Tina McCovin decides to stay in New Orleans to look after her feisty 87-year-old grandmother who is in a wheelchair after having one leg amputated from diabetes complications. As the city floods, Tina manages to get through to her mother by telephone on Monday morning. Her mother says that the water is rising fast ... and then her phone cuts out. Tina tells her grandmother that they both need to get upstairs. Tina's grandmother won't budge, even when a wave bursts into her ground-floor apartment. Tina picks her up, kicking and screaming and carries her upstairs to safety through the rising water.

Tina, who is legally blind and wears very thick glasses to make out shapes and figures, makes a sign using a sheet and parcel tape to try and attract helicopters: "HELP! ELDERLY WOMAN IN WHEELCHAIR." They stay trapped for two days, while rescue helicopters buzz over the city. They are rescued by boat and taken first to the interstate and then, by truck, to the unmanned and unsupplied Convention Center. Tina calls her sister, Roxie, in New York and discovers that her parents are safe and also at the Convention Center. She meets up with her parents in an emotional reunion and again calls her sister in New York City. Roxie and her brother, Rendell, perform a rescue mission by driving a secondhand SUV — with the good fortune of still having its state police sticker on the windshield — into New Orleans, where they rescue their family.

Since the Hurricane: After spending two months with her parents, Tina has been living in Baton Rouge. She works as a supervisor at a nursery school. At some point, she may be moving back to New Orleans and to the school where she used to teach. Since working in Baton Rouge, she has already helped save the life of a little girl after she suffered a stroke. Tina has two sons in their 20s, Jonathan and Kenny.