|
Actually, I
heard someone use the phrase “disaster of biblical proportions” yesterday. KwC Displacement Of Historic Proportions By David Von Drehle
and Jacqueline Salmon, Washington Post Staff Writers, Friday, September 2,
2005; A01 Storm refugees
overwhelmed the state of Louisiana and poured into cities from coast to coast,
crowding sports arenas, convention centers, schools, churches and the homes of
friends, relatives and even strangers. Red Cross officials reported that every shelter in a
seven-state region was already full -- 76,000 people in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia,
Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. Hundreds of miles from New Orleans, hotels were
jammed or quickly filling. Rich
and poor alike, they found themselves starting over. The former began buying
new houses and leasing new office space. The latter waited in lines for a bar
of soap or a peanut butter sandwich. Katrina has scattered more than twice as
many people as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and unmoored more people
in a few days than fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Estimating from census data, about 150,000 of the displaced lived
below the poverty line even before they lost everything. Far more than 50,000
of them are past retirement age. Cities and hamlets,
charities and individuals stepped up to help. In Washington, District officials
made plans to open a shelter in the D.C. Armory, and 415 retired veterans were
moved from the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Gulfport, Miss., to a similar
facility here. "The biggest
issue we're faced with is handling the volume of people," said Margaret
O'Brien Molina, a spokesman for the Southwest region of the American Red Cross.
"Just identifying their needs is so complex." In Baton Rouge and
other Louisiana cities, the influx was dangerously straining services,
officials warned. Armed guards were stationed at food distribution sites, and
Baton Rouge police chief Jeff LeDuff said the city's hospitals might have to be
barricaded to prevent desperate storm victims from continuing to swamp
emergency rooms. The city's sanitation system is overloaded, garbage collection
has soared, gasoline is scarce. "Instead of water
flooding in, we've got people flooding in," said Mike Walker of the East Baton Rouge
Parish Council. "The levee of people broke." Where to go? What to
do? They needed food, water, medicine, beds, showers, toilets, clothing, jobs,
schools, friends, diversions. Where to begin? For many of the
impoverished refugees from the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, the first
step into the future led to a strip mall near the Astrodome, which transformed
into a bazaar of free ham sandwiches, water, diapers, baby formula and other
supplies brought by volunteers. Gaynell
Warden, 46, stood in her pajamas, 350 miles from home -- make that former home.
For now and the knowable future, she lives in a new town of 25,000 made up of
cots in an old stadium. "My son is missing. I don't know if he's dead or
alive," she said. Allen Porter, 18, sat
in a hotel lobby in Hot Springs, Ark., 530 miles from his former home. His
parents were out looking for a condominium while their son tried to sort out
the confused picture that had seemed so clear and glittering just days before.
Senior year, top of his class at Jesuit High in New Orleans, Porter was a bit
annoyed when his mother insisted on evacuating. He packed his iPod,
"Wuthering Heights," and his applications to places such as Princeton,
Yale and Virginia. Now his high school was reportedly under 13 feet of water,
deep enough to drown his transcripts, and his khaki-clad buddies were scattered
to the winds. "It could get
lonely over time," he mused via the Internet. Porter was probably
wise to take the long view, because the few lessons available in upheaval of
this scale suggest that the metropolis flung apart by the hurricane may still
be in pieces years from now. More
than 300,000 Japanese were left homeless by the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and some were still in makeshift
camps three years later. Closer to home, the sudden influx of125,000 Cubans in the 1980 Mariel
boatlift was
only partially absorbed by families and volunteers across the country; some of
the refugees remained in camps into the late 1980s. Herbert McKnight, 44,
had no intention of waiting for New Orleans to be restored. "The way I'm
looking at it, I don't have a job and I don't have a home," he said in
Houston, where he and 20 members of his extended family were among the tens of
thousands of displaced people occupying virtually all of the city's 55,000
hotel rooms. McKnight, an accountant, said he was desperate to find work and
move into an apartment in the Texas city. Mostly, though, it was
a matter of coping with the here and now.
Internet bulletin boards buzzed with offers of spare bedrooms and pleas
for volunteers. "I have 11 family members arriving," a harried host
in Maryland began, and "a rental property in Capitol Heights, MD to put
them in. . . . However, it is currently undergoing renovations and is not quite
habitable yet . . . I need donations." And: "I am in Kewanee, IL. a small rural community in
Illinois. . . . I can fit 2-4 comfortably . . . 6-8 in a squashed
condition." School boards in state after state dropped
their normal admission rules to make room for more than 100,000 school-age
children from New Orleans and other storm-wrecked communities. Colleges and
universities offered to reopen their rolls to take in about 50,000 displaced
students. But for some of the
hardest-hit evacuees, such concerns seemed light years away. Those who were not
moved to the Astrodome fanned out across Louisiana, swelling cities and towns
to the bursting point and sorely testing the capacities of their neighbors. In Sorrento, approximately 50 miles
northwest of New Orleans, there was "looting everywhere, all over the
place. There is chaos everywhere right now," said Police Chief Earl
Theriot. "There's a bunch of fights. All our shelters are full. The gas
rationing is getting out of hand." Theriot spent part of
his day dealing with the death of an elderly woman on a bus full of nursing
home patients who were traveling without any attendants or medical personnel. Up the road in
Alexandria, where the sometimes surly storm-tossed were being housed in an abandoned Wal-Mart, police chief Daren Coutee issued a plea
for authorities in New Orleans to search each evacuee for weapons before
sending them along. In Baton Rouge, city
officials said that 20,000 refugees are being housed in official shelters, but
they believe that's just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands more are thought to
be staying in private homes, hotels and other facilities. And they are braced
for more. Rep. Richard H. Baker
(R-La.) said he planned to ask for temporary housing facilities from the Defense Department, the
Department of Homeland Security and private companies and realtor groups. "Portable barracks, mobile homes,
vacant commercial structures -- whatever can house people in humane
conditions," he said yesterday.
(I’ve been sent a report that Carnival Cruise lines has been
contacted about using some of their boats for temporary housing, although come
to think of it, that might be for FEMA personnel, etc. k) More than 800 people
are currently sleeping on inflatable beds on a gymnasium floor at Louisiana
State University-Shreveport, where their living quarters aren't much larger
than an average car. All of their belongings -- perhaps some clothes, toiletries
and an old a photo album -- are stacked by the beds. There's no other space for
storage. Beds are crammed in like puzzle pieces, covering nearly every bit of
the hardwood floor. Some residents
plan to live in the gymnasium for at least the next month. "When my family
first came here, I was like, 'No way. I'm not staying at a shelter. I'm not
going in,' " said Latrice Alexander, 35, who fled here from New Orleans on
Sunday. "I sat in the parking lot for like an hour and refused to come in,
and now this place is basically home.
"It's tough. When you want to shower, there's usually a line of 10
people in front of you. There's never anything to do. You get up. You eat. You
take a walk. Then you come back to your little bed." The scene is repeated in towns and
cities across thousands of square miles. By midday yesterday,
more than 1,000 refugees had found Starkville, a university town in
northeastern Mississippi, according to Duane Tucker, disaster chairman for the
local Red Cross chapter. "All the hotels in town are full, we've got
people staying with relatives, and about 40 people from New Orleans living in a
church shelter." And the problem is likely to worsen as middle-class
families in hotels run out of money.
"I can't see the end," Tucker said. A major city, thrown
to the winds. No one spared. Not the prosperous DeLongs, a Garden District
family of lawyers and university administrators now dispersed from Texas to the
District. And not the huddled masses in the Astrodome, suffering from
dehydration, diarrhea, malnutrition and other problems. In Houston, Harris
County Chief Administrator Robert Eckels hoped that the Astrodome would not be
a city for long. "This is not a place you want to be living for months
with that kind of crowd. We want these folks to move on." Still, plans are
being hatched to open a school there. And Walker, the Baton Rouge council
member, is predicting that his city of 217,000 could double in size as refugees
come to realize that "they have no place to go back to for years." "This is not a one-day or a one-year crisis. This is
changing people's lives," said Baker, whose district includes
Baton Rouge. "This is a societal
problem of a magnitude that America has never seen." Salmon reported from Baton Rouge, La. Staff writers Peter Whoriskey
in Baton Rouge; Sam Coates in Sorrento, La.; Lisa Rein in Houston; Eli Saslow
in Shreveport, La.; and Ylan Mui, Robert Pierre and Neely Tucker in Washington
contributed to this report. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090102406_2.html |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
