US Gulf Coast buried by refugee crisis

By Stephen Collinson in Baton Rouge
September 02, 2005

STRETCHED relief services flailed away overnight at a vast refugee crisis developing, unbelievably, within US borders, following a mass human exodus from Hurricane Katrina.

Scenes emerged of desperation, deprivation and human agony, which Americans are used to seeing only on their television screens from the world's hotspots.
"It's the Third World," said one medical professional, who requested anonymity, in order not damage his hopes of being sent into blacked out hospitals in New Orleans, after repeated requests.

A huge operation was underway to pull out people still marooned in the swamped city of New Orleans, but the evacuation was badly hampered by poor communications and rising anarchy as a National Guardsman was shot and wounded and a helicopter came under fire.

As the strain on already underfunded and inadequate infrastructure along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, became critical, wild rumours flew of a building crime wave, allegedly blamed on desperate evacuees.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator David Fukatomi meanwhile said airdrops had been launched to bring food and water to areas of Mississippi still cut off under fallen trees.


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People who fled the hurricane in a mass evacuation were stuffed, sometimes many to a room in hotels, roadside motels and homes of relatives in southern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
But thousands of people appeared to still be trapped by floodwaters, according to officials, with reports circulating of rotting bodies being left for days in steaming hot summer weather.

Not a room was to be found within a 400 km radius of New Orleans, and many of those already in hastily booked accommodation found money fast running out.

"The majority of hotels have been cooperative," said Angele Davis, secretary of the Louisiana department of culture, tourism and recreation.

"We strongly urge them to continue to accept them," she said at an emergency operations centre set up in Baton Rouge.

Up to 20,000 displaced people were being taken in a 500-strong fleet of buses from the hurricane scarred Superdome, where they had taken refuge from Katrina, to another cavernous sports arena, the Astrodome in Houston.

And he acknowledged the situation outside the Superdome, where authorities said trash fires were burning was "critical."

But it was the fate of refugees not in the Dome causing the biggest headache for authorities.

In Houston, people who fled before Katrina barrelled into the coast, but lost their homes to a deadly storm tide, turned up at the Astrodome, only to be told the stadium was for Superdome needy only.

Tens of emergency shelters had been set up around Houston however, and local high schools were instructed to accept children pulled out of the disaster zone.

Officials said privately they were toying with the possibility of setting up "tent cities" to house refugees temporarily, with signs that New Orleans will be uninhabitable for months.

Even that option would be problematic, and uncomfortable, as there is at least another month temperatures in the low thirties Celcius is forecast.

Authorities even conceded they were talking with cruise lines about making ships available as temporary living quarters.

The small city of Baton Rouge, 50 km from New Orleans, became the main choke point for relief efforts, fleeing refugees and military personnel pouring in.

The population of 250,000 was already struggling to cope, with hotels overstuffed, and long lines already forming at gas stations.

"Overnight Baton Rouge became the largest city in Louisiana," said Walter Mansour of the city mayor's office.

And with the huge influx of evacuees, came attendant fears.

Reports of "stores being taken, over, basically hundreds of cars being broken into, you name it," were pouring in said US Attorney David Dugas.

But police said so far, they had only made one arrest among thousands of people who poured into the city after they were displaced by Katrina.

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