Gustav evacuees find the going home is harder than the leaving
By Adam Nossiter and John Schwartz
Virginian-Pilot
Reprinted from The New York Times
Read full H1 News Report
NEW ORLEANS — A mostly smooth evacuation from Hurricane Gustav turned sour Tuesday as many New Orleans-area residents trying to return to their homes were turned away at roadblocks into the city or were stranded in parking lots across the region.
That left many sweltering and frustrated at the city's edges, out of gas, money and food after several days on the run, like a dozen or so people waiting it out in the parking lot of a closed Circle K gas station in LaPlace, 25 miles from New Orleans. Their situation was duplicated by dozens of others across Lake Pontchartrain, in St. Tammany Parish, according to officials and local radio reports throughout the day.
Many said that a house without electrical power, which awaited them in the city, was preferable to another night sleeping in a car in a hot parking lot.
"They should let people back in. The storm is over with," said Dominique Jones, a landscaper from east New Orleans who was leaning, shirtless in the broiling heat, against his truck while his wife, Kim, a security guard, sat inside. "We might not have lights, but we can light candles. We have canned goods. We don't have anything out here. We're dead broke."
New Orleans was spared on Monday by Gustav, which knocked out power and downed trees and limbs but otherwise left buildings intact, the sewer system largely functioning and hospital emergency rooms open. It caused no serious flooding.
Still, residential and commercial insurance claims could total $4 billion to $10 billion. More than a million customers, including some refineries, lack electricity.
In New Orleans, power remained off at nearly 80,000 homes Tuesday and tree limbs littered the streets. City officials cited those and other factors as reasons they were not ready for the return of hundreds of thousands who heeded Mayor Ray Nagin's mandatory evacuation call over the weekend.
Thursday was held out by officials as the earliest return date for most residents, although business owners will probably be allowed in today, and they called for a reopening of the city's schools by Monday. Several other nearby parishes plan to bring residents back today.
But Thursday seemed unthinkably distant for those who disregarded the official warning not to return and tried unsuccessfully to brave it through the barriers at the entrances to the city.
"What are they going to do about people that get stuck out on the side of the road without money or gas?" asked Raymond Taylor, a taxi driver from the city's Gentilly neighborhood, sitting in his cab.
Merlene Demourelle, a Mid-City resident, dismissed the inconveniences that awaited her at home.
"We're tired, we're hungry, we're out of money, and we want to take a bath," she said. "Sleeping in darkness, we're used to that in New Orleans. Our lights always go off."
She and three New Orleans traveling companions told of hostility encountered upstate, and of being turned away from shelters in towns such as Alexandria, Bunkie and Livonia.
"We slept in the parking lot during the hurricane," Demourelle said, speaking of a church in Alexandria.
"We told them we was from New Orleans, and they wouldn't take us," said her husband, Ronald.
New Orleans remained deserted Tuesday, apart from the occasional resident who had defied the city's evacuation order and could be seen sweeping up. There was scant evidence of the cleanup - promised by officials - of the carpeting of tree limbs, fallen magnolias and fractured crape myrtles on the city's streets.
In Baton Rouge, Gov. Bobby Jindal cited the state's successes during the Gustav operation in a news briefing Tuesday, quoting numerous statistics: 1,800 National Guard troops working on debris removal, 92 crews from the state Department of Transportation clearing interstate highways, generators dispatched to nursing homes, the "pre-deployment" of commodities in hard-hit southeastern towns such as Houma, New Iberia and Morgan City.
Ten deaths have been attributed so far to the hurricane, compared with 1,600 during Katrina. Still, Jindal called Gustav "a very, very serious storm that has caused major damage in our state."
It was also a major - and ultimately successful - test of the flood protection system that failed so disastrously during Katrina. Monday night was the debut of the critical gates and pumps at the city's drainage canals.
They worked. The 17th Street canal gates were closed just after 8 p.m., all of the pumps were fired up, and the water level in the canal dropped 3 feet in the first hour. There was no powerful surge into a canal that goes deep into the city and that helped flood 80 percent of it in Katrina.
"There should be no doubt in anybody's mind" after the first true test of the pumps that "they worked pretty much as planned and designed," said Col. Jeffrey Bedey of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Hard-hit Houma, southwest of New Orleans and in the direct path of Gustav, presented a very different picture. Enormous downed trees, snapped power lines and splintered telephone polls blocked streets Tuesday in the largely deserted town of 32,657. Mangled pieces of metal dotted the roads. Gas station awnings were toppled by the storm, as were traffic signals, billboards and marquees.
At mid day, a lone crow cackled near downtown, and there were shards of glass from broken windows on the streets.
|
Most Commented Articles