Still sheltered, evacuees improvise

By RICK LYMAN and SUSAN SAULNY
The New York Times

HOUMA, La., Sept. 21 -- Eloise Juneau does not need a calendar to tell how long she has been living in a shelter. Any mirror does just fine. Her blonde hair has turned silvery at the roots, a reminder that it has been almost four weeks since she has been able to dye it.

Hurricane Katrina refugee Frank Lazard, 83, of New Orleans, rests on a cot inside Houston's Astrodome Thursday, Sept. 15 in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Still, over that time she and her boyfriend have gone from sleeping on the bare floor of the Civic Center in Houma, about an hour southwest of New Orleans, to building a makeshift bedroom complete with queen-size mattress, lounge chairs and a place to hang their clothes. The couple, both 65, call it The Hilton.

At the other end of the state, the floor of the Hirsch Memorial Coliseum on the Louisiana State Fairgrounds in Shreveport is a grid of mattresses and family encampments, alive with the flicker of donated televisions and the sounds of scampering children. The walkways between the beds have been marked off with white tape, and each path has been named for a street in New Orleans - Bourbon, Canal, Hope - so people have an address to describe where they sleep.

The initial, numbing shock of seeing the world upended has begun to subside for many evacuees, according to interviews in 16 shelters over the last week across the length and breadth of Louisiana. Instead, as the days turn into weeks and approach a month, a kind of normalcy has begun to creep in, a new life requiring novel strategies and fresh uncertainties.

Children are in school. Bank accounts have been opened. Sleep spaces on coliseum floors have moved from habitats to homes. The daily schedule of church visits, hot meals, mail calls and AA meetings has become as familiar as old neighborhood routines.

And for many of the evacuees, who expected to be in shelters for only a few days, those routines have led to a creeping sense of dread that they will not get out of the shelters for weeks, perhaps months. What was supposed to be a transitory phase in their lives is beginning to take on an awful feeling of permanency.

"Things are moving so much quicker at the shelters in Texas," said Deirdre Cheavious, 32, who is staying at the Health and Physical Education Building at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. "Here, it's like a turtle."

Her boyfriend, Mike Williams, 41, shook his head ruefully. "Welcome to Louisiana," he said.

Federal emergency officials said this week that there were still 71,280 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina in more than 650 shelters scattered across the nation. More than 40 percent of them, or 30,650, were in the 317 shelters still operating in Louisiana.

There has been a steady trickle of evacuees moving out of the shelters over the last two weeks, some into hotels, others into housing that they have found, either on their own or with the help of church groups and others. The trickle might have become a surge, relief officials said, if not for the scarcity of available housing in the state.

For the most part, food and daily necessities are plentiful, but promised money from the federal government and the Red Cross has been maddeningly slow to arrive. Almost everywhere, the greatest need is for places to live - apartments, houses, mobile homes, anything to get out of the shelters.

And now, state officials say, they will be moving thousands from shelters south of Interstate 10 to shelters in the northern part of the state, just to be safe as Hurricane Rita plows through the Gulf of Mexico.

So - just as it did in the hours when Hurricane Katrina pounded their city - fate continues to roll through the lives of these evacuees at a Category 5 clip. At almost every turn, some combination of chance, luck and split-second decisions continues to determine the future of the storm's families.

"After we got rescued by the men in the boats, we just got on the first bus," said Veronica Causey, 44. "We didn't know where it was going."

It was going to Shreveport. After two weeks on a pair of mattresses on the floor of the Hirsch Coliseum, Causey and her two sons were packing up to move into a three-bedroom house found for them by a local church group. Shreveport, they have decided, is their new home.

"We're going to start over," she said. "I can do ironing, mend clothes, do some cooking. I need to find a new church. I live in Shreveport now."