Evacuees find less than warm reception

[TexasStooge]

BY SHERRY JACOBSON / The Dallas Morning News

It was a bus trip from hell.

That's the way more than a dozen evacuees from Hurricane Rita described their 48-hour ride in a caravan of 40 to 50 school buses from Beaumont to Canton three weeks ago.

They were 2,000 people strong – extended families with kids and elderly folks, many of them with disabilities – who just needed a safe place to stay until the storm blew over.

But in one East Texas town after another, state troopers and other officials turned them away, the evacuees said Friday at a Dallas hotel, where they've been staying since Sunday.

The door was effectively slammed on them in Lufkin, Center, San Augustine, Kilgore and Tyler.

As they ticked off the list, some of the people gathered in the lobby of the Fairfield Inn became visibly upset.

"I never in my life got kicked out of a town," said Monique Richardson, 44, who rode the bus with her 13-year-old son. "It was humiliating."

This bus odyssey may not invoke the same tragic images of the New Orleans evacuees who were abandoned at the Superdome.

But their desperation to find a safe place in East Texas was just as real.

And the way they were treated was just as inexcusable.

"In your heart, you're telling yourself that you're going to safety," said Rollan Davis, 74. "Then, all of a sudden, your hopes start dwindling down as you see the people – who should be helping you and protecting you – being mean and threatening to lock up the bus drivers."

Some of the passengers wonder now if racist attitudes were keeping them from getting help. Several times during the trip, the buses stopped at convenience stores or fast-food restaurants, but the businesses would lock their doors as soon as the passengers got out.

Most of the evacuees were African-American.

"There's no other explanation for it," Mr. Davis said. "They saw who we were. And they wanted us to go away."

To be sure, there were acts of kindness during the two-day journey.

At one point, a San Augustine woman let some of the passengers use a bathroom and telephone in her home.

The evacuees also were fed twice at East Texas churches, but the food disappeared so quickly at that first meal that some people left hungry. Neither of the churches would allow the evacuees to spend the night.

"In San Augustine, they said the school wasn't big enough, and they couldn't accept all of us," said Sarah Ardoin, 46. "At Kilgore, they offered us an escort, and then they led us in a complete circle, right out of town."

Occasionally, the bus drivers circled back to a city, begging for help, or would simply park the buses alongside a rural highway for hours at a time. There, the passengers were encouraged to commune with nature.

"We were all out in public, going to the bathroom – men, women and everything," said a Beaumont woman who asked not to be identified. "But the worst part was that we had no destination, no idea where we were going."

Things got worse when the drivers became so fatigued that they stopped listening to the passengers, said Carl Wortman, 44.

"They wouldn't give rest breaks for people needing a bathroom or diabetics who needed food so they could take their medication," he said. "The people were getting sick and having accidents."

Disaster relief officials blame the whole mess on the fact that many East Texas towns filled up with evacuees from Houston and Galveston before the buses arrived. Beaumont dispatched 9,000 people in a 24-hour period before Rita hit the coast Sept. 23, said a spokesman for the Jefferson County Emergency Operations Center.

"My assumption would be that they went to the shelters where they were supposed to go but found they were filled with other evacuees," said County Judge Carl Griffith, who oversees emergency operations in Beaumont.

"Similar things happened to people from Houston," he said of people being turned away.

Thankfully, the Beaumont buses and passengers were directed to Canton on the third day of their journey, after one of the passengers called the governor's office and begged for help.

Shortly after, Canton welcomed them with open arms, food and clean clothing, although they also had to sleep on a concrete floor for two nights before coming to Reunion Arena on Sept. 26.

"We were glad to help them," said Ronnie Daniell, a justice of the peace in Van Zandt County. "It was a moving experience for all of us."

When the state does its postmortem on Hurricane Rita, I hope the officials talk to the Beaumont people who were stuck on the school buses for two days. What happened was not just a case of too many people showing up at overcrowded shelters.

That's just an excuse.

These poor people were treated badly by public officials who should have known that all the evacuees were victims of the storm.

At the very least, someone owes them a big apology.

[LAwxrgal]

That's terrible! If these people were turned away like that then somebody owes an explanation.

Where did these people eventually end up? Did all of them wind up in Canton?

[Houstonia]

That's terrible! If these people were turned away like that then somebody owes an explanation.

Where did these people eventually end up? Did all of them wind up in Canton?

I don't think it was racism (and I speak as being mixed-race myself), as much as it was what the one person said - the shelters filled up with people who didn't really need to leave.

A truly amazing amount of people left Houston. Many many MANY of them didn't need to. They were not in evacuation zones, they were not even near them. I know people who live between Houston and Prairie View who evacuated. Prairie View is a good 50 miles northwest of Houston.

The shelters were prepared to take in those from Galveston, Brazoria, and other coastal counties. They were NOT prepared to take in the thousands of Houstonians who left also.