Pat at StubbornFacts has a nice post on Katrina. He was there. Took some good pictures, one of which is above.

Shortly after the storm, I found myself touring several shelters in the Baton Rouge area. I visited first hand with people who had fled their homes with little or nothing. The people rescued from rooftops by helicopter usually lacked even a shirt on their back when they arrived at the shelter. The picture just above shows the entire worldly possessions left to one small family.

One woman's legs were swollen to huge size by the ordeal of trekking through chest-deep mucky water trying to get to the Superdome. Her husband would be dead now had it not been for samaritans who took the description of the pills he needed and broke into a shuttered pharmacy to get more for him.

Another woman was in tears, of joy, because her 14-year-old son had just been located in Houston. She hadn't seen or heard from him since the storm, and didn't know if he was alive or dead. My friend held the woman's 2-month-old in her arms as she frantically put everything she now owned into 4 little boxes and some plastic grocery bags before they took her to the airport to be flown to Houston to join the boy.

Readers of my old blog may recall with amused and I hope tolerant condescension my own mission to Katrina. I thought I'd drive on down, kidnap a family, move them to Chapel Hill and take care of them for however many months. That was a doomed if fascinating jaunt. The people I met in shelters were (understandably) dubious. I'm not sure what I'd have thought seeing me zip on up and offer to bust people out.

In one church shelter they warned me that the refugees needed to be vetted before they could be placed. (They gave me a defunct 800 number to call.) I explained that I was willing to take the risk, that I was looking for family people and I didn't think some mommy with three kids was going to be much of a threat.

They told me I needed to be vetted, too. Apparently on the theory that I had driven down to Alabama to make off with a poor black family, what with us having none of our own in North Carolina. And again a defunct 800 number.

This particular church had a media facility. Half a dozen of the people asked me to get the projection TV turned on, but the technical stuff baffled me. So I asked the church folk for instruction and was told not to let the people in the shelter become too demanding.

The people running the shelters I visited were overwhelmed, undertrained, or, in some cases, scared to death of the people for whom they were caring.

Finally I found one guy in an Alabama shelter who had his act together. I walked in and said "Dude, I have an SUV outside and an Amex card in my grubby fist, what do you need?" I think it was the third shelter I'd made the same offer, but this guy had his shit together. He had a list. It was like he'd been expecting me to show up. So off I toddled to Wal-Mart which, although surrounded by ruin, was busy marking down prices. (No, I'm not kidding.) In one of the more surreal episodes of a life replete with oddness I spent an hour dragging two shopping carts through Wal-Mart loading up plus-size clothing (the shelter had nothing over XL), foodstuffs, personal hygiene items, ice, kid's toys, make-up in African-American shades, and whatever other crap came to my mind. (Strangely inexpensive, but then, that's Wal-Mart.)

As I left, the people running the shelter confiscated the TV-DVD and the movies I'd bought to keep the kids occupied. It troubled me then, still does today. I'm a father, so I know something about keeping kids occupied and had tremendous sympathy for the exhausted parents in the shelter. I asked them why they were confiscating the TV and was told that "these people" would just steal it. Steal it from the open middle of a huge shelter? Steal it while kids were watching SpongeBob and Nemo? The toys I bought were kept away from the children because, "they each have a toy."

A toy? My kids have roughly eight billion toys, and they hadn't just lost their homes.

But it wasn't my place to argue: they were running the place and I was a dilettante commuting back and forth for a couple of days from the Birmingham Hilton. (And the Birmingham Hilton bar.)

I came away thinking this country needed something more than the Red Cross to cope with disasters. Volunteers are good people, but they aren't professionals. And as well-meaning as the church people I met were, and as devoted as the Red Cross people were, the result was still a confused mess. A mountain of diapers, a lot of volunteers sitting around drinking sweet tea, scared white people and resigned black people. And no one taking care of the kids.

CORRECTION: Just occurred to the shelter was in Mississippi, not Alabama. Like there's a difference.

This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on Tuesday, August 29, 2006. You can leave your response.