As a team of gun-toting sheriff’s deputies in thigh high rain boots navigated a flatboat around mailboxes and street signs barely jutting above the floodwater’s surface, Juanita Dimartino clapped from ashore.

A team of five deputies was headed her way, a cache of bottled water hoisted above their head.

For three days, the 62-year-old movie security contractor has bathed with bottles of water and eaten uncooked canned food while marooned by floodwaters on her homestead, a 14-acre spread off Louisiana Highway 59 near Mandeville, which lost power. She was running out of supplies.

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In the wake of Hurricane Gustav, her home on Nicks Road became an unofficial island of sorts, surrounded by floodwaters from a nearby creek. There’s only one way in and one way out, and it’s been covered with as much as 4 feet of water. She called Sheriff’s Office deputies for assistance.

“It’s just unbelievable,” she said. “I called, and they came right out.”

The supply drop to residents shut in by water is just one of 25 such water rescue attempts performed this week by the Sheriff’s Office water rescue team, Deputy Stephen Paretti said Wednesday.

About eight people in all were evacuated mostly along the little Tchefuncte River and Bogue Falaya River, both snaking through parts of Covington and flooded this week by up to 15 inches of rain.

Most residents, however, said they were stocked with supplies, and although marooned, planned to stay, Paretti said.

Paretti, steering the flatboat over logs and using an oar to push the boat off a barb wired fence, called the effort no big deal.

“Just another day at the office,” he said.

Deputy Gary Ranzata, a 12-year-Sheriff’s Office veteran who aided Paretti, was a little more excited.

“You feel good about getting out there and helping them out,” he said. “These are our people. We need to take care of them.”

For Dimartino, it’s the first time she feels she’s been helped.

Nicks Road, the roadway to her house, has flooded more than a dozens times since she moved there in 1996.

She’s complained to parish councilmen, parish engineers and others, and nothing’s improved, she said.

“What are they doing with my taxes?” she said. “I want something done.”

“It keeps building up,” she said later, looking out to her yard swamped in a foot of floodwater. “Eventually it will hit the house.”

Her neighbors agree.

As a young girl Roberta Barringer remembers playing in the creek. It used to be comforting to think of her days spent swimming. Now it is a nightmare, she said.

“It’s not the same anymore,” she said Wednesday, wading through the floodwaters near Dimartino’s house. “It’s scary. It’s scary for my mom living out here.”

Her mother, Dorothy Stumpf, was forced to rebuild a home 50 yards away from the creek after it flooded during Hurricane Katrina three years ago.

“I’m scared,” she said of the drainage issue. “I’m completely scared I’ll flood again.”

Meanwhile Dimartino is hoping parish officials will implement some drainage improvements.

Several years ago the flooding kept her marooned as her husband was treated for cancer in East Jefferson General Hospital on the Southshore.

“I was hot,” she said. “If my man would have died on me, I would have owned this parish.”