Posted on 02/27/2006 10:37:43 AM PST by WestTexasWend
-With Katrina evacuees arriving, city had to mobilize fast-
Mayor Will Wynn stood on the loading dock of the Austin Convention Center that Saturday morning in September dressed in a sweaty polo shirt and worn Levis, nervously watching the first Capital Metro bus loaded with Hurricane Katrina evacuees rumble into the parking lot.
Less than 48 hours earlier, Wynn had made a bold promise to state and federal emergency officials: Austin — like Houston, Dallas and other cities — would house as many evacuees as needed.
Now, as the first wave of what would eventually be more than 5,000 people arrived in his city, a jittery mayor started second-guessing himself. Austin had no blueprint for such a massive relief effort. And the city wouldn't get any immediate help from the state and federal governments.
"This could be a mistake," he told himself.
As the federal response to Katrina was bubbling into a national controversy and TV images showed the dead and the stranded crowding the Louisiana Superdome, the first exhausted evacuees descended from the bus and trudged into Austin's convention center.
Hundreds of American Red Cross volunteers — including business leaders, off-duty city workers, college students and retirees — had worked through the night on this Labor Day weekend, frantically setting up cots, wiring 50 free long-distance phone lines and putting mounds of donated clothing on hangers and racks according to size.
They transformed the convention center into what would eventually be known as Hotel Katrina, a city within a city that offered everything from hot meals to live music, a convenience store and a medical clinic.
In less than two days, they built 36 outdoor showers, set up 100 computers with free Internet access and arranged a 24-hour cafeteria that would serve more than 225,000 meals in three weeks, including everything from red beans and rice and shrimp étouffée to ice cream sundaes.
"I go nowhere, no event, no neighborhood meeting that I don't have citizens talk about how proud they are of how the city responded to Katrina," City Manager Toby Futrell said nearly six months later.
But in the first few hours, Wynn was not sure how things were going to go. He knew thousands of people were counting on Austin. He knew that the city's reputation was at stake.
He knew the shelter operation could not fail.
Two days earlier, on Sept. 1, during a break from a regular Thursday City Council meeting, Wynn hung up the phone after a conference call with other Texas mayors.
He learned that he should expect at least 6,000 people to arrive from New Orleans on Saturday afternoon. Futrell, who had listened in on the call, agreed with Wynn that the convention center was the only place that could handle so many people.
The American Red Cross would coordinate volunteers and set up booths at the convention center to provide financial help to evacuees. Futrell and her staff would set up the shelter. Wynn would deal with any fallout from canceling 12 events, involving about 1,000 guests, that had been scheduled at the convention center in the next three weeks.
"I'm taking responsibility for it," Wynn told downtown business leaders as he placed a few strategic phone calls.
The city had already mapped out a medical care plan for those who fled before Katrina hit: The most critical would go to Brackenridge Hospital, which was converting a parking garage into a triage center, and the Palmer Events Center would be used for round-the-clock nursing care.
Back at City Hall, Futrell called in her staff about 4 p.m. to begin brainstorming about what the evacuees might need and how they would get it.
Toothbrushes and toothpaste. Lip balm. Feminine hygiene products. Baby bottles.
She tapped one of her assistant city managers, Rudy Garza, to run the shelter. Garza supervises Austin's emergency services — police, fire and EMS — but knew nothing about how to run such a shelter.
There was no time for nervousness or dwelling on the images from the Gulf Coast. "Time to get to work" was all he could think.
On Friday morning about 8:30, Garza met with city department leaders and told them they had a little more than a day to provide everything the population of a small town would need to live for several weeks at least. They needed a hot line to handle the expected crush of volunteers and to help evacuees connect with their scattered families.
"We made a decision — the mayor and the city manager — that Austin was going to be as self-sufficient as possible," Garza said. "It was clear from what we were hearing from other cities and the state that we did not need to be an additional burden."
They ended the meeting and got to work.
Garza walked into the empty, cavernous convention center Friday afternoon about 6 and began mapping out Hotel Katrina.
The evacuees' first stop should be a triage center near the loading dock. From there, people who needed medical care would flow into a clinic, which would lead to a pharmacy. A volunteer would guide each evacuee through the areas, then to a cot.
Garza and Futrell decided that the three biggest exhibit areas, with combined floor space larger than three football fields, should be converted into sleeping quarters, so they assigned city workers to mark off areas for cots with masking tape. Each evacuee would have a 48-square-foot space, which would include a cot and a 3-foot-by-6-foot space for belongings.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had promised to send 3,000 cots to Austin. They still had not arrived.
Garza continued his planning. An exhibit area near the kitchen would become a cafeteria. A living area would hold phones and computers.
Peter Collins, chief information officer for the city, led a group that began wiring computers to the center's Internet system. He downloaded children's games onto some of them. He also created a database that would allow shelter workers to know who was in Hotel Katrina and where.
By now, about 2,000 city employees were involved in the effort. Workers canceled trips and picnics, and hundreds never left Hotel Katrina during the Labor Day weekend.
"Nobody was concerned about not having dinner or lunch," Garza said. "The focus was on accomplishing the mission."
Garza reached for his cell phone and called his neighborhood Wal-Mart at Interstate 35 and Slaughter Lane in South Austin.
Manager Richard Oxley said Garza introduced himself and said he would need "a few items" for Katrina evacuees. Garza gave Oxley a credit card number with a $10,000 limit and rattled off his list. Toothbrushes. Toothpaste. Bedding. Cots. Pillows. Razors. Soap.
Oxley immediately began gathering the supplies but quickly realized he didn't have enough in stock. Company headquarters in Arkansas promised to deliver the rest by truck. As the weekend wore on, a growing number of local businesses pitched in. Oak Farms Dairy brought a refrigerated truck and kept it stocked with milk. H-E-B donated shopping carts to help evacuees move their belongings to sleeping areas. Paul Mitchell salons donated hair products.
It was early evening Friday. In New Orleans, those fleeing the floods crowded the airport and other impromptu staging areas, desperate to leave their ruined city.
Garza and his team knew many of the evacuees had not bathed in days and had walked through toxic water that filled the streets of New Orleans. With no portable showers to be had, Jill Maness, the city's building services officer, organized a team of workers that included plumbers, air conditioning mechanics and carpenters to build showers. They couldn't find designs for outdoor showers on the Internet, so they drafted their own.
They bought supplies and began building three shedlike buildings with 12 showers each outside the convention center.
"It was just instant teamwork," Maness said. "It was the biggest emergency project we've ever worked on, and we've worked on a lot of emergencies, (but) nothing this big with so short a deadline and something that was so important to so many people."
They had no idea whether they would be finished when the first group of evacuees arrived.
About midnight Friday, Futrell and Wynn — who had appointed himself head cheerleader and was patting backs all over the convention center — walked over to Garza and told him to go home. He would need some sleep before the first evacuees arrived Saturday afternoon.
Garza left feeling uneasy. The convention center was nowhere near ready. The showers were not finished. The cots FEMA had promised had not arrived. The ballrooms that were to be used as dorms were empty.
Garza had been home less than an hour when his phone rang shortly after 1 a.m.
It was Futrell. The guests were soon to be on their way. The feds had revised their arrival time, which was now 7 a.m. — six hours away.
And instead of arriving by bus as expected, the evacuees were being airlifted to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
In the middle of the night, city officials had to scramble Capital Metro buses and drivers to the airport to start a shuttle service. Garza sent paramedics to the airport to set up a basic triage center, where evacuees should be transported first. He started waking up city employees who had agreed to help register evacuees and asked them to be at the convention center at 6 a.m. He called FEMA and was told the cots weren't coming.
Garza called Oxley, the Wal-Mart manager, at 4 a.m. The city would need every sleeping bag, blanket and air mattress Oxley could find. Garza also sent a group of city employees to the new Cabela's outdoor store in Buda to buy out its sleeping bags.
Everyone was in motion as 7 a.m. came and went. In New Orleans, the first plane toward Austin took off about 8:30 a.m., filled with about 150 evacuees. It would be the first of 30 flights to Austin during the next 26 hours.
At the convention center, workers were setting up the first few hundred cots. Maintenance workers were finishing the showers.
About 10 a.m., Wynn was on the loading dock as the first Capital Metro bus, escorted by Austin police, rounded the corner. He hopped inside the bus and saw the faces. The dirty clothes. Some had small bags with them. Most had nothing.
"Welcome! You're our honored guests," he told them. "We have everything you need here. We are going to take care of you."
He hoped he was right.
The evacuees flowed into the convention center.
Christina Lush, 46, was among those who arrived that weekend, after National Guard troops rescued her from her home in the Mid-City section of New Orleans. Lush had lost one of her shoes and had a large blister on her foot, which paramedics immediately treated.
"When we got here and saw how much the people cared and how much people opened their arms, it was just something we weren't used to," said Lush, who has made Austin her home with her two grown children. "It was done right here, in so many ways, as far as organization."
Futrell said evacuees were asking three main questions.
"They were looking for people — their mom, their dad, their brothers, their sisters," she said. "They were asking when they could shower and when they could have a hot meal."
Wynn greeted evacuees in the parking lot all day Saturday — he later said he lost 10 pounds that weekend — then spent the night at the convention center. He saw an infant sleeping in a cardboard box, with an older brother keeping watch. He saw families sleeping almost in piles, as if afraid of losing one another.
Wynn handed out towels and bedding and let people use his cell phone to try to reach family members.
Futrell helped an elderly woman take a shower. She explained the Tooth Fairy to a little boy who had lost a tooth during the evacuation and slipped a $20 bill under his pillow after he fell asleep.
Shortly before noon Sunday, Garza got word from the federal government that another plane headed for Austin had taken off from New Orleans. The last of the evacuees would be arriving within the hour.
The three of them walked out to the loading dock when the last bus arrived, and Wynn did his final welcome.
Then he walked back over to Garza and Futrell and hugged them.
Compare & contrast to the response of New Orleans!
I guess that's 5000 new democrats for Austin.
Hope Austin doesn't ask them to work like the N.O. city council member did.
How did this story end? Houston still has many evacuees (in subsidized hotels, by the way). Some of the gangster element are even travelling back and forth between Houston and New Orleans so they are not in Houston by necessity anymore.
I assume that some have had difficulty finding work. Move them back to New Orleans and let them tie up hotel rooms in that city. Oh wait, New Orleans only welcomes tourists back.
Well tourists and the self-sufficient musicians (there actually have been articles critical of efforts to put New Orleans musicians to work in Houston because we are "denying" the city of NOLA "their" valuable talent).
Democrats and Republicans alike, I am *immensely* proud of how Texans responded to the mass evacuations from Louisiana. It's my primary reason for supporting Gov. Perry's re-election. He showed he could step up in a crisis and that is starkly contrasted to how you saw government handle the job in Louisiana and Washington DC.
Texans came together to take in the poorest of souls in their time of greatest need and did out best to help them adjust to their new realities.
Yes, of course, some of the evacuees turned out to be freeloaders or those with criminal pasts but if if meant saving 5 of those in order to save 5 whose only crime was being too poor to get out on their own, I'd say it was worth it.
I'm very proud to say we Texans stepped up when a lot of others just whined.
And have lived to regret it
The whole world should be proud of the way Americans, especially Texans, helped Katrina evacuees. These stories should be told over and over. The lame old media would rather the world think that the US is nothing but what was shown on 24 hour news shows from NO's convention center and superdome. Instead, there was probably the greatest outpouring of donations of money and personal effort in the history of the world.
Not crazy about liberal nest Austin but have to hand it to them - a good show of American can-do spirit. Yes, Houston and some other places have a problem now with the gangs, criminals, and ungrateful freeloaders which the msm concentrates on - but there were many people who made the best of a very bad situation and were grateful for a refuge.
I wish there was attention also on Alabama and Mississippi Katrina survivors and Texas/Louisiana Rita survivors.
Take a trip through East Texas and you'll find some areas where nearly every building has blue tarp on the roof because of September damage from Hurricane Rita.
I believe that if Katrina had hit south Texas (like Corpus Christi) instead of New Orleans, it wouldn't have registered on the national news for more than a week.
Well, one minor little thing I can think of to contrast is that 80% of Austin wasn't under water or destroyed. That could have a little something to do with the responses.
Thank you.
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