Former Orioles pitcher Ben McDonald was a couple of days late getting to town for his fill-in assignment on the team's radio network, but he had a pretty good excuse.
He lives in Denham Springs, La., and if you've been watching the terrible scenes of flooding in the Baton Rouge area — and you know anything about Big Ben — you know he was too busy taking part in the massive rescue effort.
"My community of Denham Springs where I was born and raised and live is just 10 miles east of Baton Rouge," McDonald said. "It's basically a suburb of Baton Rouge, but it was ground zero for all the flooding. The Amite River, which runs through my community, is the one that flooded everybody."
"It's one of those things that you've got to go see it to believe it. You'd have to have been there to believe it. The water's all gone now, so folks are returning to their houses, assessing the damage, pulling things out that need to be pulled and just starting to rebuild their lives. It's just a heartbreaking, terrible situation is the best way I can describe it."
But before the water receded, McDonald and a friend spent most of last weekend in a Gator-Tail boat, going house to house to rescue stranded residents alongside an unofficial armada of pleasure and fishing boats that is getting credit for multiplying the effectiveness of the professional first responders. They called it the "Cajun Navy."
"There were a lot of people who stayed [in their homes] thinking, 'It's not going to get this bad,' and you turn around and it's a foot deep in your house or two feet in your house and you've got nowhere to go if you don't have a boat," McDonald said. "So, we were putting animals, dogs, people into the boat and running them up to high ground and then coming back into going through subdivisions just getting people. But there were a lot of people doing that.
"The rescue people were there. The professionals were there with helicopters getting people off their roofs. We did the same thing in boats, getting people out of second-story windows because the water got so high."
Like any such natural disaster that has caused so much damage and tragic loss of life, the challenges facing the residents throughout the flood-damaged region are only just beginning.
"It's a national disaster. … It really is," McDonald said. "So many people didn't have flood insurance because they were told they didn't need flood insurance because they were above the old flood stage of 41 1/2 on that river. Well it got to 46.2 where it crested this time, so you can imagine how many of the homes in our community have water in them. It's that bad."
McDonald said the estimates on how many homes were damaged in the flood zone are as high as 95 percent. So far, 13 people have been confirmed dead.
"It's heartbreaking, but the good thing, so many positive things happened. What they call the 'Cajun Navy' and the 'Cajun Army,' which is basically all the Cajun people down there and folks who had boats, went around and rescued people and got people to high ground," McDonald said. "There were folks who were housing people in their homes and I was putting people in my gym. And we just did what we could to help people out like anybody would have done in that situation. That was a positive situation. To me, our country and our community was built on the people just like me and you who help each other out.
"People built this country and people have been helping each other out for hundreds of years. That's just what happened down there. I'm not saying the government didn't help, because the rescue did come and they did what they could do. But if it wasn't for blue-collar folks there in South Louisiana doing what they did with their own boats and going to get people any way they could, it would have been a lot more disastrous than even what you saw."
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