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Hurricane Katrina

Disabled who fled hurricane find temporary haven in Texas

By wire services
Published October 6, 2005

PALESTINE, Texas - Down a winding lane from their dorms to the cafeteria, they hobble along, clutching their caregivers' steady hands or walking just within arm's reach.

"It's lunchtime! It's lunchtime!" exclaims one man, grinning and clapping. One woman pauses to look up at the canopy of trees above her. "We're in Texas. We're at camp," she says.

For the past month, the 1,300-acre Lakeview Methodist Conference Center in the piney woods of East Texas has been home to nearly 70 mentally retarded adults and children who were evacuated from Louisiana before Hurricane Katrina.

The setting is serene, but it has not entirely insulated the residents from the stress of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Their routine in group homes in Louisiana was comforting: They ate in the kitchen, watched television in their bedrooms. Some went to the grocery store or church with staff members, and some spent weekends with their families.

Now, most - ages 6 to 63 - eat meals in a large cafeteria, sometimes riding there in vans when it is too hot to walk. Six to 12 people sleep in a room on cots.

During the day, many play games, draw in coloring books and do puzzles in a small auditorium. But every once in a while, the tension erupts: Someone yells; someone else throws a stuffed animal or a crayon.

"Their life has been altered, and the little things you can do will kind of distract them," said Denise Smith, a former health-care worker from Tampa who flew to Texas to help out.

The group's 12 disabled children spend the day at a school near Palestine, and two dozen of the refugees with mild mental disabilities attend a county work program. Recently the staff took some to a bowling alley and to an equestrian center.

But the calm of their surroundings was shaken when Rita began brewing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Some of the residents cried when they overheard the staff talking about the new storm.

The camp lost power briefly during the storm but was not damaged. Rita did, however, damage some of the group homes in Louisiana to which they hoped to return.

"I can't believe this is happening to these folks again," said Angela King, a program director with Volunteers of America, the nonprofit organization operating the group homes. "But people are a lot more resilient than we give them credit for."

The dozen group homes were evacuated relatively easily two days before Katrina hit last month. The residents stayed in Houston-area hotels for a week, and spent a night in the crowded Astrodome.

Then the group found out about Lakeview Methodist Conference Center, about 150 miles north of Houston. Lakeview charges $27 per person per day for four dormitory buildings and an auditorium, as well as three hot meals a day.

King said Volunteers of America hopes to pay the camp costs from reimbursements from the state of Louisiana, but the payments have been delayed and in any case will not be enough. The organization is trying to get money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But the Rev. Von Dawson, Lakeview's director, said: "This is a faith agreement ... They're welcome to stay here as long as they need to."

The evacuees' exile is almost over. On Saturday, 20 left for two Louisiana group homes that were undamaged. Two more groups are set to return to homes in Slidell, and other residents will go to two New Orleans homes once city services are restored.

"We could stay here indefinitely, because the people have been so good to us, but we are feeling a sense of urgency to get them to a permanent home," King said. "They miss home. They may not understand the connotations of that, but they miss home."

BATON ROUGE, La. - The New Orleans sheriff on Wednesday disputed allegations from a human rights group that inmate corpses were floating in the city jail after Hurricane Katrina and that prisoners were left for days without food or drinking water in cells where the floodwaters were chest-high.

Human Rights Watch has asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate treatment of prisoners in the jail, accusing Sheriff Marlin Gusman of abandoning inmates in ground-level cells as the floodwaters rose.

The group cited interviews with inmates who said they saw floating corpses and were left for four days in darkness, without food, drinking water, air conditioning or working toilets.

The sheriff said no one died in the jail after the storm. And the state Department of Health and Hospitals said there have been no reports of corpses found in the jail.

Gusman also said inmates had plenty of food and drinking water throughout the three days of evacuations. He called the allegations "fiction" from disgruntled inmates.

"They're in jail, man. They lie," Gusman said.

BATON ROUGE, La. - New Orleans' two public hospitals should be torn down because Hurricane Katrina inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, the head of Louisiana's charity hospital system said Wednesday.

Charity and University hospitals "were issued their death warrant by Katrina and the cataclysmic floods it spawned," Donald R. Smithburg told the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors.

[Last modified October 6, 2005, 01:15:08]