On the ground and into the crowd
Posted: Saturday, September 10 at 03:39 am CT by Kari Huus
BATON ROUGE, La. –- After dozens of phone calls to airlines and hotels, and e-mail to'ing and fro’ing by many people at MSNBC.com, we settle on Louisiana’s capital to take the Katrinablog baton from our colleagues. It was immediately clear than many others had the same idea.
This city, some 50 miles northwest of New Orleans, is just outside the disaster zone. But it is suffering from a second wave of the crisis: a crush of evacuees from one side and a crush of aid workers from the other.
On the packed flight from Houston, one guy tells me he’s been diverted from setting up tents at an Omaha, Neb., farm show to set up tents for evacuees from the disaster zone. At the baggage claim, firefighters from Arizona, FEMA officials, National Guard troops and missionaries of several stripes are jockeying for their luggage.
It might seem almost festive if it weren’t for reality creeping in. New Orleans native Ephrim Forbes, 32, left the city when he was 18 but his family stayed, even through Katrina. Now his grandparents, father, uncle and aunt are missing.
“Anything can happen, just like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. “All you can do is pray.”
We conduct a hasty handover between our arrival and Andrew and Michael’s departing flight. A lot of technology and gear changes hands and a minivan that is by now ripe with the smell of gasoline (from the extra cans in the back) and splattered with the bugs of Mississippi back roads. They are winding down and having a beer. We get caffeine.
Our first stop in Baton Rouge comes as the sun is setting on the city’s convention center on the banks of the Mississippi, a temporary home to about 4,500 evacuees. But all told there are about 100,000 evacuees here, a tidal wave of humanity for a city that ordinarily is home to 225,000. The sea of people in the convention center spills throughout the city, jamming hotels and snarling traffic. In a Starbucks, we find ourselves in a full house where people are using the free wireless computer network to conduct business and plan their next moves.
It’s especially difficult for the poor. What will become of Rosemary Bentley’s family, her children and 69 grandchildren, who all lived together in a trailer-home community that was destroyed? Will people move on to offers of homes in far-flung places or hunker down in the South where they have lived all their lives? This is one of the questions we hope to explore in our travels. What next?
Miss Kitty’s celebrity tour
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