For Many Evacuees, There’s No Going Home, So They Plan to Stay

Roderick Tureaud, 33, a pipe welder by trade and the father of twin girls, spent his morning Monday in a tent outside the Astrodome filling out job applications and calling prospective employers.

It was Labor Day, traditionally a time to celebrate the value of work. Tureaud and his wife, Rhodesia, 31, hope for a more personal celebration -- by finding a job for him and a school for her to continue nursing studies.

There is also the problem of finding child care for Robin and Raven, both 3.

For the Tureaud family, among the estimated 200,000 to 500,000 newly unemployed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, there is no intention of waiting to go home.

“It’s a new life now,” said Tureaud, from Walker, La. “The old life is gone, and we’re going to make this one work. We don’t have any choice.”

Moments earlier, at a news conference a few hundred yards away, former Presidents Clinton and George H.W. Bush announced the formation of a fundraising foundation to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Its website is bushclintonkatrinafund.org.

“A lot of these people have no cars, no work, no home, no nothing; they will depend on us to give them a future,” Clinton said.

As Clinton and other officials noted, it will take a national effort to provide that future. But Houston is the front line of that effort.

The nation’s fourth-largest city is the ad hoc home to more than 100,000 evacuees in shelters, motels, hotels and private homes. Officials expect that many of the evacuees will never return to their former homes in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The impact on Houston, which calls itself the “city of opportunity,” has been swift. The City Council met Monday in emergency session. Two schools closed due to declining enrollment are being reopened to enroll children from evacuee families.

The Astrodome, largely abandoned since the Astros baseball team moved to a new stadium, has been given new life as the largest shelter for Katrina evacuees. Officials said they have made tentative plans to keep it open as a shelter until December.

With more than 220,000 evacuees already spread throughout Texas, Gov. Rick Perry ordered state health officials Monday to develop plans to meet the short- and long-term medical needs.

“The threat of an epidemic breaking out in shelters across the state is real,” he said.

The plan to airlift some evacuees out of Texas has been put on hold, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency develops a multi-state strategy, Perry said.

Meanwhile, evacuees with special needs continue arriving and Texas agencies are struggling to cope.

In San Antonio, 80 handicapped children arrived in two buses; in Lubbock, the residents of a nursing home arrived with severe medical needs, and the small town of Palestine plans to take in 79 adults and children with mental problems, including retardation.

In Houston, officials want to move evacuees out of shelters as soon as possible to decrease the potential for problems.

Houston police on Monday announced an 11 p.m. curfew that will block evacuees from returning to the Astrodome property before 6 a.m. Evacuees had complained that some of their number were leaving to drink, then causing disruptions when they returned.

The Harris County Housing Authority will announce this week a plan to find several thousand housing units.

Houston Mayor Bill White said he will push for the city to waive building code and other regulations that might stymie a push to house evacuees in garages and other makeshift dwellings. Regional housing authorities are being asked to waive requirements for security deposits.

Many who have taken refuge in the Astrodome and three other shelters in public buildings had already spent several days waiting to be rescued from the Superdome or the New Orleans convention center.

“Some are very grateful, but others are angry and say things like ‘You’re lying to me just like they did in Louisiana,’ ” said Dianna Gunnels, manager of outplacement services for a firm that works for Texas’ equivalent of the state unemployment office.

“I tell them, ‘We’re doing the best we can.’ ”

If some evacuees react with anger because of their experiences at the Superdome or elsewhere, others are grateful for the welcoming attitude they found in Houston.

“We were like dogs, thrown-away dogs, to the police in New Orleans,” said Antoinette Lamerson, 38, who fled with her three children. “Houston is so much different. We’re poor again, but we’re free and safe.”

The Texas Workforce Commission has a trailer and a tent at the Astrodome to take job applications and help evacuees contact their home states so that unemployment checks can be forwarded to the new ZIP Code set up for the Astrodome. A job fair is set this week in the parking lot.

“It’s going to be a lot like speed dating,” said Larry Temple, the commission’s executive director.

The Texas agency that deals with child support checks has set up shop in the convention center across from the Astrodome.

“We grabbed our laptops and a printer and an ice chest -- with water and sodas -- and drove out here as fast as we could,” said Alex Camacho, who works for the agency in San Antonio.

Camacho said he thinks that support checks from Louisiana and Mississippi can be sent to the newly opened post office annex at the Astrodome by the end of the week.

Robin Allen, 45, who fled New Orleans with her six children, hopes that he is right.

“Without that check, I can’t begin to start over,” she said. “We’re here to stay, but I need to support my kids.”

Allen plans to enroll five of her children in school when the Houston district sends registrars to the Astrodome today. Elea Batiste, 54, plans to enroll her four grandchildren. “Unless your kids are in school, you’re not really living here, just surviving,” she said. “But we’re going to live here if we can.”

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A region looking for work

Experts say that up to 1 million people are jobless in parts of the Gulf states because of Hurricane Katrina. The rate could climb to 25%, five times the national average.

Unemployment in Gulf states before hurricane, July 2005

*--* Area Avg. annual pay Jobless* Nationwide $39,348 5.0% Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss. 28,531 5.7 New Orleans/Metairie/Kenner, La. 31,837 4.9 Mobile, Ala. 33,414 4.3

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*Seasonally adjusted unemployment rate

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Global Insight, Georgia State University, Associated Press

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Morphing into a monster

Over a two-week period, an atmospheric disturbance that evolved into Hurricane Katrina persistently confounded forecasters and the computer models they rely on. Here’s a look at the history of the storm and some weather factors that influenced it.

So weak, it almost disappeared

Aug. 13: Tropical Depression #10 forms briefly east of the Leeward Islands, but it fails to organize. The National Weather Service drops it from forecasts a day later.

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Aug. 23: Unstable moist air left over from #10 is part of a disturbance that turns into Tropical Depression #12 near the Bahamas. Tropical storm watches are issued for Florida, but computer models show the disorganized storm remaining weak and perhaps curving out to sea.

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A seemingly minor threat

Aug. 24: Forecasts downplay the potential for major strengthening. An east-west line of high pressure to the north guides Tropical Storm Katrina over the Bahamas and toward southern Florida. It still looks ragged in satellite images.

Sustained wind speed: 45 mph

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Tougher than it looked

Aug. 25: A stronger-than-expected Hurricane Katrina lashes southern Florida. As the relatively small storm veers northwest into the Gulf of Mexico, the projected track shows a northward turn and a second landfall on the Florida Panhandle, probably as a low Category 2 hurricane in about

72 hours.

Sustained wind speed: 80 mph

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Weekend surprise

Aug. 27-28: Before turning north, the hurricane drifts farther west than predicted, leading it into extremely warm waters in the Gulf. It rapidly intensifies and expands. The latest computer forecasts put New Orleans in the bullOs-eye.

Sustained wind speed: 160 mph

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Day of disaster

Aug. 29: An unstable low-pressure area over the southern Great Plains helps nudge KatrinaOs center a bit east of New Orleans. It slams into coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, pushing a surge of seawater estimated as high as 29 feet in some areas.

Sustained wind speed: 145 mph

Sources: National Hurricane Center, Navy Research Laboratory Monterey, Weather Underground, Clark Evans, Florida State University (https://flhurricane.com/blog.php). Graphics reporting by Cheryl Brownstein-Santiago, Mark Phillips and Les Dunseith