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ROBBINSVILLE: Storm odyssey: A cat, a cockatoo and ’95 Corolla

By Joanne Degnan, Managing Editor
    ROBBINSVILLE — Every hurricane evacuee has a story, but Denise Leese is just thankful hers had a happy ending.
   After a utility pole fell against her mobile home during Hurricane Sandy, draping her trailer and several others nearby with live electrical wires, she grabbed a blanket, her 16-pound cat, Niblet, and her Moluccan cockatoo, Bali, and hit the road in her ‘95 Toyota Corolla. But it was a journey without a destination.
    “I don’t have family and didn’t really have anywhere to go, but I knew I didn’t want to be in mass shelter with a lot of people,” Ms. Leese said. “I certainly wasn’t taking my animals there. They are like my kids; they’re all I have.”
    Ms. Leese said she and her animals spent the first night parked on a driveway off Sharon Road. The next day, she asked her former landlady, Cindy Pirozzi, of Robbinsville, to keep the noisy bird and cat inside her bathroom for a few days.
    Was it safe to put the cat and a bird inside a bathroom together?
    “Absolutely,” Ms. Leese said. “They’re friends.”
    Besides, Niblets and Bali had a lot more elbowroom in the bathroom than they did in the Corolla so they were much happier, she said.
    On Day 2, with the knowledge her animals were safe, she said she “snuck back” into her mobile home, which was wrapped with yellow police caution tape, to retrieve more clothes and get some sleep. There was no electricity or heat because the power was now out, but she had blankets to keep warm, she said.
    “I don’t go to pieces over this type of stuff; I’m a survivor,” she said.
    Her defiant attempt at being a squatter in her own home soon backfired, however, when neighbors and power company workers fixing the downed lines in Mercer Mobile Homes discovered she had returned. She was “re-evacuated” with a stern warning not to return until the pole was fixed and the power restored.
    By Wednesday, her 53rd birthday, the township had opened a shelter at the township Senior Center, but Ms. Leese stubbornly refused to go.
    “I don’t see the point in sitting around a shelter feeling sorry for myself,” she said.
    Besides, she wanted to be close to where her animals were.
    Although Mrs. Pirozzi had offered to take her in, too, Ms. Leese said she felt that with her animals already camped out in Mrs. Pirozzi’s bathroom, that would be too much of an imposition.
    Instead, Ms. Leese slept next door at the home of Mrs. Pirozzi’s sister, Debra Bjorling, for the next three days. For most of that time, the Bjorlings didn’t have power either, but their living room couch was much more comfortable than the Corolla, and she was grateful for their hospitality, she said.
    Ms. Leese, who finally was permitted to move back to her own mobile home on Oak Street with her beloved animals on Sunday, said she is glad the odyssey is over and thankful her home didn’t sustain major damage.
    “Everyone said thank God the pole and power lines didn’t burst into flames when it fell,” Ms. Leese said. “It could have been much worse.”