“I took a couple of pairs of shoes and enough food for my pets,” said Hall-West, who operates A Dog’s Life NOLA, an upscale kennel in New Orleans’ Mid-City area. “I only ran back in to get my laptop, just as I was leaving. I figured I’d be gone a couple of days.”

In fact, Hall-West still wasn’t back by the middle of September, three weeks after Katrina wrecked much of the city and the Gulf Coast. Her business, which she operated out of the large house she lived in, was gone, flooded, along with all her business records and personal effects. Worse yet, because she leased the building, she didn’t think she would need flood insurance, and didn’t have any. Adding insult to injury, A Dog’s Life had been open for less than a year.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of stories like Hall-West’s in the aftermath of Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States. The exact numbers of pet industry members affected and the extent of damage they suffered is still unknown—telephone service and electricity were still spotty weeks after the storm, and many retailers, groomers and kennel operators had not yet returned to assess the damage at press time.

Some, like pet sitter Carina Loubier, whose business was in New Orleans’ Broadmoor Basin section, lost everything.

Others, like pet shop owners Colleen A. McAuliffe and Angela Sagona, who own Good Dog Naturally in far north suburban Covington, La., were luckier. They sustained minimal damage (the store didn’t even have any broken windows) and were able to reopen in the week after the hurricane.

Chi-wawa Gaga, which specializes in costumes and clothing for small dogs in New Orleans’ French Quarter, sustained almost no damage. Owners Elayne Angel and Justine Roig planned to reopen the store and its Internet offshoot as soon as officials allowed business owners back into the Quarter.

PetSmart, which operates 14 stores in the New Orleans and Gulf Coast area, didn’t expect to reopen six of them until the end of September, although most had not suffered severe damage, said PetSmart spokesman Bruce Richardson. Animal injuries and deaths were minimal because many employees had taken birds and small animals home with them, he said.

But no one—even those who didn’t lose much—was taking anything for granted.

“Every day, I thank God, because He watched out for us on so many levels,” said McAuliffe, who opened her 3,000-square-foot supplies-only store last November. “It was one of the scariest things I ever went through in my life.”

McAuliffe and Sagona were forced to ride out the storm in nearby Folsom: They got stuck in outbound traffic when they tried to leave Sunday morning before the storm hit. By the next Saturday, many of their customers—who had run out of food for their pets—were at the store, ready for business.

Similarly, Chi-wawa Gaga continued to receive Internet orders despite a notice on the front page of its Web site saying it wouldn’t be able to ship because of the hurricane. An employee telephoned Angel in California, where she was staying, to report that the inventory was in the same condition as the day the owners had left. In fact, the store’s biggest problem probably will be locating the other two employees, Angel said, and finding enough people to staff the store and Internet operation.

Hall-West wasn’t as fortunate. She was in Brooklyn three weeks after the storm, not even sure when she would be able to get back to see what remained of her flooded house and business. She had left New Orleans several years earlier for New York City, where she learned the upscale kennel business. “I wanted to come home and give people in New Orleans the class of service they could get in Manhattan,” she said, “and this is what happened.”

Loubier understands Hall-West’s pain all too well. In the middle of September, there was 6 feet of water in her home, which doubled as the headquarters for her 7-year-old, one-employee pet-sitting business. She knows there was so much water because a neighbor, who was doing rescue work in the area, called her in Memphis, where she had evacuated, to tell her. “It’s kind of crazy,” she said with a sigh.

Loubier and her husband left Sunday morning before the storm hit. But before she left, she located the three clients for whom she was pet-sitting to tell them she was leaving. They were able to return home and get their pets, and none of the animals were hurt in the storm.

“That’s the most important thing to me,” Loubier said. “It was heartbreaking to me that I might have had to leave the pets behind, but we had a backup plan in case something happened, and it worked. All of the damage, it can be repaired or replaced. But I didn’t want anything to happen to the pets.”
–Jeff Siegel