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"....Rosemary Pierre and her son, Jesse Pierre, who is blind, found themselves stranded when the tidal surge swept in fast-rising water.
Within about 20 minutes the two found themselves in chest-deep water in their Lacombe apartment on Lake Road.
"I told my son to go on without me," Rosemary Pierre said. "I would just go and join the Lord."
But firefighters plucked the two out of their home and brought them to the Lacombe Fire Department where they huddled in blankets.
"I don't know where we're going to go or what we're going to do," Rosemary Pierre said. "We've lost everything.
The surge started just as the skies seemed to be clearing from Katrina.
"I was standing in my house making a sandwich when water started rushing through my door," said Troy Batiste, a Lacombe resident.
"The water just came so fast," Batiste said. "There was no time to do anything but get out. By the time we were on the road, the water was over our heads."
Impastato and Mark Frosch, a firefighter with St. Tammany Fire District No. 3, joined others searching the area in flat boats looking for stranded residents.
Efrain Irias thought he had his hands full when Katrina knocked a tree onto his roof.
"We heard this crack and a tree fell on our house," he said. "Rain started pouring through the ceiling. And my biggest concern at that moment was finding buckets to catch it in."
But what Irias didn't notice was the other water -- water from Lake Ponchartrain rushing through his front door.
"I looked up from the kitchen floor where I was working and our couch floated by," Irias said. "Water was pouring through the door like someone opened a floodgate."
Irias and his wife, Gloria, began gathering some of their possessions: a television, DVD player, CD player and family photographs. They ran into a back bedroom with their family treasures and threw them on a bed they recently purchased.
"Then I noticed the bed started floating off of the frame," Irias said. "I told my wife, 'We need to go. Grab what you need.' "
But by now, they couple was standing in chest-deep water.
"I braced both feet against the wall and pulled as hard as I could but the door wouldn't open," Efrain Irias said. "I couldn't believe the water rose that fast. It seemed like there was a thousand pound weight on the other side."
Visiting the couple was their daughter, Trineice Johnson, 25, of Garland, Texas, and Efrain Irias' mother, Reina Irias-Duron, 77, who was also visiting for the weekend from Florida.
Efrain Irias said there was only one escape route left and told his family to go to the attic.
For the next hour, they stayed on wooden planks with pink insulation stuffed between them.
"I tried not to think about what was happening," Johnson said.
In a short time, Johnson thought she heard someone.
She climbed out through a window her father had broken onto the roof and saw a boat approaching the house.
"I got a flashlight and started blinking it on and off," she said.
But there were so many trees on the roof. The boat didn't see them at first.
Frosch and Impastato heard the family's cries.
The two pulled the boat up to the roof and Frosch climbed up and helped them into the boat.
"We've lost everything,' Efrain Irias said. "But I don't care. I mean, I really didn't think there was any way we were going to survive that ... but we did."
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