'Why did you do this to us?' Tragedy, triumph in Katrina's aftermath

NEW ORLEANS - Set down on dry land for the first time in three days, 83-year-old Camille Fletcher stumbled a few feet to a brick wall and collapsed. She and two of her children had made it through Hurricane Katrina alive, but her Glendalyn with the long, beautiful black hair was gone.\n"My precious daughter," she sobbed Wednesday. "I prayed to God to keep us safe in his loving care."\nThen, looking into an incongruously blue sky, she whimpered: "You're supposed to be a loving God. You're supposed to love us. And what have you done to us? Why did you do this to us?"\nBut for the rescuers rushing to pluck Fletcher and untold others from roofs, balconies and highways flooded by Hurricane Katrina, such questions were a luxury they simply could not afford.\nEmergency officials say 72 hours is about the longest they can expect most people to last in the sweltering Louisiana heat. So they called in volunteers from across this "fisherman's paradise" to help improve the survivors' odds.\nRonnie Lovett and about 30 of his crew from R&R Construction drove four hours from Sulphur, La., to join the rescue effort. They arose with the sun Wednesday after spending the night in sleeping bags on the pavement outside Harrah's casino on the Mississippi River, because they couldn't find rooms.\nLovett is paying the men's wages and furnishing gas for their personal boats.\n"They're all Bubbas, swamp men," said Lovett, who brought his own 21-foot fishing boat. "We're here for the duration, until they turn us loose."\nAt dawn, a motley armada of air boats, aluminum skiffs and even a two-seater Jet Ski moved out from the central business district. Heading east in the westbound lanes of Interstate 10, the boats passed the Superdome, where hundreds of ragged people stood on the hot pavement and helicopters buzzed around.\nMany of the displaced had clearly spent the night on the highway rather than suffer the stable-like conditions of the sports stadium. The caravan passed people dragging suitcases and pushing shopping carts. One man waved an empty water jug like a railroad lantern, pleading for someone to stop and fill it.\nAfter nearly an hour of zigzagging around downed lampposts and plowing through water up to past their wheel wells, the volunteer navy arrived at a staging point in New Orleans East, just south of Lake Pontchatrain.\nNew Orleans police Officer Martin Jules warned the men not to overload their boats. Some volunteers have had their rigs taken from them at gunpoint, so Jules also warned them not to be heroes.\n"These people have been out here two or three days," he said, standing on the bow of a flatboat. "They're scared, they're tired, they're thirsty, they're hungry. If it gets hostile, we roll, OK? We're here to help 'em. We got to be here to help them for the next couple of months, however long it takes. Our safety is No. 1."\nWithin minutes of launching, the men were returning with sunken-eyed, sallow-skinned survivors.\nKevin Montgomery, 40, had spent the past three days shuttling between the attic of a one-story home and a makeshift canopy he built on the roof. He and two other men rationed a gallon of water between them.\n"It was terrible," the carpenter said as he trundled through the gasoline-laced water.\nEvery once in a while, Mongtomery would see a body float by. But he cannot swim and had to fight the urge to wade in and tie them down.\n"All I could do was pass them by and hope that God takes care of the rest of that," he said. "You have to think of self, too."\nThe boats circled a Day's Inn, where people had hung sheets on the balconies reading, "SOS." and "We need food and water." At Forest Tower, a high-rise senior citizens apartment complex, one man waved his empty oxygen tank out a window.\nA boat floated through the building's shattered entrance and pulled right up to the stairs. Elderly residents stepped gingerly onto tables and into the boats.\nSimon Queen, 68, said he slept through Hurricane Betsy. But Katrina was like "King Kong pounding at the windows."\n"I need to get me to some high ground," he said. "I wasn't born with fins."\nAt the nearby United Medical Rehab Hospital, 14 patients, 11 staff members and their families awaited their saviors.\nNurse Bernadette Shine said the facility was nearly out of oxygen, and several diabetic patients had been without dialysis for nearly a week. After the fruit cocktail and peanut butter ran out, the staff broke into the candy and drink machines for sugary items to keep patients from going into shock.\n"There are people that are not going to make it," Shine said, her voice cracking. "One I've known since I was 10 years old. But we did what we could for them. We did everything we could for them."\nAfter several hours, a small fleet of rented moving trucks showed up to take the people to the downtown convention center so they could be taken out of the city. Police herded people up metal ramps like cattle into the unrefrigerated boxes.\nCamille Fletcher sat forlorn, not really caring when it would be her turn. Suddenly, a woman emerged from the waters and began walking toward her. She had long, disheveled black hair.\n"Mamma?" she shouted.\n"Oh my god, oh my God," the old woman screamed, kissing Glendalyn's hand and pressing it against her forehead. "My daughter's alive!"\nThe 60-year-old Glendalyn Fletcher told her family a harrowing story of how she had floated through a wall when her house started to collapse around her; how she had swum, stripped naked by the raging waters, to a neighbor's house and cowered in an attic; how someone had picked them up Tuesday and left them stranded on a water-locked section of I-10.\n"It was horrible, but there were millions of stars," the dehydrated woman said.\nA few moments later, it was time for Camille Fletcher to go to a shelter. Before being helped into the back of the moving truck, she looked back at her daughter and smiled.\n"God is good"