It Had Come Down to Survival. When Surrounded by Savagery You Are Savage. We Stole to Live...

Summary

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WHEN HURRICANE Katrina struck, it tore down more than just buildings. Clinging to each other in a disintegrating hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Teresa Cherrie and John Drysdale listened to civilisation being swept away. Within days, they would be looting to survive, an unremarkable Renfrewshire couple stealing food and hiding from predators willing to kill for water.

"I thought: 'What have I come to? I'm a thief!'" says Teresa from Renfrew. "However, surrounded by savagery you become a savage. Mercifully, the brakes were on. While others were stealing Gucci, I was taking tinned ravioli and sharing it. But we would be confronted by others, predators ruling the streets with guns, who would have killed us, but for the intervention of a friend and his three guard dogs."

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Extract

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It Had Come Down to Survival. When Surrounded by Savagery You Are Savage. We Stole to Live...

Teresa and John, exhausted and tearful, arrived home yesterday, among the Scots who survived the devastation of New Orleans. Another was Dawn Plunkett, a care worker from Edinburgh, who took refuge on a car-park roof near her holiday hotel and survived for three days on pizza and chocolate cake.

Plunkett, 21, spent the summer working in New York state and only found out about the...

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