Lisa Ladner and her family huddled earlier this week in a Mississippi Ramada Inn watching cows float down Interstate 10 while parts of the hotel's roof caved and water churned by Hurricane Katrina poured in from overhead light fixtures.

Today Ladner, her three children and a nephew are safe at her parents' home in 'Aiea. Mostly, they are thankful to have escaped. Her sons and nephew are taking the changes pretty well: talking about starting fresh in Hawai'i. Sometimes, her daughter, 15-year-old Brittney, cries.

"On and off," Ladner said. "It's like a roller coaster."

Ladner and her children know others have it worse. They saw the destruction as they fled — broken stilts marking the spots where houses once stood. They've heard from Ladner's husband and brothers who remained behind, bringing supplies to stranded neighbors and collecting bodies in the family's pontoon boat.

But the knowledge that nothing will ever be the same is sometimes difficult to bear.

"We lived in Diamondhead, Mississippi," Ladner said, "and we no longer have a house and we no longer have a neighborhood or schools or grocery stores. Our entire way of life is gone."

The Ladners are among many with ties to Hawai'i whose lives have been affected, or even devastated, by Katrina.

Some are unsure whether homes they fled still stand. Others are waiting to hear how relatives in the storm's path fared.

Ladner said she, her husband, Morgan, her children and her two brothers and their families took shelter in the Ramada Inn as the storm approached. The hotel was on higher ground, and farther from Bay St. Louis and the churning Gulf waters than their homes.

Morgan, an American Airlines pilot, had been out of town but rented a car and joined his family just before Katrina struck.

The water rose remarkably quickly.

"We could see the interstate," she said. "There were dogs and cows floating across it."

'JUST THE STILTS'

Part of the roof of the hotel caved in and the brothers' families, who had rooms on an upper floor, were forced to move in with the Ladners. Even on the first floor, water leaked in through the electrical wiring.

Then the storm passed, and the water receded from the interstate. The Ladner family walked across to see what was left of their neighborhood: a place where middle-class houses once stood on stilts.

"Nothing," Ladner said. "Just the stilts. Clothes hanging from trees."

Their own house had a set of stairs that led to the first floor, but the floor itself — along with the rest of the house — was gone.

All that remained, tied where it had been left, incongruously unharmed, was the family's pontoon boat.

Morgan Ladner packed his wife and children into the rental car and drove them through a labyrinth of debris to Baton Rouge, La., where they eventually were able to catch a flight out.

Then he filled the car with gas, supplies and a generator and headed back to Diamondhead and the pontoon.

The people back there were neighbors and family and people he'd known all his life, his wife said. He called American Airlines and told them he'd be working the relief effort for at least a month.

"They said they understood," Lisa Ladner said.

Vanessa V. "Tina" Lavilla, formerly of Kalihi, and her recently retired Marine husband, Joseph, formerly of Wai'anae, are waiting to hear what happened to their home in Slidell, La.

Joseph had just started a new job in Virginia.

Tina grabbed her "poi dog," Chase, jumped into her 1990 Park Avenue with its broken air conditioning and hit the road long before evacuation of the New Orleans suburb became mandatory.

"The humidity in Louisiana is unbearable this time of year," she said. "I didn't want to hit bumper-to-bumper traffic. It would have killed the dog."

Tina is at a La Quinta Inn in Montgomery, Ala. She figures she'll stay in the south until the couple figure out what, if anything, they can gather from their previous lives.

DISTANT RELATIVES

Dawn Dural of Mililani and her 8-year-old son, Kekai, are concerned about Kekai's grandparents in Louisiana.

Hattie and Johnny Dillon are probably safe in Bogalusa, but both are diabetic and Dawn has been unable to get a phone call through to them or to Kekai's other relatives in the area.

Wendy Renee of Waikiki said her sister, Kandy De Freitas of Nu'uanu, had been in New Orleans with friends and a friend's family when the storm struck.

A friend's elderly relative had been unwilling to leave, and by the time they convinced her the group fled to a shelter in Baton Rouge just ahead of the storm, Renee said.

At last word, her sister was safe and headed for Texas.

Former Hawai'i resident Linda Gerakis said her brother, Frank Candalisa, was a priest at St. Ann's Church and Shrine in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

As the storm bore down, her brother fled to Houston, where he and five other people are camping in a friend's apartment. His parishioners fled, too. The life they left behind is gone, she said.

"He has no parish to go back to," Gerakis said. "That community lost everything; they have no homes, no livelihood — it is all gone.

"Keep praying for them," she said.

Reach Karen Blakeman at kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.