From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Richard B."  wrote in message
news:lqebh1h3jlhiumcdmp20v77q8c2nnm2gha{at}4ax.com...
>  >
> Having lived most of my life on the coast and having experienced quite
> a few storms and a couple of major ones, I found anyone who wanted to
> leave could, with little ingenuity, get the hell outta Dodge.
>
> Otoh, some folks love where they live, like New Orleans.  It has long
> been a dangerous place to reside as this very thing has so tragically
> confirmed.  Knowing you live below sea level, knowing you are
> hurricane prone, knowing the lake is above your head, well, you take
> your chances living there.
>
> Almost every place has some nasty natural concerns along with the
> good, certainly life offers no guarantees.  Hard to think of a "safe"
> natural place to live.
>
> - Richard

Getting out  with no place to go back to

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/nationalspecial/31stranded.html?ei=5
090&en=7b949a2294a054e8&ex=1283140800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=pr
int

SARALAND, Ala., Aug. 30 - Hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the New
Orleans area stranded in overcrowded hotels, motels and makeshift shelters
and on highways across much of the South underscored a new reality on
Tuesday: an extended diaspora of a city's worth of people, one rarely seen
in the annals of urban disaster.

As news spread that the devastated, largely emptied and cordoned-off New
Orleans area would not be habitable until at least next week, hurricane
refugees gathered in hotel lobbies and shelters around television sets
beaming images of their waterlogged city and turned to cellphones and
laptops, usually in vain, for information about the homes, relatives and
neighbors they had left behind.

Hotels as far away as Houston (350 miles from New Orleans), Memphis (395
miles) and Little Rock (445 miles) were booked, and the American Red Cross
had opened more than 230 shelters in schools, churches and civic centers
spread through six Southern states.

Many found themselves wandering anew after maxing out credit cards or being
forced to leave previously booked rooms.

America Williams, 34, evacuated on Sunday, piling into a sport utility
vehicle with her boyfriend and 13 of his relatives - seven of them
children. "They just told us to drive, to drive east or west to get as
far from the storm as possible," Ms. Williams said. "Our
intention was to go to Atlanta, but it was raining so hard we stopped in
Birmingham."

After two nights in three $50 rooms at a motel, the family ran out of money
and moved on Tuesday to the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center, where the
Red Cross had just opened a shelter. "We're down to our very
last," Ms. Williams said. "We came here for some type of
assistance, some type of help."

One woman spent much of the day in her car on the side of the highway here
in Saraland, just north of Mobile, since her car radio was the most
reliable source of information in a region where electricity remained
spotty. An extended family holed up at a hotel in Lafayette, La., sent a
scouting mission to Baton Rouge in search of rental property in case they
remain stranded for weeks.

"We're getting almost a second shift of refugees who are trying to
find new spots from the original place where they've come from," said
Brady Warner, coordinator of a Red Cross shelter in Baytown, Tex., the
second of three to open in the Houston area. "People are very
comfortable and very happy, but they'd also really like to go home."

Sandra and Robert Allums, from Metairie, La., said they evacuated on Sunday
with just some insurance papers and clothes for a few days. They booked a
room at the Hampton Inn here in Saraland, but with no electricity at the
hotel and no cellphone service, they retreated to their car for its
air-conditioned comfort and its radio for information. They said local
radio call-in shows were the best source of information on the availability
of gasoline, water and ice; some were playing audio of television news
broadcasts otherwise unavailable because of power failures.

"The biggest fear is the unknown," Mr. Allums said. "We
don't know how long before we can get back into our home and our
work."

Three generations of the Costa family of Metairie formed a four-car caravan
here at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, leaving the Hampton Inn, where they had taken
refuge from the hurricane to begin the 160-mile journey home. But a
half-hour into the predawn drive, the car radio crackled with warning that
no one would be allowed into the New Orleans area until Monday.

So the Costas resignedly checked back into the hotel - except for one
carload, which drove on toward Disney World in Orlando, Fla., in hopes of
turning nightmare into adventure. By lunchtime, the Hampton Inn still
lacked electricity, so employees prepared a barbecue in the parking lot as
the Costas and other guests plotted their next steps.

"We're thinking of moving north; we'll become gypsies or something
like that," said one, Heidi Purnell, 50, who went to Wal-Mart for
groceries only to find it was out of water. "We've left one disaster
for another."

At the Best Western Richmond Suites Hotel in Baton Rouge, 80 miles from New
Orleans, some 600 people - plus their pets - were crammed into the 145
guest rooms, many of them helping the short-staffed management move patio
chairs from the pool area and serve free meals of cold cuts or spaghetti
with breakfast sausage. Garrett Kruithof, the general manager, said one
woman offered to give up one of the two rooms her family of four was
occupying to make room for another refugee.

At the Red Roof Inn in Memphis, a six-hour drive from New Orleans, all 130
rooms were booked, many of them double-booked for the coming weekend, when
the television show "American Idol" is taping in town.

"We don't want to tell anyone they have to check out, because where
would they go?" Michelle Williams, the general manager, said.
"There is nowhere else to go."

Several families cut back from three rooms to two as they ran out of cash,
Ms. Williams said.

At the Hilton Lafayette and Towers, 135 miles northwest of New Orleans,
Susan Zimmerman's family fills 23 rooms and has commandeered a conference
room, renamed Cousins Headquarters, where they play Texas hold 'em and the
Family Feud board game and gather each afternoon at 5 p.m. around the
votive candles they bought at a nearby Wal-Mart to recite the rosary.

Ms. Zimmerman secured the rooms Thursday night in a four-hour online
search, and said she has "104.75 people, 3 cats, 13 dogs and 6
birds" staying at the hotel, noting that one cousin is nine months
pregnant. Teenage nephews and nieces were "runners" to make sure
each room got word when there was news.

"Today's been a bad day -the more news you get, the worse it
gets," Ms. Zimmerman sighed, estimating that half her relatives' homes
are submerged.

"My father, his name is Pops, and he's 81, and he broke down
today," she said. "He cried. He said, 'I never thought that I
would ever see this disaster occur that I've heard about my whole life.'
"

Here at the Hampton Inn, Cookie Costas had the essentials - medicine for
her husband's rheumatoid arthritis, birth certificates and passports,
pictures from her granddaughter's graduation. "But I didn't pack for a
week," she said. "We're not prepared for a week."

Similarly, Danny Mirovich brought "four pairs of underwear, four
shirts" expecting to be away four days, maximum. But after three
nights - the last without electricity - at the Hampton Inn in Tuscaloosa,
Ala., 300 miles from his home in Red Ridge, La., a New Orleans suburb, Mr.
Mirovich loaded his wife, three daughters and their Irish setter puppy,
Rescue, back into the van on Tuesday, bound for Lynchburg, Va., 600 miles
northeast.

"At $100 a night, how long can you stay here?" Mr. Mirovich asked.

"I'm going to go to Virginia and see my folks and just make a vacation
out of it," he said. "I'm going to go sit at my mama's house. If
my house is ruined, there's nothing I can do about it."

Ms. Allums said she and her husband were thinking of driving north to find
a place cheaper than the $89 a night they pay here. Still, she said, they
are eager to return home to rebuild their lives.

"When someone says the roots are gone, what happens to the rest of the
plant?" Ms. Allums said. "It dies. New Orleans is our
roots."

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5