Quarreling through Katrina: A saga of survival

Hurricane coming? ‘Have a drink!’
"I could not have been more excited and was determined to whip this motley crew into a seasoned hurricane survival team,” Sonny recounts on his "Hurricane Man" Web site. He was sure that the others did not see him in the same light. “... I have no doubt they thought ... there was an empty bed in the VA lock-down psych ward.”

MSNBC.com was unable to reach the four men and women in the party crowd — they’ve dispersed since the storm — but the other survivors say their party continued late into the night. The revelers broke into a neighboring seafood restaurant when they ran out of their own alcohol.

Their plan had been to retreat to a friend's house when the storm got closer, but police threatened to arrest anyone on the streets.

“They were stringing me along … letting me come and entertain them with my hurricane stories and what we were going to do — and like ‘hey, have a drink!’" Sonny recalls. "… And when it finally came crunch time, they couldn’t go. … So at midnight, zero hour on the twenty-ninth, they were mine.”

Michael and Carol Cupp kept their distance from the drinkers and everyone else. They remained in their tiny room with their chihuahua, cockapoo and a chow named Bubba. They listened to Sonny when he came by, through a closed door.

“I’m getting a bit annoyed by these people because they wouldn’t invite me in and I’m trying to save their lives,” says Sonny. “I’ve got woods between me and the storm and while I’m talking to them, I’m being pelted with all this debris and some of it could kill me.

“So one time they cracked open the door and I just pushed my way on in. … Oh, the dogs had a fit!”

And so it went until dawn.

Deluge at dawn
“Everyone had the sense of relief that when the sun came up that you know — it was over, you’d made it through the night,” says Colleen, even though the wind was still blowing.

It was only then that Katrina brought the deluge. As Sonny remembers it:

“It was Robert who brought it to my attention that the parking lot across the street was filling up with water. It had become a lake, the cars were floating. Their lights were on. Then we notice that there’s a river flowing down Highway 90. It looked like the Colorado River.”

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Colleen describes it this way: “I walked out to the street to see if I could see anything. And that’s when the wave (came). ... It looked like somebody ought to be surfing on it. It had a white cap. … I would have expected a parade of pink elephants before I would have expected this huge wave coming down Highway 90.”

Within minutes, the water was lapping at their ankles and rising fast.

There was sudden sobriety, and even a certain solidarity now.

And, as Sonny notes with no small amount of pride: "Suddenly they didn't think I was so crazy."

The Cupps had to be retrieved or risk drowning in their room, but it was too dangerous to enter the outside door, on the windward side. Robert or Sonny, depending on whom you ask, broke down a connecting door to the adjacent room to create an exit.

All 11 people and six dogs raced to an abandoned house behind the motel. But at the point when the group came together, their memories of what happened diverge.

Abandoning ‘the Alamo’
According to Sonny, a retreat to "The Alamo," as he dubbed the raised, open structure used to store extra furniture, was his Plan B.

“The idea was that because it’s higher up off the ground, we could go inside there and make a little fort and just ride out the storm,” he says.

He remembers ordering everyone to leave when the water in the Alamo was knee-deep, in case it collapsed.

John Brecher / MSNBC.com Carol and Michael Cupp at their trailer in Bay St. Louis nearly a year after the storm. The couple was living with their three dogs at the Texan Motel when Katrina hit.

But his fellow survivors remember he tried persuading them to climb into the rafters, which they refused to do. No one remembers this more vividly than Carol Cupp, a diabetic who struggles to get around due to her bad back and knees, and weight.

“Whose idea was it to get up in the rafters? The guy with one arm,” recalls Carol Cupp.

Michael Cupp, Robert and Colleen all say they fought the idea.

Who will float, who will swim?
With the water now about 4 feet deep and rising, the bickering band finally agreed to leave the house. They had Sonny’s inflatables, and Robert spotted a leaky skiff behind the motel.

Still, there was a shortage of flotation.

Sonny figured the dogs and non-swimmers, including Michael Cupp and two motel workers among the party crowd, could go in the skiff, and Colleen and her two kids could use his two-person kayak. He and Robert, at least, would be in the water, guiding the boats.

The only way to transport Carol Cupp, as Sonny saw it and others came to agree, was in the one-person kayak. The skiff had only a few inches freeboard with all the others in it, and he believed she would sink it.

In a moment that astonished everyone, Sonny ordered Carol Cupp to get in the inflatable boat, and she did.

“He told me to lay down in that (boat) and I’m like 'No, I ain’t gonna do it. I’m claustrophobic,'" recalls Carol Cupp. “They talked me into it ... (and) when they shoved the boat, I went right out the door.”

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