Rooftop Rescue

Rooftop Rescue
Originally uploaded by Uncle Greggy.

Below: an article for my students to read Tuesday. We will write a comparison of the Sudanese immigrants' and the storm evacuees' problems in class Wednesday.

Evacuee crisis could take years to solve
Editors:@ UPDATES with FEMA saying it wants to keep evacuees in the South.
By CHUCK RAASCH, GNS Political Writer
WASHINGTON – The government and aid groups are trying to come to grips with a domestic challenge they usually meet in poorer countries: hundreds of thousands of people who need food, clothing and shelter for an undetermined period of time.
Sports stadiums, civic centers, churches and private homes have become shelters for the evacuees.
— The population of Baton Rouge, 70 miles west of New Orleans, doubled within a week as the Louisiana state capital was inundated with Katrina victims and relief workers. All apartments have been rented and all available buildings filled with refugees.
— Houston had to divert buses of New Orleans evacuees to its convention center after the Astrodome filled up.
— Tennessee, which already had 12,700 evacuees Friday, is preparing for as many as 18,000 more. Gov. Phil Bredesen wants them housed at National Guard armories, vacant schools, churches and other smaller shelters instead of sports stadiums. “I think it’s a more sensible way of trying to handle large numbers of people,’’ he said.
— A private airline that delivered food from an Indiana supermarket chain to New Orleans returned to Indianapolis with 60 evacuees Friday night. “I'm going to tell them that this city will embrace them," Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson told reporters before the Republic Airways plane landed.
— Iowa’s governor offered to have his state take in as many as 5,000 hurricane evacuees, putting them up in apartments or college dorms.
Images of desperate Gulf Coast residents languishing without food or water for days prompted offers of shelter from states as far away as Pennsylvania and Minnesota. But Federal Emergency Management Agency officials say the government will focus on relocating hurricane evacuees within the South.
Federal officials Saturday said many families may not return to their home areas if they are evacuated to far-flung states. A permanent mass exodus of residents could deal an even harsher economic blow to the South, FEMA said.
The human flood out of the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast is so massive that President Bush on Friday declared neighboring Arkansas and Texas federal emergency areas.
By week’s end, the American Red Cross had already set up 275 emergency shelters in 16 states to deal with the human stream from Hurricane Katrina. Another 100-plus shelters were on standby.
But the long-term housing prognosis of these refugees, and thousands of others, remains unknown. Government and charity group officials are still struggling to get their arms around what could be the largest displacement of Americans since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when years of drought caused the southern Plains states to become unlivable.
"Ultimately, we’re talking about dislocations of hundreds of thousands of people,” Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff warned. “That will be a challenge for this country on par with challenges we've seen overseas."
In recent history, Americans have been on the giving end of refugee response, meeting challenges in places like Ethiopia, Somalia, Afghanistan and Bosnia with private and government relief funds. American organizations like World Vision, Mercy Corps and Church World Service specialize in crisis response, parlaying government and individual donations into tent cities and health care for people displaced by war, drought and famine.
But now, the need is at home. Many of these organizations have sent in reconnaissance teams to assess where they can most help. Foreign governments and the United Nations have even offered help.
James Bishop, director of Humanitarian Response for InterAction, a consortium of private relief agencies, estimated there will be tens of thousands of people who are going to require long-term assistance, and the number may be larger than that.
“These are people without assets or support systems because what was keeping them going in New Orleans is not there any more,” he said.
Bishop talked Friday with officials at the United Nation’s disaster response office who are ready to offer technical relocation assistance as soon as the U.S. government asks for it.
“What they would probably have to offer is not food or medicine, but expertise,” he said.
The first wave of refugees out of New Orleans and other flood-ravaged areas has been met with a much-criticized government effort, as well as a spontaneous effort from churches, private groups and individuals. A Web site set up by Moveon.org’s nonpartisan arm, www.hurricanehousing.org, produced offers for nearly 50,000 beds from private individuals in its first 24 hours online. Offers came as far away as tiny Rosholt, S.D.
There are countless stories of family members landing on the doorsteps of relatives hundreds of miles away.
Indianapolis Police Detective Arleatha Marble got a call Wednesday from a cousin saying she and other New Orleans relatives, ages 1 to 65, were on their way.
"You said how many?" Marble recalled saying. "Twenty-five," was the response.
Bishop said this crisis could eventually be rivaled in American history only by the numbers who fled the Plains’ Dust Bowl or Gen. Sherman’s blazing march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War.
“When you go to Gulfport, Biloxi and Hattiesburg and all along the coastal line, and you see the evacuation of one of the major cities in the United States, you can see this is going to be years,” said Major Gen. George Hood, the Salvation Army’s national community relations secretary. “The economy of this area is in a state of chaos.”
Hood pointed out that 30,000 people were still living in temporary housing a year after Florida was hit with two hurricanes in 2004 that were less devastating than Katrina.
All along the Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana coast, “there are concrete slabs where houses used to be,” said Hood, who is working in the devastated areas. “There is nothing there, neighborhood after neighborhood. And those were all homes.”






Nat Geo “Gone with the Water” Geo test 2 answers

1. b global warming
2. a floods
3. c gulf
4. a penetrate
5. a 30%
6. d Alaska-Louisiana
7. a freighter channel
8. a build up
9. b Atachafalaya
10. c keeping South La water supplies free of salt water
11. F
12. b foreign
13. d petroleum
14. b natural gas

15. After some 80 years (since 1927) of using levees, the city area has grown to about 1.2 million people and is a success as a tourist destination. But the payback has arrived. The city has become a bowl-shaped site that is terribly vulnerable to the effects of severe storms. Hurricane Katrina has wiped out many of the businesses and people whose safety and jobs depended on the levee system.

Alternative: Louisiana has gained many high-paying jobs and much state revenue by allowing the oil companies limitless ability to explore and drill for oil. But the canals dug and the oil extracted from the ground have contributed to erosion and subsidence and an alarming loss of coastal wetlands. The loss of coastal land to salt water looks like a long-term trend that is almost unstoppable. It seems Louisiana is paying the price of coastal land loss for the oil monies gained during the past century.