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To the Rescue
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SIGN OF THE TIMES
A s family members from New Orleans settled safely into his Houston home, CPA Richard Forrest was approached by a friend who wasn’t so lucky; he had lost touch with his 80-year-old parents as Hurricane Katrina battered the city. So like any good neighbor, Forrest fueled up his Robinson R-44 helicopter and set off to find them.
“The place was a ghost town,” Forrest told the JofA , “but we found the street, loaded them up, left several cases of water in a nearby playground for other survivors and flew out.”
Back home, though, Forrest just didn’t feel right sitting around and letting the R-44 go to waste. So he climbed back into the helicopter and took off for the floodplains again.
“I can’t really say how many trips I made over the next few days,” Forrest said. “My last day I was there with the New Mexico National Guard and officers and SWAT teams from all over the country. I went with EquaSearch—the group that looked for the Holloway girl in Aruba—to do house-to-house searches.”
His last night in New Orleans, Forrest was chatting on an Internet blog site with some locals who had declined to evacuate and now found themselves with no potable water. He told them about the cases he had left nearby, and they hurried to retrieve them—one last little miracle before he flew home to his day job at Gainer, Donnelly & Desroches LLP.
—Cheryl Rosen
