© Davd Goddard
Unexpectedly heavy rains caused massive flooding in New Orleans Saturday, August 5, 2017
Janine Hayes was working her shift at the Port of Call restaurant on Esplanade Avenue, at the edge of the French Quarter, when the deluge started Saturday afternoon.
She and her co-workers noticed the water was pooling faster than it does in a typical summer storm. Alarmed, they started keeping a closer watch. And during one of these periodic checks, a co-worker saw something worrisome - some kind of black apparatus in the water.
A closer look revealed the unidentified item was a wheelchair. In it was a paralyzed man, struggling to keep his head above water.
"It was crazy," Hayes said, adding that several waiters and others ran outside immediately to help.
"It took all their strength to get that man's face out of the water and lift the whole apparatus up and get him up on the dry sidewalk," she added. "And he was crying."
Hayes' story was one of many harrowing tales to emerge from Saturday's flooding, a freak event that meteorologists and city officials said
dropped between 1 and 10 inches of rainfall over a few hours in the New Orleans metro area.
Comment: More on the flooding: Heavy rainfall causes severe flooding in much of New Orleans; 5 inches of rain in 3 hours