Refugees Swelter in Heat and Frustration

On a freeway overpass rising above downtown’s flooded streets, elderly people gasped on hospital beds, diabetics weakened after two days without insulin and mothers tried to shade infants from an unrelenting sun.

On Wednesday, thousands were stuck on concrete spans of interstate highway that, three days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, had come to resemble a refugee camp.

Some in the crowd arrived in wheelchairs, others with walkers, wearing hospital gowns, pushing shopping carts or confined to hospital beds. Most had been rescued from imminent danger and deposited on dry ground. All had been forgotten.

From one hot stretch of asphalt-covered roadway, where some of them had spent two days, the crowd watched with some impatience as emergency vehicles lined up on another overpass nearby.

But no one was coming for them.

Kache Grinds, 11, decided to take matters into her own hands. Barefoot, she stepped to the edge of the road, where the traffic lanes disappeared into floodwaters, and waited for a rescue boat. She hoped to persuade someone to take her grandmother, who is nearly blind, off the overpass.

She was willing to offer them her savings, $6.

Kache and her grandmother were among many rescued from a nearby housing project. Someone would come pick them up, she said they were told.

But two days later, the crowd on the overpass remained stranded, hungry and thirsty. Children and the elderly were getting weaker.

Linda Bowie, 51, walked behind family members as they pushed her mother, Ethel, down the interstate on a hospital bed. She had suffered a stroke the night before, said Bowie, who asked desperately for help with evacuation. The family hoped to move Ethel’s bed to a more visible place on an offramp where safety personnel might see her.

“She’s going to die tonight,” Bowie said.

Others were getting angry. A man in a plaid shirt walked back and forth furiously, staring up at safety personnel on the overpass above him and screamed that someone needed a medic. The man got no response.

One of the safety officers who heard the man’s angry screams simply turned away. He was busy providing security on the other roadway where a group of rescued prisoners was being herded into buses.

Another officer dismissed the plea, saying any medic who went down to help the crowd on the roadway below would be mobbed.

“There is no way to get vehicles to that area. Every on-ramp is flooded, every off-ramp is flooded,” said Officer Earl Dunbar of the State Capitol Police, who was stationed nearby. “Trust me, if I had the answers, I’d be giving them.”

So the crowd stranded on the overpass waited, and chatted, and dozed.

One man used a plank to paddle away down Perdido Street, perched atop a large square of roofing. He rowed off with two 40-ounce cans of malt liquor sitting behind him and a broad smile on his face.

Others tried to sleep on the asphalt.

Lolita Davis, 60, a retired accountant, waited patiently by the side of the highway in a black pantsuit, her hair pinned in a neat chignon. In a small backpack, she carried the things she took when she left her house: two cartons of cigarettes, a can of mixed nuts and a jar of mayonnaise.

The truly desperate moments come after nightfall, said Herbert Branch, who sat across from her.

“Come out here when it’s pitch dark, when the only lights you see are the headlights of a car that doesn’t see you,” said Branch, 40, an ironworker. “If you want to make a name for yourself, try figuring out how this was possible.”

Seeing a stranger, many expressed fury at Mayor C. Ray Nagin and at federal and state authorities who had deemed stranded refugees were not a priority.

“We don’t matter,” said Melvin Jones, 47, a truck driver, because “it’s black folks out here.”

In all directions, pedestrians dotted the highways, making their slow way out of the neighborhoods. Lesley Wood, 21, was walking along the highway wearing a backpack and carrying a large makeup case balanced on her head. She left her seven-story high-rise that morning.

Wood, 21, who works as a model distributing free samples of products at nightclubs, expressed impatience.

“I said, if I look out the window tomorrow and see water, I’m going.”

She left home on an inflatable mattress that she used as a raft, steering with a broom handle. When she got to dry, she gave her raft to a stranger and began a 2 1/2 -hour walk down the highway. She said she would walk four more hours to reach a friend who was waiting with a car.

She said the long walk was worth the effort to escape the fears and rumors -- rumors of more water, of floating bodies, of all kinds of murky threats.

“People are afraid of water moccasins and nutria rats and bacteria that may crawl into your toes or into your urethra,” she said. “I said, I’m not staring at four walls anymore. I’m going.”