HOUSTON, Sept. 3 -- Thousands of evacuees, exhausted and frustrated after days trapped in flooded New Orleans, continued to pour into Houston and other cities in Texas on Saturday, rapidly filling enormous arenas and small shelters in an extraordinary exodus of humanity that has quickly strained the capacity of the Lone Star State.
Over the past six days, Texas has mobilized its emergency relief operations almost as if Hurricane Katrina slammed into its borders, rather than the neighboring eastern states, and in a very real sense Katrina has hit Texas with massive force. About 240,000 Louisianans have found sanctuary in the Lone Star State in hotels and large shelters, state officials said. Many more are in church-run shelters and even some in private homes. Officials are scrambling to stay ahead of what they anticipate could be a long-term relocation of humanity.
Houston has become ground zero for the exodus, with 100,000 to 200,000 of the total number of refugees in the state sheltered here. To cope, officials have built a virtual organization from scratch, blending the public and private sectors, nonprofit groups and churches to handle the evacuees' needs.
Almost overnight, officials established one of the largest hospitals in the state to cope with indigent and ailing exiles, and they are planning how to move the evacuees from temporary shelters including Houston's Astrodome and the George R. Brown Convention Center into more permanent housing. In coming days, Houston area schools are expected to absorb 6,000 to 8,000 students from Louisiana.
By Saturday, state officials said they were close to capacity and urged the Federal Emergency Management Agency to start diverting evacuees scheduled to move to Texas to other states. Over the past two days, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and his staff have contacted the governors of Michigan, Oklahoma, Iowa, Utah and West Virginia urging them to take some Louisiana evacuees.
"Texas is committed to doing everything it can to help our neighbors from Louisiana, but we want to make certain that we can provide them with the medical care, food, shelter, safety, education and other services they need to start getting their lives back together," Perry said in a statement. "Local officials are beginning to notify us that they are quickly approaching capacity in the number of evacuees they believe they can assist." Some officials in East Texas, however, said they still had adequate space in their shelters as of the end of the week.
In the aftermath of a storm that has raised pointed questions about the adequacy of the response by officials in Washington and Louisiana, Texas so far has avoided the finger-pointing, complaints and social breakdown that have marked the situation in New Orleans while mobilizing rapidly and unexpectedly for the evacuee influx.
The response has not been flawless. The Astrodome reached capacity far faster than expected, and long before the bus convoy from New Orleans had finished emptying the Superdome and convention center there. Tempers flared and city and county officials quickly found more space for temporary housing. Dallas officials sent out alarms early Saturday saying they would soon reach their capacity to handle the evacuees on the way to their city. Bottlenecks in the bureaucracy have complicated efforts to qualify Louisianans for assistance.
On the whole, however, Texas appears to be weathering the first wave of a crisis thrust upon the state by the accident of geography, helped by their experience in dealing with Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, which put 50,000 Houston homes underwater.
Houston Mayor Bill White said in a telephone interview that the city began mobilizing at a new level of urgency when the levees in New Orleans were breeched. "A lot of us understood what that meant, that it was a different issue than a weather issue, that we were dealing with the virtual destruction of a major American city."
State officials estimated Saturday that 100,000 Louisianans were in Texas hotels and motels, 123,000 in 97 shelters around the state and another 16,000 scheduled to arrive by bus or airplane by day's end.
The Astrodome is now home to about 15,000 people, rather than the 23,000 originally envisioned. Another 11,000 are being housed in ancillary buildings. Another 8,000 are in the city's convention center. But even as the influx continues, officials are beginning to move people to more permanent housing, a few hundred at a time.
