I’m really fascinated by the reports I’m hearing of the now very rapid mass relocation of evacuees around the country. Here’s a USA Today article about the general wave that’s going out there, with some interesting anecdotes of creative, energetic folks:
David Perez, owner of a San Diego oil and gas company, spent $250,000 to charter a jet to Louisiana. At a shelter there, he told reporters, he offered rides to California. He got 80 takers, who were put up at San Diego’s Kearny High School. Perez then turned the jet around and went back for another load of evacuees. (More here)
As well as startling stats:
Some resilient, middle-class evacuees are already putting down new roots elsewhere. In Baton Rouge and Jackson, Miss., so many of them are buying houses that Sen. David Vitter, R-La., calls it "the great land rush." The average home price in Baton Rouge has jumped about $25,000, to $200,000, since Katrina, real estate agent Beth Alford says. One New Orleans law firm bought 50 houses in Baton Rouge, sight unseen, says Ann Prewitt, a Madison, Miss., agent.
Camp Edwards on Cape Cod gears up
In FL, at a thoroughbred-training center
I am pretty fascinated about how all of this works, and will work, and what the consquences will be. Of course so much depends on the future of New Orleans proper and the desires of the evacuees themselves. What is this mass forced migration going to do to the economic, demographic and social landscape? Do people have a choice when they’re evacuated like this? I mean..what if they don’t want to go to Cape Cod? I suppose when you have lost everything, you take what you can get, but the disruption of family and social ties is going to be tremendous. What I’m looking for are more stories that will get to the mechanics of all of this and explain it to me, being more exact as to what areas of the Gulf Coast are thought to be more or less permanently uninhabitable now, what those residents are thinking, what FEMA is doing with them, what choices they have, and what in the world they hope to do now…
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