneath the trees beside a lake.

"The place where they put us on, it will console your mind, give you peace of mind. It's a beautiful place," Pryer said.

By Thursday, his wife's whereabouts were confirmed. The Red Cross Web site said she was at a shopping mall-turned-shelter in San Antonio. Dorothy Hills said by telephone that she was fine. Danielle and Dawn were with her, and they were OK, too.

For Pryer, the job now turned to finding a way to reach them. He hoped they could all rendezvous in Baton Rouge, La., where his sister lives.

He is left with unanswered questions about the flood. Some Ninth Ward survivors suspect that the Industrial Canal levee was deliberately dynamited. The Times-Picayune discounted the suspicion, but reported that the persistent rumor is "unquenchable."

Pryer believes it.

"If they'd a let the storm just go ahead on, it'd a rose up slow. A lotta people woulda got out," he said. "But by the levee breaking or busting or blowed up, whatever they did, it came too fast, and it was hittin' two places."

He wrestles with a gnawing question: Did he do all that he could to save everyone he could? He knows the question will be with him a long time.

But he also remembers a brotherhood, forged in crisis when the whole world had come apart.

He said: "You tell `em Mister Harry's hollering for the Ninth Ward Rangers."

Ellie