Forget what you’ve seen on television.

The devastation from Hurricane Katrina is much worse and more complicated than you can imagine, and if you want to go volunteer in a disaster area, be prepared for total mental and physical exhaustion.

That’s the message from a trio of Haywood County volunteers recently returned from working a week at a make-shift animal rescue station in New Orleans earlier this month after the Category Four hurricane demolished buildings, flooded huge portions of the city and left the Gulf Coast region in a state of chaos. In addition to the loss of life, hundreds of thousands of animals were left stranded in homes and wandering streets after their owners died or abandoned them to seek safety from flooding and storm damage.

Sgt. Brian Beck of the Waynesville Police Department, his wife Lori, who works at Canton Animal Hospital, and Annette Corey, an accountant from Waynesville, worked together at an animal rescue station that managed to save hundreds of animals each day while enduring grueling shifts, steamy weather and toxic floodwaters.

When the Becks left to return home to Haywood County last week, there were still an estimated 700,000 animals in need of rescue in just one of New Orleans’ major parishes, according to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Louisiana.

However, thanks to increased coordination between law enforcement, military and local residents, as well as an animal rescue Web site, conditions are improving in the Big Easy, Brian Beck said.

Still, even after spending a good amount of their own money and volunteering long hours in New Orleans, Corey and the Becks are eager to return to save more animals.

Seeing the devastation night after night on the news and learning about helpless animals in need of rescue, Lori Beck was determined to help.

“This is one thing I was going to do,” Beck said. “I was going by myself; I didn’t care.”

Lori and her husband, who both have experience in animal control, decided to use up their own vacation time, packed up supplies, gathered donations and pet food to take down to New Orleans, and left on Sept. 14 not knowing what to expect when they got to the Louisiana State University campus, where a huge animal shelter had been set up for rescued animals.

Once they got there, they went to work medicating some of the larger dogs but were soon told to clear out of the arena to give the dogs rest time. With all the trauma, the animals needed to get back on a regular feeding and sleeping routine if they were going to survive.

The Becks were restless; they wanted to do more. When they heard about a make-shift animal shelter set up nearby, they drove to the Gentilly district between Lake Pontchartrain and Interstate 10 where other volunteers from different states — people just like themselves — had had enough of the red tape from federal agencies and set up their own station in a Winn Dixie parking lot.

Immediately, the Becks went to work handing out food to rescue workers and unloading pet food for the animals. From there, they began going out on rescue missions, door to door, street to street, in neighborhoods along Highway 90. They covered an estimated 30 square miles over the next week.

Meanwhile, Annette Corey of Waynesville, got word that her younger sister, Jessica, a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department, was going to New Orleans after hearing stories and seeing video about dogs being shot because the animal control problem was so enormous.

“The NYPD did not send her,” Corey added. “She was on her own time.”

Just as the Becks had done, Annette Corey went out and bought supplies and gear (food, water, face masks, bungee cords, rope, first aid kits, etc.) and drove down to New Orleans after work, leaving town at 3 a.m. on Sept. 15, picking up her sister in Gulfport, Miss., and driving on to New Orleans.

Having lived and traveled all over the world as a hospitality accountant, Corey had seen plenty of cities, but she was in no way prepared for the stench, heat and buildings reduced to rubble when they arrived at the Winn Dixie parking lot rescue station in New Orleans.

Dogs were on the side of the road shriveled and belly up resembling pieces of driftwood or debris. There were stories of 50 dead pigeons in a house, dead bodies floating in homes with emaciated dogs roaming porches. All kinds of animals were being rescued — a boa constrictor, a rooster, an osprey, cats, pigs, horses. There was no running water, no electricity, no bathrooms, no phone system. Stop signs and traffic lights had been blown away, so people drove on whatever side of the road they could.

“I was at the point of New Orleans that had nothing,” Corey said.

Dead bodies, rotten food, chemicals, feces and trash mixed in the muddy floodwater to create a toxic stew that was hazardous to touch and painful to breath.

“The stench was incomprehensible,” she said.

While Jessica Corey went out on animal rescue missions — sometimes rescuing people in the process — Annette maintained a bulletin board listing when and where the different two-person teams were going and what they found. The parking lot filled up with tarp-covered tents housing dozens of kennels.

“It was constant, constant work,” she said.

The first day, she was so dehydrated that she passed out and had to be taken to the U.S.S. Iwa Jima where she received potassium pills and intravenous fluids before returning back to work.

People don’t realize what kind of place they might be heading into when they decide to volunteer in a disaster region like New Orleans, Corey explained. Supplies like bars of soap were no use without running water. There was a short supply of important rescue equipment like bolt cutters, sledge hammers, and long, curved dog poles. Other supplies like disinfectant spray, hand sanitizer cloths, non-perishable foods and even port-a-potties were extremely important and in short supply, Corey added.

In addition to being unprepared for some of the situations — for example, not having enough sun screen or potassium pills — some came to the sight as volunteers wanting to do one job when another needed doing, Corey explained. While some may have wanted to go out on adventurous rescue missions, breaking down doors and finding animals, others were needed to do less glamorous work like cleaning out dog kennels, unloading supplies or walking animals who needed to stretch after being cooped up in a cage.

There were also misunderstandings about what needed to be done when volunteer citizens from different parts of the country mixed with professionally trained law enforcement, fire and rescue workers who work in a hierarchy where decisions are made by commanding leaders. In some cases, the non-professional volunteer rescue workers just wanted to go off on their own and disregard instructions from the rescue station leaders.

“If you have an ego, you don’t go into a place like this,” Corey said.

What she found especially horrifying was that people had been told they couldn’t take animals within them on evacuation buses, so some stayed behind with their pets and died after the hurricane struck. This left a situation where animals could die, spread disease, and put even more humans at risk.

Corey recalls one woman, dazed and in tears, who came by the rescue station looking for her lost cat. Her whole family had died and all she wanted was her cat. Corey told her that if the cat had been found, it was in good hands. Many of the animals were taken to Houston and nearby cities. There was some confusion among rescue workers over how to use resources — was it better to return rescued pets to owners or send them on to safe shelters?

Complicating matters even worse in the early days after the flooding, law enforcement and military argued over who had jurisdiction in the city. When the Becks went out on a rescue mission, they were told by a soldier that they would be arrested for breaking and entering if they tried to break into a house to rescue pets — never mind that these houses had been utterly destroyed and the owners were nowhere in sight.

“I would gladly have spent time in jail to save the animals,” Lori Beck said.

Ambulances would drive up and nurses would stop rescue volunteers to administer hepatitis or tetanus shots before they ventured into a dangerous part of the city. About 90 percent of the rescue workers had no showers, no baths, and very little sanitation available, Brian Beck said. While Corey and her sister slept in her car in the Winn Dixie parking lot, the Becks would drive four hours to a hotel in Jackson, Miss., and drive back the next day to start work all over again. The work began at dawn and ended around midnight.

Leaving the camp and passing through a military checkpoint, the Becks turned down America Street and found a man on his front porch who had survived the hurricane with his dog. Further down the street, they came to a house with a chain link fence that had been crushed. Out of the caked mud emerged a very thin German shepherd. The Becks managed to put a leash on it, feed it, clean it up and take it back to the shelter. Other dogs and animals weren’t so friendly. Some attacked and bit rescuers. Sometimes the rescuers were run off by residents with guns or shot at by snipers. Add to that the extreme heat and long hours.

“It had to be 115, 120 degrees in those houses,” Lori Beck said. “The animals were so happy to get some fresh air.”

Showing her confidence and experience in animal control, Lori often found herself being treated like one of the guys, working with total strangers that learned to trust each other and work as a team.

“Everybody down there worked together amazingly,” she said.

Eventually the situation improved, waters receded, coordinators developed a more organized system of search and rescue, and New Orleans residents began calling in to tell rescuers where to go for animals who needed to be rescued.

Strangers before their volunteer experience, the Becks and Annette Corey formed a close friendship during their time in New Orleans. Since returning home last week, they continue to keep in touch with each other and monitor the situation in New Orleans with phone calls and emails.