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Hurricanes forced 350,000 to leave Louisiana

07:42 AM CDT on Wednesday, June 7, 2006
By CLAIRE CUMMINGS / The Dallas Morning News

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita drove nearly 350,000 people out of Louisiana last year, with more than a third of them landing in Texas, according to new census figures that provide the clearest picture yet of how the storms scattered Gulf Coast residents.

The Census Bureau comparison of population estimates from July 1 and Jan. 1 show that Orleans Parish lost 64 percent of its residents and had only about 150,000 – fewer than live in Irving – after the storms. St. Bernard Parish, obliterated and inundated by Katrina, lost 95 percent of its residents.

By contrast, the census found the Houston area growing by roughly 140,000 residents, a figure lower than the city of Houston's working estimate of 150,000 to 200,000.

The study, which included only the 117 coastal counties and parishes in four states, also did not account for people dispersed elsewhere, such as the 70,000 estimated by the city of Dallas to have come to the area.

Also not accounted for is 19-year-old Ashley Williams, a former New Orleans resident who has no plans to go back. She's happy with her new life in Oklahoma City.

"The hurricane changed a lot of people's lives," Williams said. "With us losing everything down there, there's nothing for us to go back to."

Williams now lives by herself and is looking to attend college soon. Her family has gone back to New Orleans to await assistance in rebuilding. Her mother works two jobs and her father is working on reconstructing the family home.

Census officials cautioned that there weren't many people to count in some areas four months after the storm, creating larger margins of error than in most census studies. Also, the region has changed since January, with more residents returning to some areas.

Among the weaknesses in the data: Only people living in households were counted, meaning that hurricane refugees living in hotels and shelters were excluded. That skewed some population counts.

Deborah Griffin, who participated in the census research, said the population increases in counties that grew can be attributed mainly to the hurricane. She said the studies should give cities and counties better direction on how to steer resources toward evacuees.

"We would hope that local planners who need to have a little more information about the characteristics of the population and the economic impacts of those populations now have some tools available ... to maybe fill in some blanks they might have," she said.

State demographer Steve Murdock said the full story of dispersion has not yet been told.

"It's a mistake to think that these numbers provide a comprehensive look at the effects of Katrina," said Dr. Murdock, who works at the University of Texas at San Antonio. "They provide a certain snapshot, but they are clearly only a partial picture."

Mike Grimes, a sociologist at Louisiana State University, also said it's too early to see net effects from the storm.

"The safest thing to say probably is that the city [New Orleans] will gradually increase in population to some level no doubt below the pre-hurricane level," he said. "It's not getting larger in a hurry right now because there's so much damage and people are having trouble with insurance."

That assertion agrees with a poll of current evacuee residents in the Houston housing assistance program, about 50 percent of whom said they plan to stay, said city spokesman Frank Michel. A quarter of them said they would return to New Orleans, and the rest said they don't yet know.

Absorbing a small city's worth of residents, many of whom are poor, has not been easy – or cheap – for Houston. The biggest cost has been for public safety, but state and federal reimbursements have paid for the bulk of other services such as housing and education, Michel said.

The Houston Independent School District took in about 7,000 student evacuees last year, and 5,000 remained when the school year ended, spokesman Terry Abbott said.

The students cost the district an extra $20 million, $15 million of which was reimbursed by state and federal agencies, Abbott said.

"We really count them as our own students," he said. "It really doesn't matter where they are from now."

In New Orleans, demographer Greg Rigamer estimated the city has rebounded to at least 221,000 people since January, or about half the size it was before the storms.

"The analogy I like to use is that it's like a stock price in the middle of the day. It's a very dynamic and fluid situation. People are continuing to return, and the availability of housing and utilities has a bearing on that," said Rigamer, head of GCR & Associates Inc., a New Orleans consulting firm.

Still, census officials said, the data offers the best look yet at who was driven from their homes, who was left behind, and who moved to the region in the months after the storms. Across the region, the data showed large jumps in the percentage of people using food stamps. In New Orleans, it showed average incomes increasing by 16 percent, in part because many of the poorest residents were forced to leave.

The black population in the New Orleans metropolitan area, which includes several largely white suburbs, dropped from 37 percent to 22 percent, while the white population grew from 60 percent to 73 percent of the total that remained.

The Census Bureau was unable to provide race or socio-economic data limited to the city of New Orleans because officials were unable to survey enough people there to generate reliable data.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

E-mail ccummings@dallasnews.com

GONE WITH THE WINDS
A look at estimated population changes in selected Gulf Coast counties and parishes between July 1 and Jan. 1:
STATE
COUNTY/PARISH POPULATION CHANGE PERCENTAGE CHANGE
Louisiana total -344,781 -10%
Cameron -1,961 -21%
East Baton Rouge 16,965 4%
Jefferson -37,273 -8%
Orleans -278,833 -64%
Plaquemines -8,118 -29%
St. Bernard -61,215 -95%
Mississippi total -42,390 -2%
Hancock -11,111 -24%
Harrison -30,713 -16%
Texas-Total 136,887 2%
Brazoria 5,636 2%
Fort Bend 15,410 3%
Galveston 4,723 2%
Harris 92,824 3%
Jefferson 2,309 1%
Montgomery 11,227 3%
State totals include only coastal counties or parishes.
SOURCE: U.S. Census

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