How they do it in Colorado

[Miriam C.]

How I wonder do you leave any coast if you have no car, the buses don't run, and they won't let you walk across a bridge. People were stoped walking out by armed police and sent back.

Yes there was a phone number to call to get a ride to the Super Dome. Not to get out of town. There was no public transportation out of town. What little there was was full and expensive. Poor people don't have money to climb on a plane or even a bus. If I am wrong please let me know..

The Phone was barely manned, and this assumes you had phone service so you could call. The buss drivers left town and the Mayor wouldn't not use school buses because he didn't want to pay for the fuel and cost of care, and no town would have the people. No facilities--- the busses that did get out some 5 days later had to go all the way to Houston.

Sure there were people who died who made a bad choice. There were a bunch who didn't have a choice. Did you know they tried to charge people with stealing who borrowed boats. The young man who stole a school bus and went around picking up people was almost charged. And that was after the flood.

I wonder if England had been wiped out due to flood if anyone would be critizing the need to continue helping. Because that is what happened only it was in America.

And FEMA---some of that money was used to rent cruise liners. HELLO you have been trapped in water for a week and you want to do what. The Director of FEMA should be fired for gross incompetance, racism and classism. The governor should be brought up on charges. Busses got in and got students out, why you ask didn't they get others out.

The answer---to go where? Why not drop water? The Red Cross had water and food waiting. There were helicopters everywhere. We can drop to cattle.

The real answer---desperate people are easily controlable.

$2500 per household (not all) Here's a challange for you. Pretend you have to move suddenly. You have no paper work. You have a serious Southern accent and are Black. Now find a new home. Get your family there and convince Family Services to help you even though you can't prove you didn't have any money. The rule for emergency food stamps is NO if you have had money in the last month. That was suspended for huricane victims if you could prove it.

You could however go to a motel but that wouldn't get you a house. It wouldn't get you a job,especially in areas where job were in short supply and you couldn't prove who you are.

[Laredo]

I worked with the Red Cross shelter in Lubbock after Katrina and again after Rita.

None of the people who came to us off the airplanes evacuating Louis Armstrong International were what I'd call rich. Many of them had service-sector jobs, and those who had had cars hadn't had gas money.
Bus fare, let alone cab fare, is a tough thing to get at the end of the month, and the hurricane hit at the end of the month, followed one more day later by the flood when the levees went.

I saw a lot of exhausted people, many ill from exposure, after Katrina.
After Rita the people who came to us were people who were just as exhausted but most of them had driven up from Galveston/Houston.
They were worried, and aggravated; but they weren't nearly as close to breaking down from physical and psychological stress during the hurricane.

The Rita evacuees mostly came in family groups, often with pets, usually with at least a driver's license and social security card for the head of each household.

The Katrina evacuees mostly came hoping to find out what had happened to their families; almost none had any kind of material goods including wallets or IDs.

I will say this -- I saw an awful lot more cell phones among the Rita evacuees.