Barbara Roberts was faced with the decision to either care for her 18-month-old granddaughter, whose parents were stranded in New Orleans, or leave her with strangers to make her assembly line job. She decided on the former and was subsequently fired.

Roberts says she wasn't even sure her daughter and son-in-law were alive when she called the Positronic Industries factory in Mount Vernon the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall.

She made the drive to Columbia from Mount Vernon that Saturday to watch the girl while her parents were away.

Tina Roberts and husband Chris Hardin flew to New Orleans August 26 so Hardin, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, could attend meetings.

Hardin's attempts to book a flight home on the afternoon of August 27 proved futile, as he was told the airline had canceled all flights because of the impending storm.

The couple called Roberts, telling her they were not sure when they would make it home.

With no other relatives to take care of little Trisana, Roberts phoned her work and told her boss she would not be in for a few days.

Hardin and his wife spent days holed up in a Sheraton Hotel, safe from looters and the chaos rampant in the streets of New Orleans following the hurricane.

They made it back to Columbia Thursday and asked Roberts to stay one more day because they were too shaken up.

Roberts was told on the morning of September 1 that she would be fired and on September 6, the morning after Labor Day, she was.

She says she had used up all her vacation hours and unpaid days off, "Fact is, I missed the allotted time and I got fired," says Roberts.

Hardin, meanwhile, is angered about the issue, "People speak of family values, and I don't see what's a more central family value than a grandmother stepping up in this sort of situation," he says.