A Worried Father Won’t Give Up Hope

Robert Jemison, upright and stoic, stood at the “Lost Persons Station” at one end of the Astrodome on Saturday afternoon, searching for information about his missing daughters. Robrielle, 9, and Rhaina, 6, were last heard from in a phone call from the roof of a three-story house on the east side of New Orleans. They were with their mother, water rising all around, the cellphone going dead.

Jemison, who owns a New Orleans ambulance company, was cut off from family in the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina. The 46-year-old hoped for the best while trying to rescue as many sick and stranded people as he could in harrowing conditions. He knows, but doesn’t care to admit, that his daughters may be dead.

When Jemison got out of New Orleans on Friday, he rushed to Houston in hope of finding his daughters and ex-wife, whose name was printed on the flip side of the bright red sign he held aloft. But as with thousands of other hurricane evacuees under the roof of the dome, there isn’t much to do but wait and hope.

The Lost Person Station is a long, manned desk with computerized message boards that carry the latest information on victims and refugees. Behind it, the wall is draped 15 feet high with the scribbled names of missing people, the signs made from cardboard and scraps of paper.

One sign with four names reads:

“WE ARE LOOKING FOR OUR FAMILY MEMBERS FROM NEW ORLEANS, GOD HELP US.”

Watching Jemison walk among exhausted, shocked and worried refugees, many of whom have lost everything, I got my first close-up look at the devastating impact of Katrina. In this grim and teeming way station, the nation’s incomprehensibly slow-footed rescue effort struck me as all the more staggering.

In a major city in the United States of America, it took days for food and medical supplies to be delivered, for guard troops to be brought in and for sick and elderly people to be rescued from rooftops.

Bodies lay in streets, floated in rivers, piled up at morgues in the Gulf states, and nobody seemed to know who was in charge of rescue efforts.

As lives hung in the balance, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert all but suggested that New Orleans should be bulldozed because of its precarious geography.

The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday on national radio that he was unaware of the chaos and suffering at the sweltering convention center, where thousands lived in unspeakable filth.

All of this is somewhat less surprising when you consider that it was the president who set the tone for so casual a response to death, a president more intent on saving face in Iraq than saving lives in the United States.

President Bush, who last year slashed an Army Corps of Engineers request for flood protection in New Orleans, waited four days to visit one of the deadliest disasters in American history.

Four days.

When Bush finally arrived in the city where levees could have been bolstered with a few weeks’ worth of the cost of the war in Iraq, he told the nation he’d had lots of fun in New Orleans in his day. He said he was satisfied with the hurricane response but not the results -- decipher if you can -- and then he boarded Air Force One and flew home without visiting the sick and suffering at an airport triage center.

Why the quick exit?

There is work to be done back in Washington, where the agenda includes another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and gigantic cuts in benefits to the poor, many of whom we saw in the black neighborhoods of New Orleans for several days running, clinging to life and waiting for someone to throw them a line.

“Bush deserves some of the blame for sure,” Jemison said as he paraded around the Astrodome hoping to hear the voices of his two little girls. To be fair, Jemison added, blame goes as well to local and state authorities who were unprepared to handle a disaster that had been predicted in uncanny detail by several mainstream news organizations, including the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Jemison said that, with communication lines out, he had assumed his ex-wife had safely made it out of New Orleans with their daughters, as per the plan. So he had busied himself with freelance rescue efforts in the city, treating and transporting people who were dehydrated, suffering from heart attacks and giving birth.

He did that until his vehicles either ran out of gas or conked out in high water, and then he jumped aboard a skiff headed to the Superdome, where he tried to help the most desperately ill people and wondered when more help would arrive in the devastated city.

“It was REAL-ly bad,” Jemison said. “You’d find someone with chest pains and shortness of breath, and there were no doctors and no communication. I asked someone what I was supposed to do, and they said you run around the Superdome until you find a doctor.”

With the city degenerating into chaos and violence, Jemison waded among animal and human corpses to dry ground, walked for miles, hot-wired a Kia owned by a nurse who was safely evacuated and told him to just take her car, and he drove to Houston.

“He has faith,” said Sabrina Scott, a friend who got out of New Orleans early on. She spelled Jemison in the Astrodome, taking his sign and holding it aloft when his arms grew weary.

They made their way down the center of the stadium, past thousands of people who lay on cots contemplating their ruin and wondering what comes next. Under his daughter’s names, Jemison had written, “Call Dad.” “I’m going to find them,” he said, telling himself they were airlifted off that roof. “I’m going to go and get them, wherever they are.”

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.