BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 4 -- As tens of thousands of New Orleans residents, many poor and needy, leave the ruined city and pour into the Louisiana state capital, Baton Rouge finds itself facing an unprecedented crisis.
Doctors and nurses are working 20-hour days to care for the sick. Police officials are putting in double shifts. School officials are scrambling to find space for hundreds or even thousands of new students. The city's landfills are stuffed; its sewage system is strained. Exhausted officials working around the clock to accommodate the newcomers are being offered mental health counseling to better withstand the strain.
"How much can Baton Rouge handle?" asked Mayor Melvin "Kip" Holden, who predicted the city's population and surrounding area will more than double -- perhaps permanently -- to 1 million.
Holden said he plans to ask President Bush for $10 billion in federal aid to help pay the costs of the massive growth when the two meet Monday during his visit to the city. The city would use the money for roads, schools, housing and more police officers, firefighters and teachers.
Holden and others believe that, over the long term, Baton Rouge will adapt and perhaps even prosper from the influx. But the immediate crisis is overwhelming, here and elsewhere as local governments struggle to accommodate hundreds of thousands of evacuees.
In Texas, where nearly a quarter-million people have filled the state's relief centers, Gov. Rick Perry ordered emergency officials to airlift some evacuees to other states willing to take them. Evacuees have also been sent to Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Indiana.
But Baton Rouge appears to be the city facing one of the largest influxes of newcomers, and its contours and character may be about to undergo change. By most measures, Baton Rouge and New Orleans, which are about 80 miles apart, are remarkably similar. In each city, about one-quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, and the household income in each city is about $30,000 -- below the national average.
Staid Baton Rouge has always prided itself on being more efficient and more intellectual than its more colorful neighbor to the east. Baton Rouge, it is said, was a good city to live in, but New Orleans was a better city to play in. The racial makeup is also different. New Orleans has a far larger percentage of African Americans -- about 80 percent are black, compared with about half in Baton Rouge.
For some residents where the dislocated have landed, the change ahead is bewildering.
At the Coffee Call shop a few miles from the bucolic Louisiana State University campus, some local residents vented frustration over an influx of newcomers and the strain they will place on the city.
"The traffic's just horrible," said Wayne Gaudin, as he and his wife entered a jam-packed Wal-Mart. "Our infrastructure's gonna take a big hit: transportation, social services, food stamps, the hospitals."
There is also a sharp racial dimension developing in the comments of some residents. A few of the white residents questioned at the coffee shop and the nearby Wal-Mart said they are anxious about changes they believe are coming to their community.
