CAMP WILLIAMS — Eleven days ago, Robert Ladmirault of New Orleans East had a house, a car, a job and a 23-cent balance on his credit card.

Today he's got a bunk in an Army barracks 1,800 miles away in Utah, and all of the above — other than the 23-cent credit card balance — have been washed away.

Forget any notions you might have that only the poor and disenfranchised were wiped out when Hurricane Katrina leveled New Orleans a week ago this past Sunday. Robert Ladmirault is living proof that hurricanes are equal opportunity disasters.

Here is a careful man, 69 years of age, who paid his house off three years early, who kept driving his '97 Chevy Malibu after it was paid off, who worked the past 47 years for the U.S. Postal Service, with no plan to retire, and who, along with his wife, Lula, raised two daughters and a son without ever taking a handout or assistance from anyone.

Now, the house and the car, along with every other possession the Ladmiraults own, are under 5 feet of seawater in a place that, when Robert and Lula settled there decades ago, the real estate agent assured them was "high ground."

Until Katrina, every hurricane that visited New Orleans seconded that motion. "There was never any damage," says Robert as he sits in bright sunlight on a bench outside this Army-barracks-turned-refugee-camp that has become his temporary home away from no home. "It was why I stayed (for Katrina). My daughters and my son left town and wanted me to go, but I said, 'No,' I'd try to save the homestead. Turns out I didn't save anything."

Robert was alone in his home the morning of Sunday, Aug. 28. His wife was in Indiana for a family funeral. When the floodwater rushed inside the front door, he climbed in the attic, where he spent the next 19 hours. At dawn Monday morning he managed to get onto the roof, where he sat for 10 hours "in blazing sunlight" surrounded by water but without a drop to drink.

A police boat eventually ferried him to a highway before he was transported to the New Orleans convention center, where "there was hope every morning and despair every evening, like clockwork."

Tired of "lies, lies and more lies" about promised water and transportation, he was planning to hot-wire a car so he could leave the area after five days when a National Guardsman advised him that a bus had pulled up outside and was taking people to the airport.

It wasn't until he was airborne that he learned he was going to Salt Lake City.

"My jaw could have hit the floor," he says.