Sympathy Translates To Aid for Victims

Ad Hoc Fundraising, States' Mobilization Focus on Recovery

Rescue specialists, emergency managers, cooks and counselors headed to the worst-hit areas of the Gulf Coast yesterday, and church groups, merchants and students collected cash to send as the Washington region stepped up its response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation.

It's the beginning of what local and national organizers hope will be a sustained outpouring of support for a nearly unprecedented U.S. relief effort.

"They've lost their houses. They are very frustrated, and some of them are desperate, because they don't know what they're going back to," said Patricia Myers-Hayer, 53, of Alexandria, who was in Little Rock yesterday loading supplies onto an ambulance-size emergency truck to be ferried to Louisiana.

Just days away from her job leading a cataloguing team at the Library of Congress, Myers-Hayer is among those facing the grim accounting of Hurricane Katrina's victims: the elderly in need of medicine, the teacher who no longer has a school and the many without homes. Her group kept being stopped by refugees lured by Red Cross insignias.

Even in its infancy, the range of local giving and volunteering has encouraged relief organizers. In Woodbridge, the Potomac Nationals will donate 50 percent of gate ticket sales for three games against the Winston-Salem Warthogs to hurricane relief. Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington has asked 140 parishes to take up a special collection at all Masses this month for Catholic aid agencies in the affected region. Maryland hospitals have made available 1,400 beds for patients who can be transferred. A search team from Montgomery County and a squad from Virginia have begun looking for survivors in three hard-hit Mississippi counties.

"In a small way, I am trying to reach out," said Darlene Mathis, owner of Collectibles Gallery, a Georgetown interior design boutique, who plans to give 10 percent of her revenue over the next two weeks to the American Red Cross. It was the "many, many faces I've seen on television over the last two days" and thoughts of how fortunate she feels as a minority store owner in Georgetown that helped inspire her to act, Mathis added.

"Most of my customers are very caring and giving people," she said. "Why not use my space to do something?"

Government officials challenged a broad array of residents to get involved.

Speaking to a gathering of state officials, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) said yesterday that he was asking state employees and all residents to donate cash and blood, "probably in that order," to assist the victims of Katrina.

Ehrlich said he will sign an executive order sending 25 state health department doctors and 23 nurses to Louisiana. That's in addition to 100 Maryland National Guard military police, urban search-and-rescue squads from Montgomery and Baltimore counties and several county emergency managers.

"It may be a state far from Maryland, but they're Americans, they're human beings, and they need our help now," Ehrlich said.

Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) declared a limited state of emergency to activate the state's emergency operations center to coordinate relief efforts. They included sending a state police helicopter with a hoist and two pilots, and preparing to accept homeless young people into the commonwealth's schools and universities, if necessary.