FEMA Evacuees Stuck in Shelters
Getting home is tough for thousands of families who received FEMA assistance.
MEMPHIS, Tenn., Sept. 3, 2008 — -- New Orleans residents are being allowed to return today, but getting home is proving to be a problem, particularly for the thousands of families who received FEMA assistance to evacuate before Hurricane Gustav hit.
Mayor Ray Nagin agreed today to allow those who fled the city to return about 24 hours ahead of schedule, and has lifted the curfew he imposed Saturday.
But the FEMA-run evacuation was coordinated with a battery of federal and state agencies, and now those same agencies are all trying to work out how to get people back -- and in the meantime, evacuees eager to see their homes again wait and wait.
"It's like I'm in a cage and I can't get out," said Orleans Parish resident Michael Wise, 18, who on Saturday took an Amtrak train out of New Orleans to Memphis.
Since then Wise and a couple of hundred other evacuees have been camped out at the Hickory Hill Community Center. The center has two large rooms full of cots. A group of teens crowds around the only television set playing a video game, while younger children play a game of tag with a tennis ball.
The adults are mostly milling around, bored, playing the popular guessing game "When will we get to go home?"
Everyone, it seems has heard a different story.
New Orleans resident James Richards, 22, said he has packed and unpacked three times in the past 12 hours.
"First they said Friday. Then they said Thursday, and now it's back to Friday again," Richards said.
At least 1,800 evacuees headed to Memphis last weekend on Amtrak trains, and thousands more came by car. The city has seven FEMA shelters up and running throughout the city, with about a dozen more run by the Red Cross.
"If it was me, I would want to get back home too," said Shelby County Sheriff's Office spokesman Stephen Schular, who is coordinating with FEMA on the assistance efforts in Memphis. "We want to move as quickly as possible. The priority is to get these people home."
But that priority requires significant planning and that, it turns out, will take some time.
Cheryl Michelet of the Louisiana Department of Social Service said a team of federal and state agencies worked together to coordinate the evacuation of residents, and it will take the same team of federal and state agencies to work together to get the thousands of residents back to the state.
