The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 10

The Philadelphia Inquirer Hurricane Aftermath Thursday, August 27, 1992 -JA1Q Some had to flee the very shelter they had sought Just after daybreak the sheriff made his way to the Holiday Inn. "We have a terrible situation," he said. "The Best Western is falling apart. 1 tjjj; T' I Th Philadelphia Inqurar MICHAEL S. WIRTZ Roy Aubert packs up what he can find.

When the tornado hit, he, his wife and two sons were huddled in a corner, facing the wind. By John Woestendiek INQUIRER STAFF WRITER NEW IBERIA, La. The rainbow arching through the eastern sky. at dusk told a blatant lie. Rainbows have their place In the tranquillity of a storm's aftermath, but the one that shimmered in the last rays of sunlight here Tuesday night fooled no one.

The streets were deserted homes and shops locked and abandoned by thousands who had fled north leaving this city to police cars on patrol and the few hundred cloistered in the three local motels. Most of the people who awaited Hurricane Andrew in the Holiday Inn, the Best Western Motel and the Louisiana neighborhood, in one to sudden terror relief gave way falling apart, and we need some place to put people." The second-floor roof had been peeling off of the Best Western, just across Highway 14 from the Holiday Inn, like the lid on a sardine can for about an hour. "We were hearing bricks and wood flying everywhere and then we heard people hollering for help," said Daniel Breaux, 38, whose room at the Best Western was six doors away from where the roof first tore away. He rushed out and assisted the five or six people from the room down to his own, which already contained 17 friends and family members. Then he heard more of the root peel off, and soon he was helping a woman with a baby and a little boy into his room.

A short while later they all were escorted down to the lobby and the sheriff made arrangements to take them across the street to the Holiday Inn. But the wind was too fierce to risk the crossing. "We're withstanding it pretty well," said Zandi, the Holiday Inn manager. Thirty minutes later, the wind picked up even more. Huge chunks of sheet metal stripped from a gas station across the highway began bouncing down the road like tumbleweeds.

The roof of the Holiday Inn started coming off. And then an overhead gas line collapsed and fell into the swimming pool. Zandi stepped outside and began shouting, "Get out of the building! get out of the building. The gas line is down. Get out of the building." Scores of people ran from their rooms, some screaming, some crying, carrying flashlights, dogs, babies and small children.

Mary and Douglas Patterson said they could smell gas as they ran from their room. "I wasn't scared, until the root started coming off and the wire felf into the pool and all the water started boiling," Mary Patterson said." A piece from the roof crashed inW: the car that Chantale Allen, her husband and three children had parked' outside. Her husband, a rushed to turn off the leaking gas. Those flushed from their rooms: gathered in the lobby and banquej' room. Down the road at the Scottish; Inn, guests had been huddled in similar room under the light of single gas lamp.

The roof had blown off there before dawn. At the Holiday Inn, Allen vowed that this was her last hurricane. "I will never go through another hurricane again," she said. "If I see one is heading for Florida, I'm leaving. I'm just leaving.

Maybe I'll go to Arkansas." pretty good. Then the unexpected happened. Scottish Inn remained because all the rooms farther north had been spoken for. They rested fitfully as the winds rose and the rain stiffened from a drizzle to a downpour. About 3 a.m.

the hurricane arrived in earnest, knocking out power within 30 minutes and roaring for the next five hours. As the winds howled outside a steady 140 m.p.h. with gusts higher people huddled on the floor of the Holiday Inn banquet room revived a metaphor that has become a fixture in the lexicon of natural disasters. They said it sounded like a freight train. And it did.

"I thought it would be safer here than home," said Annie Gardner of New Iberia, sitting on the floor with two granddaughters, 5 and 2. "I've been through quite a few hurri canes, but this was the worst." There was Yvonne Marsh, who fled north from Morgan City with her 5- month-old son, Devon, and 16 other members of her family, crowding into three rooms at the Holiday Inn. There was George Stevens, a 39- year-old school bus driver for Iberia Parish Schools, who brought his wife and two daughters, 11 other family members, two dogs and a canary up from their home in Jeanerette. There was Richard Dupre and his wife, Clare, who sat wondering whether their home 10 miles to the south in Lydia was still standing. It had been built of wood salvaged from the destruction after Hurricane Audrey in 1957.

Those who stayed in their rooms put mattresses against the doors, hid in the bathrooms or crawled under the beds. Just when you think it's bad, it gets worse, one said. Just after daybreak the sheriff made his way into the Holiday Inn lobby. We have a terrible situation, he told Holiday Inn general manager Massoud Zandi. "The Best Western is 'We were feeling By Andrew Maykuth INQUIRER STAFF WRITER LaPLACE, La.

Roy Aubert had a growing sense of security Tuesday night despite the rain pelting the windows of his three-bedroom house -20 miles west of New Orleans. The weather report indicated that Hurricane Andrew was bypassing La-Place by a wide margin to the south- 'west. The winds outside Aubert's house on Cedar Drive were gusting only 60 miles an hour, "but that's something we're kind of accustomed to here in south Louisiana," he said. Heck, the electricity was still on. The cable television was working.

"We were feeling pretty good," said Aubert, 51. Then the tornado hit. In about 15 thunderous seconds, Aubert's house was destroyed the roof was sucked off the walls as Au "I don't know if it was my refriger ator or someone else s. Cedar Drive, a dead-end street of modest homes built on concrete slabs, was the fourth stop on the tornados tear through the parish, which is bordered by the Mississippi River and lined by sprawling petrochemical refineries and a few ante bellum plantation houses. Aubert said the tornado came from the east, thundering in an angry baritone right past the Texaco serv ice station.

We heard it coming, and we knew what it was," he said. He, his wife and two sons huddled in the corner, facing the wind. Hours later, plying through the wreckage of the house in the rain, Aubert said he could not distinguish the succession of events that de stroyed his house if the roof went first, or when the Mercury out front went into the wall, or when the house across the street swept by, taking his garage with it. "It's like a massive explosion," said Aubert, who wore a torn yellow vinyl slicker as the rain streamed down his face. "The pressure's so great inside that funnel, it just sucks everything up." It was a strange scene when Aubert pulled himself from the rubble, groping for flashlights.

He heard neigh bors screaming, the ram pounding. The burglar alarm on his house was blaring its warning that there had been an intruder. "Yeah, it still worked," he said sardonically. "That was a massive entry." The tornado did not steal everything. It left the trophies on the wall of the den, along with ceramic collectible bottles of Wild Turkey bourbon, the seals unbroken.

A stack of Longevity magazines remained where Aubert had left it. But the kitchen was a mess a muddy soup of crumbled walls, snaking wires, plastic flowers and Cajun cookbooks. "The house is just totally gone," said Aubert, as some neighbors from up the street their houses were untouched helped collect the things that could be saved. "I'm just trying to get out those things that you accumulate in 28 years of Relief groups seek donations to aid victims of hurricane bert's family huddled on the floor below. Five other homes surrounding the Aubert residence were wrecked.

The one across the street was hurled like balsa wood past Aubert's house into a soybean field. Nobody on Cedar Drive was injured. Not everyone in St. John the Baptist Parish was so lucky. A 63-year-old man was killed and 33 people were injured when a powerful tornado hopscotched on a seven-mile course through LaPlace and the neighboring town of Reserve, damaging houses, hospitals and businesses wherever it touched down.

A woman in LaPlace died of a heart attack in a shelter overnight. The tornado's path was "kind of narrow, but very destructive," said Delton J. Arceneaux, the LaPlace disaster assessment officer. It destroyed 48 houses and 12 mobile homes and A high school serving as a shelter was heavily damaged, authorities said. In Morgan City, 1,200 residents fled to the Municipal Auditorium, which became kind of a miserable convocation of hungry, wailing children.

"We have no cots, no food, but we have plenty of leaks in the roof," said Anthony Go-vernale, the manager of the auditorium. Not everyone felt the need to go to a shelter. Morgan City resident Johnny LaJaunie, 68, a retired welder with a toothless grin and a cots, no said a manager, we have of leaks the roof." in-kind donations and volunteer assistance. That number is 1-800-253-3000. To donate to Catholic Charities USA, send checks to Disaster Response, Catholic Charities USA, 1731 King Suite 200, Alexandria, Va.

22314. To give to Church World Service, send checks to Church World Service, P.O. Box 968, Elkhart, Ind. 46515. Donations to the Episcopal Church Center can be sent to the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief, the Episcopal Church Center, 815 Second New York, N.Y.

10017. ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK Here are some relief agencies seeking donations to help victims of Hurricane Andrew. Cash contributions are being accepted by the American Red Cross, Disaster Relief Fund, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013.

For credit-card donations, telephone 1-800-842-2200. The Spanish-language number is 1-800-257-7575. The Adventist Community Services, a voluntary disaster-response agency based at Andrews University in Berrian Springs, is operating a hotline for damaged 45 other dwellings. This was one of dozens of tornadoes spun off by Hurricane Andrew as it cut into Louisiana late Tuesday and early yesterday. It was the slashing tornado in La-Place, not the blunt force of the heralded hurricane, that created the only death and many of the storm-related injuries in Louisiana.

"You prepare for a hurricane," said Margaret Webb, 39, who picked through the rubble of her parents' house. "But I don't think you ever prepare for something like this." Amid the debris, she found her wedding dress. The tornado popped houses like balloons, scattering possessions into a communal hodgepodge. One resident, Lucille Perrilloux, said her husband was injured when he was struck by a flying refrigerator. think," he said.

The winds cut 12 barges loose from their moorings at an Exxon Refinery in Baton Rouge on the Mississippi. They were recovered. The National Weather Service downgraded Andrew to a tropical storm early in the afternoon after its winds dropped be low the hurricane threshold of 74 m.p.h. It continued to soak the area with heavy rain. State officials said that 350,000 people were without electrical power and that restoring service could take days or weeks in some areas.

Along the few highways that venture through the coastal area, mobile homes lay collapsed or saturated in small lakes. Cattle lay in drenched fields while ominous, smoky clouds billowed overhead in fast motion. Many of the canals that crisscross southern Louisiana, often at elevations above the surrounding houses, were brimming their banks and officials warned of flash floods. Margaret Webb searches the rubble of her parents' house. "You prepare for a hurricane," she said.

"But i don't think you ever prepare for something like this." She found her wedding dress amid the debris. Andrew loses its strength after pounding into Louisiana food," shelter "but plenty in HURRICANE from A 1 ries because most of the population mindful and fearful of the damage Andrew had caused in Florida had fled to higher ground under a mandatory evacuation order. was not as bad as it could have been," said a weary Jimmy Fields, Morgan City's assistant police chief. it was still bad. lysine little of its intensity, the storm ran over Morgan City, a waterfront town as tough as the massive offshore oil platforms that are built here before they are towed out to sea.

Few buildings in Morgan City escaped the storm's power. Andrew Shattered windows, knocked down power lines, snapped mighty oaks and tossed roofs down the block like Frisbees. The streets were barely passable from the debris. The Blowout Lounge, one of three rough bars on Railroad Street, took a big hit when parts of the brick facade toppled, showering the bar with brick and glass yet leaving most of the liquor bottles intact. The storm seemed to seek out people who had tried to flee its wrath.

In New Iberia, the roofs of two hotels crammed with evacuees blew away. President Bush, making his second stop in areas that Andrew visited first, arrived in Lafayette yesterday afternoon and inspected some of the damage. Bush, who had gone to Florida on Monday and pledged federal aid, promised additional help for Louisiana. In Iberia Parish, one of the places the President saw, officials advised residents to remain in shelters yesterday, although many wanted to leave to check their homes, said Hay-ward Bomin, a parish emergency volunteer worker. Indeed, later in the day, as the rain eased, the refugees began venturing back to their homes, swapping tales of survival and comparing losses.

New Orleans slowly throbbed back to life. At noon, the mayor, Sidney Barthelemy, said the worst was over and tens of thousands of residents returned. The city actually suffered a reverse afternoon rush hour as those who had jammed the highways Tuesday, fleeing north to higher ground, returned to see what damage the storm had done, take down the boards that covered windows, sweep up the debris and get back to their lives. LOUISIANA 4 Shreveport 'V Alexandria Baton New IberiaVi New Orleans XMorgant.ty Intracoastal The Philadelphia Inquirer ROGER HASLER beach-ball belly, stood on his porch through the entire storm like a captain at the helm of his wind-lashed ship. "I just wanted to see what it felt like," said LaJaunie, whose porch was surrounded by heaps of wires, downed pecan limbs and metal roofing sheets that sliced like razor blades in the wind.

"You see those limbs falling down, breaking like match sticks, and it makes you.