Caught in Hurricane, Dog Owner Learns From Loss

When the last-minute order to evacuate came, Tony Hopkins did all he could for his dogs.

The small boat arriving in 30 minutes to pluck him and his neighbors from the floodwaters of Hurricane Floyd would have no room for six German shepherds. So Hopkins set them loose, spread all the dog food he had on the highest land and filled buckets with clean water.

But when he waded to the boat through four feet of water, the dogs swam after him.

On his orders, 13-year-old Jessie and her granddaughter, Tessa, obediently turned around and swam back to their yard. The four others trailed behind the boat.

“He had to keep telling them to go back,” said Terri Crisp, director of Emergency Animal Rescue Service in Sacramento and a volunteer rescuer in last September’s hurricane. “Eventually he had to turn his back on them. They had this question on their faces: Where are you going, and why am I still here?”

Hopkins finally saw the four dogs turn around and head for dry land.

“It was upsetting for me because you didn’t know if you’d ever see them again,” Hopkins, 46, said last month in a telephone interview from Greenville. “There were a few tears as I saw them getting further and further away. Being single, these dogs were my life.”

But Hopkins was among the most fortunate of pet owners; he found all six dogs after the flood.

“It was a miracle,” he said. “It was a team of people, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the Lord was involved. I don’t think it’s humanly possible, that it’s natural, to get six dogs back.”

Settling in that first night at Gum Swamp Church, he heard a sheriff’s deputy talking about a dog he’d saved as he evacuated two elderly women. The dog, found swimming two miles from Hopkins’ home, was his Butch.

The next day, he found two of Butch’s offspring, 16-month-old Marco and Quana, at a shelter set up by Crisp’s outfit at East Carolina University. A neighbor had found them paddling in the rising water.

For a week, he worried about the three others, especially Jessie, who was arthritic. When he finally returned home, he found Tessa on a deck once attached to the house and now floating 12 feet away. Jessie was lying prone on a floating picnic table.

“I actually thought she was dead because there was no movement,” he said. “But when I called her name, she picked her head up.”

Hopkins’ home was uninhabitable, but he returned to the area daily to search for Cheyenne, his sixth shepherd and a littermate of Tessa, Marco and Quana.

Then he ran into a high school classmate who recognized Cheyenne’s description. The dog had been rescued by people who spotted her swimming toward their boat. She had been with her rescuers, dry and well fed, for 10 days.

Hopkins says he learned from Hurricane Floyd not to delay evacuation if there’s any hint of danger. “If we get the word that there’s going to be threatening weather, I’ve got places where I can take myself and my dogs and go,” he said.

Crisp echoes the lesson:

“We always say to people, if you’ve got animals, and the more you have and the larger they are, if there’s the most remote possibility you may have to evacuate in the next day or two, do it now. If it’s a false alarm, at least you’ve practiced.”