We apologize for the tardiness of this post—things have been really busy and this is the first chance we have had to update the website. Here is an overview of what happened yesterday.

Yesterday Cynthia was in New Orleans with teams from CODE 3 and the Humane Society of St. Louis. She describes the city as very hot and very smelly. The homes are filled with a toxic sludge that includes oil from a refinery that spilled. Many of the animals they found were covered in this substance.

The teams were in a section of the city that had been underwater for many days. Now the waters have receded, but the houses are in terrible condition, filled with the aforementioned sludge. Their mission was to go into these homes to try and rescue the animals left behind. Two of the successful rescues are chronicled in our slide show.

The first rescue that Cynthia described took place in a house that had been flooded for quite some time. In this house were two small and terrified dogs. They were filthy and huddled on an upturned mattress. Eventually Tim Rickey and Brett Huff of HSMO were able to get the dogs to safety. They are now at Lamar-Dixon.

The second rescue chronicled in our slide show shows a brown dog that was a day or two away from death. You can see how thin and exhausted she looks, but after she received an IV she was much better (that is her with the soldier on this page).

Today the crew went out on boats, Cynthia stayed back at the staging area in New Orleans (we talked about this staging area in an update a couple of days ago) where she helped decontaminate animals. More on this later.