Positives after Katrina

[Aurora63]

With all the horrendous realities going on in N.O. and the surrounding area, I thought it might be good to start a thread highlighting some of the positive things coming after the storm.

Here's one, from Yahoo.com News.

Utah May House 1,000 Hurricane Refugees By DEBBIE HUMMEL, Associated Press Writer
10 minutes ago



SALT LAKE CITY - Utah is ready to accept up to 1,000 people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Gov. Jon Huntsman said Wednesday. The state of Louisiana asked for help housing the refugees, he said.


"We did a quick calculation as to what we could accommodate immediately and we came up with 1,000," Huntsman said. "I'm glad Utah is seen as a community that will reach out charitably."

The displaced residents would likely stay in housing at the Army National Guard's Camp Williams in Draper or at an overflow shelter in Midvale, both Salt Lake City suburbs.

The state can provide such basic services as shelter, food, clothing and schooling for children.

It is not clear how soon people might be relocated to Utah, but once here they could stay for up to four months, Huntsman said.

He also said that Utah is prepared to send up to 200 Utah National Guard troops to the area immediately if needed.

The Utah departments of health, public safety and homeland security also are prepared to assist in rescue, recovery and rebuilding efforts, he said.

"This could be the state of Utah we're talking about. We're doing it for our neighbors this time, but it could well have been Utah," Huntsman said.

Also Wednesday, pallets of sleeping bags and other relief supplies were transferred from the Mormon church's central storehouse to trucks headed to Louisiana and Mississippi. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has 14 truckloads of supplies including food, water and tents en route to the hurricane-ravaged region.

And the Best Friends Animal Society, which operates an animal sanctuary in southern Utah, has volunteered to work with animal rescue groups and local officials to help reunite people with their pets.

"Local authorities are prohibiting or strongly discouraging people from returning to homes they have evacuated," said regional coordinator Paul Berry, who is directing Best Friends efforts on the Gulf Coast. "So as we gather details of where pets were left behind, we'll be working with all the other rescue teams and organizations to pick them up and reunite them with their families."

___

Editor's Note:

People who lost their pets or left them behind can e-mail hurricane(at)bestfriends.org for help.


Let's post some more, everyone!

 

[Free4Life11]

This is a wonderful thread.

America responds to Hurricane Katrina

BILOXI, Miss. - On a hot Mississippi summer day, a meal of chili, green beans and a refreshing fruit cocktail was appreciated by survivors in the hurricane-ravaged town of Biloxi.

Sandra Douglas and her two boys, along with scores more at a Baptist Church, were the recipients of generosity now stretching across America.

“Without then, we don't know where we'd get our next meal from,” says Douglas. “There are not many stores open.”

The Baptist Church feeding station is one of a half dozen sent by the Southern Baptist Convention from several states.

“You see a brother in need and you're supposed to minister to him,” says volunteer Vernon Boteler. “And that's what we're doing.”

The empathy is coming from everywhere. In Minnesota, volunteers who normally fight forest fires were packing for a 1,200-mile drive south, for, as Eric Carlson put it, the most basic reason: “I think we can do some good.”

On Long Island, N.Y., Jennifer Vomvas went online, opening her heart and more to Katrina's victims.

“We have a dry home, we have electricity, we have food and water,” offers Vomvas. “We'd be willing to share it.”

In Georgia, a FEMA warehouse was dispatching a million meals and 300 trucks of water.

Bea Roahde, who was helping in the relief efforts, said, “You just feel so small when the people thank you for bringing them water.”

There is one big problem. With so much aid arriving and needing to be distributed over the course of weeks and months, nearly every warehouse along the Gulf Coast has been destroyed.

Said one local official, “I need a 50,000-square-foot building right now. If you've got one, call me.”

For now, Sandra Douglas and her boys, like so many of her neighbors, are grateful to see the best of humanity can be revealed in the worst of times.

 

[kejoda]

All i can say is God bless Texas!!!!

 

[binny]

Thats great news thanks for sharing!!!

 

[DawnCt1]

I am reminded of a line from Apollo 13, This will not be our darkest hour but our finest moment.

 

[mt2]

I saw this on the news tonight. There is a man there with a warehouse full of food and he is going to feed as many people as possible. He told the reporter that he had enough to feed 30,000 - 40,000 people. I'll try to find the link.

It was on the DFW news.

mt2

 

[Aurora63]

Here's another one, from the Times-Picayune. Long, but worth a read.

SLIDELL -- As he pushed his skiff past the big boats aground on the interstate, Mike Parks feared the worst.

On the horizon, Parks could just make out the catamaran perched atop the twin-span bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. To his left, car antennas poked above the surface of the white caps splashing against a dealership's display windows, and to his right was the vast, watery plain of Oak Harbor and Eden Isles, the upscale neighborhood that at daybreak had contained more than 1,000 houses, a marina and a sprawling three-story apartment complex with scores of units.

The north shore of Lake Pontchartrain -- the one that existed before Hurricane Katrina -- was some three miles to the south. The home Parks and his wife, Melinda, had moved into less than a year ago was about 2 3/4 miles south. It was Monday about 3 p.m., roughly four hours after Katrina's ferocious eye wall had shaved Slidell and roared off northeastward toward the Mississippi coast.

"Oh, man, oh, man, I just don't know, I had no idea it would be as bad as this," Parks said as he navigated what had once been a golf course fairway. In every direction, Parks saw houses without roofs, with boats smashed through garages and walls, with possessions mean and exquisite spilling into the dirty water that lapped into their foyers and bedrooms.

The tops of street signs provided some landmarks, but what was once an intricate web of streets and canals was now simply a marine wasteland.

"Even if insurance covers it, do we want to rebuild?" Melinda asked.

Parks, jumping out of the skiff now and then to push it across the shallow water over a driveway, shook his head.

"Let's see if there is anybody we can help first," he said.

And so, like a Titanic lifeboat crew, they puttered amid the wreckage of Slidell, where authorities said Katrina had killed at least two people and left untold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of residents homeless.

In knots creeping along the water's edge, or in motorboats that crisscrossed the flooded landscape, people scavenged for scraps of their former lives. Communications were out everywhere; even fire and rescue crews were having trouble staying in touch with each other. News from New Orleans or Mississippi was nonexistent and the blackout over St. Tammany Parish meant that radio broadcasts carried no information about what was happening across the north shore.

Throughout Oak Harbor and Eden Isles, a creepy calm seemed to have settled over the flotsam of forever-shattered lives. In canal network cul de sacs, swaths of boards and shingles and bobbing coolers and appliances formed what appeared to be a solid mass, as if one could walk across the wreckage to the flooded homes just beyond. Boats, some of them whacking big yachts, were aground at weird angles, the air filled with the high- pitched thwack and ping of lines whipping across their booms and masts. Cars had been tossed into homes. Insulation foam bubbled around the fringes of ragged, ripped edges of houses.

And then a screaming came across the water. To his right, Parks saw a woman gesticulating wildly from a second-floor balcony at her home. Parks, a captain of sport fishing boats and offshore supply vessels who works out of Gulfport, Miss., navigated closer.

The woman, Ann Nash, told Parks her in-laws were trapped in their house nearby. She had spoken to them that morning, as they crawled into their attic to escape the rising storm surge. Parks agreed to check on them.

But the exact address proved difficult to find. So the Parkses pushed on further south toward their own house, figuring they could stop by Nash's in-laws on the return. By now, they were certain they would find little, if anything, worth salvaging.

And then, incredibly, when they motored into the canal behind Cutty Sark Cove, there was their home, largely intact, and sitting atop one of the few mounds of grass still visible. Inside, a slippery layer of mud coated the stone floors and had ruined the carpets, but the water had not reached that high, and the meticulous cutout and crayoned tigers and balloon vendors on one wall -- the artwork of Aaron and Brady Parks, identical 2- year-old twins currently residing with grandparents in Baton Rouge -- was intact.

Melinda Parks opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water.

"I do not believe it," she said, shaking her head. "I am pleasantly surprised beyond belief."

The Parkses quickly surveyed their astonishing good fortune, stuffed Hershey bars and crackers into a Ziploc baggie, and returned to their skiff. This time, rather than leave the search for the Nashes to chance, he picked up Ann Nash at her home and set off once again.

With Ann Nash guiding, Parks returned to a pocket of a canal he'd searched before, but this time the cries from the boat were returned from shore. Jim Nash, 77, and his wife, Odette, 65, had heard the yells before but could not get out of their attic in time to respond.

Parks cut the motor and the skiff drifted on to the back porch, and the grateful, stunned Nash family was reunited. They were surprisingly upbeat given what they'd endured.

"We really thought we could make it; we were told the water had never gotten much higher than the docks, even in big storms," Odette Nash said.

Indeed, she had just ended a cell phone conversation with an evacuated neighbor about 8 a.m. when she looked out her back window and saw the water coming over the edge and charging her house like a train in a tunnel.

"We just scrambled to the attic and prayed, and we've been up there ever since," Odette said.

As the now-crowded skiff returned to Ann Nash's house, Parks encountered two St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's deputies in another boat.

"Are you OK?" one deputy shouted across the canal. "What are you doing out here?"

"We're fine," Parks sang back. "We're rescuing people."

"That's just fine. Thank you," the deputy replied. "We're the first boat that could get out here." "Second boat," Melinda Parks said softly, a smile creasing her face.

The Nashes deposited on higher ground, Parks turned his skiff toward the Oak Harbor marina and, across the horizon, the oddly lumpy line of the twin-span bridges that carry Interstate 10 across Lake Pontchartrain. Even from a distance, it was clear the marooned catamaran was the least of the bridges' concerns. Katrina had left both the eastbound and westbound elevated stretches structurally unsound.

The same was true of the marina, where boats had been tossed about recklessly. One giant vessel had pierced a three-story apartment building, parked their half inside and half outside the wrecked building. Now, hours into his odyssey, Parks faced less light and more wind, and he needed to return to the interstate where he could pull his skiff ashore before dark.

And then another voice wafted across the increasingly unruly water.

On a strip of land still left along what had been the lake's north shore, standing among the demolished camps and houses and restaurants that had once faced the water, a man was waving his arms above his head.

Parks crossed over, his skiff slapping on the waves, and found Jim Elorriaga, a New Orleans blues musician who goes by the simpler name of E.L.

"Do you want a lift?" Melinda Parks yelled. "Oh, God, do I," E.L. said.

As the skiff pulled up in some reeds, E.L. began to relate his tale.

Trapped in his apartment along the lake's edge, he had gone first to the second floor and then the roof as Katrina built in fury and the water rose.

Finally, with the water closing over the top of his roof, Elorriaga saw the Sundance sailboat adrift and passing nearby. He said he jumped to a floating refrigerator and from there to the boat, which began to lurch about crazily in the tempest.

Eventually, the Sundance rammed an even bigger boat, and the two of them ran aground in a T. With his belongings and home gone, Elorriaga sat down to wait for help.

"I even lost my dog, Woody," he said in despair.

But, as it happened, the Parkses had seen Woody earlier. He was nearby, jumping among the wreckage floating around a gas storage tank. Elorriaga splashed off and soon was carrying Woody in his arms.

It was nearing 7 p.m. when Parks finally turned north and headed back to the interstate. By the time he returned, the water had receded enough so that Slidell Fire Department units had been able to set up a command post near where the interstate meets Lake Pontchartrain.

Firefighters scrambled into the shallows and helped pull up Parks' boat, and then got a heavy jacket around Elorriaga. The rescue crews were still desperate for information, asking about survivors and the extent of the destruction in Eden Isles, and possessing little news about New Orleans or Mississippi.

"It's like St. Tammany is a black hole," one firefighter muttered. "They don't know anything at all has happened here."

 

[Boston Tea Party]

They're fixin' to have a big slumber part in the Astrodome...

And Houston ISD is taking the kids who need school...

And the Gallery Furniture man is going to let people live in his store and feed them...

 

[ducklite]

Looks like the DIS'es MrsKreamer is NOT homeless! I got a very preliminary 3rd hand report that her street remained dry, and there is some wind damage, but nothing not "fixable".

That was some nice news to get

Anne

 

[Cyndirella]

Here's another 'feel good' thing - people from all over the US generously offering room in their homes to Katrina victims:

http://neworleans.craigslist.org/hhh/index200.html

 

[ColoradoBuffaloMom]

This just shows that most people are basically good, giving people.

 

[eeyore kelly]

I saw the LAFD dive by one the interstate towards NO with their water rescue equipment. It touched me to see it.

 

[grlpwrd]

Just read in our local paper that displaced students and their families are being welcomed here in Virginia:

Local colleges, schools taking in displaced students
Some are enrolled at Hampton and Old Dominion, others at W&M and Christopher Newport.
BY BEVERLY N. WILLIAMS AND JESSICA HANTHORN
247-4755
September 2, 2005
SATELLITE EDUCATION -- Thousands of students in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast region face a new nightmare. As their neighbors struggle to rebuild or even survive, the schools they once attended are heavily damaged or simply gone.

Colleges and public school systems around the country are hurrying to ensure that none of them miss out on their education. Late this week, they opened their doors and began welcoming displaced students into their folds.

Some students have enrolled at Hampton and Old Dominion universities and at the College of William and Mary. Christopher Newport University will accept students. Local public school officials are signing students up for classes or taking phone calls from relatives asking how to get children enrolled.

Aronya Fuller of Hampton plans to make such a call Tuesday, when most schools will begin a new year. Five of her cousins and their families, including 11 children, are scheduled to arrive from New Orleans on Saturday.

"They were so happy that school had not started here yet," Fuller said. "They said they can get things straight and get the kids in school."

Jo Lynne DeMary, the state's superintendent of public instruction, sent an e-mail to school superintendents Thursday advising them to enroll school-age children left homeless by Hurricane Katrina who are staying with relatives or family friends in Virginia.

So far, students have enrolled or are seeking information about schools in Hampton, Newport News, Suffolk, Gloucester, Mathews, Poquoson and Williamsburg-James City County.

"These children and their families are experiencing trauma most of us can only imagine," DeMary said. "Virginia's public schools will do everything possible to ensure that children from the Gulf Coast who have sought shelter in the commonwealth can continue their education."

The Louisiana Department of Education estimates more than 135,000 students can't return to school. In Mississippi, education officials estimate some 35,000 students are displaced.

No one knows yet how many of these children will seek shelter in Virginia, but DeMary said they and their families should be treated as if they were homeless, as defined by federal law. Under the law, homeless students are enrolled immediately and officials will try later to obtain birth records, required immunizations, documentation of health examinations and scholastic records - all of which may have been destroyed by the storm.

Colleges aren't bound by the act, but several schools in the area already are enrolling students.

Gov. Mark Warner requested that the state's colleges and universities develop plans to accept students enrolled in schools affected by the huge storm. At least 10 universities in New Orleans remain closed, including the 13,000-student Tulane University and the 19,000-student University of New Orleans.

Virginia schools since have scrambled to figure out how to make room for such students.

Hampton University officials said several students have enrolled. The HU admissions office received about 25 calls from students in schools in the New Orleans area, most were from freshmen who had been accepted at HU but chose to go to elsewhere.

"There's still room, and school hasn't started yet, so for them it's yes, you can come," said school spokeswoman Yuri Rodgers Milligan.

Meanwhile, HU is working with the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, the association representing historically black colleges and universities, to find space for students from two historically black schools in New Orleans - Dillard University and Xavier University of Louisiana.

Both schools are closed indefinitely. HU plans to accept students from the pharmacy and nursing programs at Xavier and nursing program at Dillard for one semester. HU also will establish a Web site for Dillard and Xavier to give updates to those students and faculty.

Xavier has about 4,500 students; Dillard has about 2,500.

"Hampton University is poised to offer any assistance necessary to the faculty, staff and students at our sister schools," HU President William Harvey said in a written statement.

The College of William and Mary has admitted one student so far, and the school will admit Virginia residents enrolled at schools closed by the hurricane who meet the university's academic requirements.

"We will somehow make it possible for these students to register and resume their education in Williamsburg," W&M President Gene Nichol said.

At least two students were admitted to Old Dominion University and like several other Virginia schools, ODU is reopening its admissions to let displaced students apply. The University of Richmond offered free tuition and housing, for displaced students.

By law, displaced students enrolling in the state's elementary, middle or high schools also can't be charged tuition and DeMary urged school systems to work together to find room for them.

"We're not looking for them to bring school records with them," said Rita Cargill-Brown, director of student services for Gloucester County. "Some of these children have lost everything they have. We're trying to make it as painless as possible for them."

Three students who are staying with families in Gloucester have enrolled in the county's elementary and middle schools and other districts are reporting similarly small numbers.

But Steve Chantry, director of student services for Williamsburg-James City County Public Schools, said those numbers are likely to grow in the next week or two.

"We're starting to see the trickling effect right now," Chantry said. "But as people from the southern region are able to get moving, we'll see more."

Staff writer Mathew Paust contributed to this report.

 

[LoraJ]

My boyfriend's mom's employer is paying them double time during this crisis and offering their employees temporary housing.

 

[gradtchr]

The state of Texas has authorized universities to allow evacuees to pay the in state tuition rate instead of the out of state rate. So many students want to continue with their college education and are very concerned about it at this time. The local universities are actually extending their application, and registration times so that we can accomodate these students.

Yesterday on the news I saw a man who donated his daughters old wheelchair to a family staying in Reunion Arena in Dallas who's daughter had CF. The man wanted the old chair to be put to good use and he understood the struggles since his own daughter suffers from it. That touched my heart.

Then 16 families have been found that had NICU babies who were transferred to Cook Childrens in Dallas. They had not been able to find two families but they have been found and all the babies are doing good.

 

[MinnieM3]

An owner of a nice apartment complex here is donating 20 fully furnished apartments rent free to Katrina victims for an entire year! How generous!

My school is collecting for the victims and today my third graders gave their "ice cream" money (they can only get ice cream once a week and is' 50 cents) into our Katrina fund. Another one gave the dollar bill she won spinning "the prize wheel" for selling wrapping paper. I was so proud of her!

Great thread!

 

[MinnieM3]

I know there are more positives out there!

 

[DisneyCP2002]

It's great to read these, thanks for sharing.

 

[eeyore kelly]

Our Local School District went out to Lamar-Dixon, were some evacuees and registered the kids for school today.

Our community is feeding the rescue workers that fly into our small airport, and the law enforcement who sleep at Lamar Dixon at night, before heading back to NOLA

Order has been restored near the super dome.

The President is signing a relief bill.