History > 2006 > USA > Weather > Hurricane Katrina

Evacuees (II)

Storm Evacuees

Remain in Grip of Uncertainty

December 6, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

BAKER, La., Dec. 2 — Wynaen Walker keeps a change of clothes, her prescription medications and important papers in the trunk of a friend’s car. When she leaves her FEMA trailer, she tapes handwritten signs on the door with her phone number. “I still live here,” one of them says.

Ms. Walker does this not so much because Hurricane Rita destroyed her house in Lake Charles, but because in October, she came home from church to find her trailer, in a park here operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, occupied by someone else. The lock had been changed. The meager belongings she had accumulated since the hurricane were gone.

“Imagine leaving your house, and you’re going right up the street,” said Ms. Walker, known as Nina, who was told by FEMA officials to seek out a homeless shelter. “I come back, I ain’t got no place.”

“They left me out in the cold,” she added. “I really panicked.”

Ms. Walker had been displaced by a family from one of five FEMA trailer parks at the nearby Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport that are scheduled to close in April. Though her move was a mistake, it is one that residents say the agency has made repeatedly in its trailer parks. And when the trailers at the airport are shut down next year, more than 600 families who took refuge in those parks will find themselves on the move once again.

More than a year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, life is still precarious and unpredictable for many evacuees, especially those who have depended on the government for a modicum of stability. About 102,000 families are still living in government trailers scattered around the region, and an additional 33,000 are living in apartments paid for by FEMA. What trauma victims need most, stability, is just what has proved most elusive.

Most families in the five parks that are closing have not been told where their new homes will be. In New Orleans, residents at two FEMA trailer parks were notified that the construction of a film studio nearby would mean ceaseless noise for months. Initially they were told the parks would close, but the families refused to move yet again.

For thousands more displaced families living in apartments, FEMA has cut off aid with little explanation, but the agency was ordered by a federal judge late last month to reinstate the aid and pay months of back rent. The judge described the ordeal of the families, many of whom have already left their apartments or are on the brink of eviction, as “Kafkaesque.”

The seesaw of daily life for the displaced is playing out against a backdrop of still larger uncertainties. Billions of dollars intended to help homeowners rebuild have yet to be distributed. And on Saturday, at a “town hall” meeting held simultaneously in five cities, Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans said he did not expect the city’s rebuilding plan to be finished until mid-January.

Mental health experts have repeatedly warned of the importance of a consistent environment for adults and children who are recovering from trauma, and evacuees complain that stress has aggravated their physical ailments, literally making them sick.

And people who work at the agencies trying to help evacuees no longer bother to conceal their anger and astonishment at the constant change in policies and how they are carried out.

“People are basically in many instances left to fend for themselves, while being hampered, if not prevented, from fending for themselves,” said Raymond A. Jetson, the chief executive of the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, a nonprofit organization started at the behest of Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.

Mr. Jetson added, “There is a misunderstanding that in some way these people have abdicated the expectation of being treated with respect and dignity.”

Jim Stark, the director of the Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office at FEMA, acknowledged that finding permanent housing had been “more difficult than anyone anticipated.” On the other hand, he said, “The travel trailers aren’t meant as permanent homes.”

For those who got apartments instead of trailers, the rental assistance program has been rife with confusing letters, repetitive requests and conflicting information from FEMA. The agency has consistently defended the process, saying that any denial of benefits can be appealed within 60 days.

But in last month’s ruling, Judge Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court disagreed, saying the inconsistencies amounted to a denial of the due process rights of evacuees. He ordered FEMA to clarify the eligibility requirements and “immediately restore” many families to the program. [On Tuesday, FEMA appealed the ruling.]

So far, though, said Cindy Gabriel, the spokeswoman for the Community Settlement Network, which has taken over for Houston’s evacuee housing program, the ruling has done little but create confusion, in part because FEMA’s lawyers have given no indication of how they will carry it out.

Christalyn Mavis, 20, an evacuee living in Austin, Tex., said she and her fiancé had been threatened with eviction for months while they tried to convince FEMA that they were eligible for rental assistance. In September, Ms. Mavis, who lost her mother in Hurricane Katrina, gave birth to a boy, adding urgency to the couple’s need for resolution.

“We were in the recovery room,” she said, “and I was getting in touch with my lawyer and caseworker from the hospital hours after giving birth.”

Tired of fighting, the couple now hope to move to a less expensive city.

In Baton Rouge, the five trailer parks are closing because the airport has declined to renew the lease. Mr. Stark said the residents who did not find their own housing would be moved, but the agency is not yet sure where. “We’re going to try to be as least disruptive to the families that live there as possible,” he said.

Yet even the moves that FEMA has already orchestrated have not necessarily been smooth. Kim Landry, the transitional communities coordinator for the Family Recovery Corps, said caseworkers knew of five cases like Ms. Walker’s in which people had returned home to find their property, or in some cases their entire trailer, gone.

“We do make regular sweeps through the parks, and we often find that people have moved without telling us,” Mr. Stark said. “If it looks like no one’s home and we haven’t been able to contact the folks, we will close the trailer.”

FEMA procedures call for three attempts to contact a resident by phone and the posting of an abandonment notice before a trailer is cleaned out. The contents are supposed to be “bagged and tagged” and stored for 30 days. But, an agency spokeswoman said, “maintenance and deactivation contractors” have a “realistic margin of error.”

Ms. Walker, who is 49 and has diabetes, high blood pressure and arthritis, was eventually issued a new, empty trailer. But the belongings on her carefully written list — “engagement ring $1249.99 pl. tx.” and “clothings new — (7) outfits” — have not been recovered. On Tuesday, she has an appointment at the FEMA storage facility to look for them. At the mention of this, Ms. Walker, who with her chipper grin, multicolored sweater and braided pigtails is a picture of stoic cheer, broke down like a child.

“The stuff that was taken out of my trailer wasn’t bagged and tagged,” she wailed. “Mine wasn’t bagged and tagged. It’s hard starting over again. You know. Everything. It’s very hard.”

Then she pulled herself together, straightened up, and smiled.

    Storm Evacuees Remain in Grip of Uncertainty, NYT, 6.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/us/06fema.html

FEMA Ordered to Restore Evacuees’ Housing Aid

November 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

FEMA has to restore housing assistance and pay back rent to thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees who had been deemed ineligible for long-term housing assistance, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote that the agency also had to improve an appeals process that evacuees had long said was confusing, contradictory and amounted to an arbitrary denial of help.

“It is unfortunate, if not incredible, that FEMA and its counsel could not devise a sufficient notice system to spare these beleaguered evacuees the added burden of federal litigation to vindicate their constitutional rights,” Judge Leon wrote.

The suit was brought by Acorn, a housing advocacy group that runs the Katrina Survivors Association. Michael Kirkpatrick, a lawyer with Public Citizen who represented Acorn, said that as many as 11,000 families could be affected based on numbers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided in court papers.

A spokesman for the agency, Aaron Walker, said it had not decided whether to seek a stay of the decision.

Last spring, the agency began notifying thousands of families given emergency shelter that they did not qualify for long-term help with rent and utility payments. That surprised many families who had been given housing vouchers valid for a year.

For months, families who had lost everything struggled to understand why they had been rejected and how to appeal that decision.

In a process that Judge Leon called Kafkaesque, families received notification letters with “reason codes” instead of actual reasons, were given different information each time they called the agency help line or found that the agency had erroneously determined that their house had “insufficient damage” or that someone else in their household (often a roommate) had already applied for assistance.

Mayor Bill White of Houston, where many evacuees fled from the Gulf Coast, was so outraged that he sent building inspectors to New Orleans to certify that the evacuees’ houses were uninhabitable.

“Some families were told, ‘Reason for denial: Other,’ and there’s no explanation for what ‘other’ means,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said.

Some families received two letters with two different codes.

The judge said that the lack of clarity deprived evacuees of their rights of due process, pointing out that the agency had conceded that thousands of families had been incorrectly ruled ineligible.

In a statement after the decision, Mr. Walker of FEMA continued defending the process, saying the agency had given applicants 60 days to appeal and had listed the requirements.

“Additionally,” Mr. Walker wrote, “FEMA established a team dedicated to handling appeals on an expedited basis and initiated calls to applicants in an effort to help them understand what documentation was needed to process their case.”

The transfers of families from emergency housing to long-term help began last spring. Mayor White repeatedly persuaded the agency to delay evictions while it reviewed each family’s file.

The families who managed to stay in apartments financed by the agency until the end of August are entitled to the reinstatement of rent payments and reimbursement for three months’ back rent, the judge said.

All families deemed ineligible, no matter when, will receive more thorough explanations of the reasons and how to appeal their cases.

    FEMA Ordered to Restore Evacuees’ Housing Aid, NYT, 30.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/us/30fema.html

Among Elderly Evacuees, a Strong Desire to Return Home, but Nowhere to Go

July 24, 2006
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN

HOUSTON, July 21 — James and Delphine Lindsey, ages 79 and 70, are so strapped they have to make do with a diet of red beans and pig tails. They have family nearby to help, fellow evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, but if they lose their federal housing assistance, which they have been warned may happen any month now, things could get dire.

“We’re not going to be put out,” Ms. Lindsey insisted, looking around at her small one-bedroom apartment in Houston’s working-class Fifth Ward, a grocery cart parked in the corner beside her wheelchair. “We’re not going out on the street. No, no. We’ll just have to start the penny-pinching, that’s all.”

Thousands of elderly evacuees like the Lindseys still struggle every day to get by in cities hundreds of miles from their homes in New Orleans. But it is the elderly who want most to return, say social service workers, and who have the hardest time doing so.

“There is simply no place for them to go in New Orleans,” said Walter L. Jones, director of community-based initiatives for Neighborhood Centers of Houston, which has worked with about 2,200 families displaced by last year’s hurricanes.

“There are no nursing homes — none,” Mr. Jones said. “There are no plans to rebuild the public housing where many of them lived. And those apartments that are available are priced way, way beyond the means of anyone on a low, fixed income.”

This week’s arrest of a doctor and two nurses in connection with the deaths of four elderly hospital patients during Hurricane Katrina’s flooding last year served as a reminder of the storm’s continuing toll on the city’s oldest and poorest residents.

In the storm’s immediate impact, 71 percent of the dead were over the age of 60, and nearly half were over 75. But the stresses and the vulnerabilities did not end with the storm’s passing.

“At no point in your life is it easy to pick up and be displaced, but it’s especially tough for senior citizens,” said Ginny Goldman, chief organizer in Houston for Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. “There are lots of evacuee issues that affect everybody, but they seem to affect seniors especially, because they can’t bounce back so easily.”

So perhaps, Ms. Goldman said, it is all the more surprising that it is this group who seem particularly keen to return to Louisiana. “I had a woman tell me she had to go back because she wanted to be buried next to her husband,” she said. “You hear things like that a lot.”

Henry Armstrong, 60, lives in a center for the elderly with his 82-year-old mother, Dorothy Griffin, who uses a wheelchair. Mr. Armstrong knows that his mother wants very much to go home to New Orleans, and he is willing, if he can get the most basic help, to rebuild his wind-damaged home in suburban Metairie. So far, he said, despite dozens of calls, he has had no luck.

“It’s so hard for my mother here,” Mr. Armstrong said. “Her arms have gotten so bad that she can’t even turn the wheels on her chair. She had a heart attack before the storm, and then another one afterward from the stress.”

The Census Bureau has estimated that 350,000 people fled Louisiana because of Hurricane Katrina, with Texas drawing by far the largest group of them. Houston alone added more than 130,000 residents in the months after the storm, most of them evacuees, the bureau concluded, though state and city officials believe that number is low by tens of thousands because it failed to count those living in hotels or shelters.

No one is sure how many evacuees are elderly, or how many of them have chosen to remain in the cities where they were resettled or have tried to get back home to Louisiana. The displaced population is so fluid, and often operating so far outside the nation’s data grid, that finding hard numbers is almost impossible, state and federal officials said, leaving only the various aid agencies to extrapolate from their own experiences to guess at the larger problem.

Don McCullough, disaster recovery supervisor for Catholic Charities in Houston, said that about 10 percent of the evacuees his agency helped were elderly, a proportion that other relief officials in the city said sounded about right. Many were able to live with family, others are on their own in apartments and rental homes. A lucky few hundred have found spots in centers for the elderly.

Only a relative handful have landed beds in nursing homes and assisted care facilities, aid officials said, because the costs of such care are usually beyond their means.

“If you are a low-wage senior, you are a hidden entity in our society,” said Marilyn Tyler, manager of Big Bass Resort, a year-old center for the elderly in the Houston suburb of Jacinto City that has become home to more than 100 elderly evacuees. “To be displaced by the hurricane only makes that worse. As far as the government and society is concerned, the same rules apply whether you’re 25 or 65. There are no provisions for these people.”

Generally more frail and financially and physically vulnerable, they are also more prone to stress, beset by nightmares, isolated and ill-equipped to manage a new start in a strange city.

“As we found out in Louisiana, when you have a real disaster, it’s the elderly who are least capable of taking care of themselves,” said Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, ranking Democrat on the Special Committee on Aging, which held hearings this year on the plight of Hurricane Katrina’s elderly.

“They are the most at risk and the most likely to be displaced or to lose their lives,” Mr. Kohl said, “just simply because they lack the physical or emotional resiliency or are not as capable of making decisions.”

Up to now, most of the attention by government officials and advocates for the elderly has been on how to lessen the impact of future disasters on the elderly. Only now is the attention beginning to turn to learning lessons from the problems Hurricane Katrina’s older evacuees have had since the disaster. Mr. Kohl said he hoped the committee would hold hearings on this issue in the near future.

Esther Lawless, 69, arrived at Big Bass Resort on Sept. 14, 2005, with her husband, Frederic, part of the first wave of Hurricane Katrina evacuees to find a home in the relatively new center. They had lost everything, but that is an old and common story in this community.

Most distressing, Ms. Lawless said, is the uncertainty. “We don’t know from one day to the next where we stand,” she said. “Are we eligible for help or are we not eligible? One day you are, the next day you’re not. They have you on this seesaw.”

If she could find a place like Big Bass in the New Orleans area, she would happily return, she said. But several months of searching has found nothing. “If there are apartments, I can’t afford them,” she said. “And they say there will be senior centers, but they’re still being built. They can’t even tell you what year they’ll be finished.”

    Among Elderly Evacuees, a Strong Desire to Return Home, but Nowhere to Go, NYT, 24.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/us/24elderly.html

 For a Town Swept by Storm, a Wound Before Healing        NYT

4.7.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/us/04highway.html

The Road Back

For a Town Swept by Storm, a Wound Before Healing

July 4, 2006
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

ORANGE, Tex., July 2 — This time a year ago, the river that separates southeast Texas and Louisiana reflected the blossoms of Fourth of July fireworks. The next month, Hurricane Katrina evacuees streamed across that river and were greeted by Orange with food, shelter and hugs.

People here just could not imagine. Three weeks later they could, as Hurricane Rita sent nearly all 19,000 residents fleeing north. When they returned to their small city, which calls itself "the sweetest taste of Texas, any way you slice it," the taste of Orange hinted of salt — maybe from the Gulf of Mexico, maybe from something else.

Gary's Cafe still sports a portrait of the Duke himself, John Wayne, squinting through the cigarette haze of pilgrims. The Farmers' Mercantile still sells feed for the cows and Bit-O-Honey for the kids. The Dairy Queen on U.S. 90 is still sprinkled with teenagers, lingering, longing.

At the Orange Public Library, the head librarian, Brenna Manasco, walks on new carpet under a repaired roof. In his restored studio, C. Delle Bates is painting again, but only angels at the moment. And throughout the city, as a persistent rain fell, thoughts turned again to Rita; to forecasts of Fourth of July wetness; and to a boy no one knew as Benjamin.

That's because they knew him best as Bubba, or Willie, or Dewayne, and you should have seen him carrying the football on those Friday nights. He always fell forward.

When word came last September of Hurricane Rita's approach, the city had little problem persuading people to get out of town. "I think what happened in New Orleans shocked people," said Shawn Oubre, the city manager. "So when we asked people to leave, they left."

Only to return to an Orange with an altered taste.

The hurricane damaged more than half of the houses and more than two-thirds of the businesses. It peeled back a third of the library roof, poured water on a shelf of old mysteries and deposited a single blue crab in the stacks. It knocked askew the First Presbyterian Church's massive copper cover for what is said to be the country's only opalescent glass dome, and punched holes beside 3 of the 16 angels depicted in the stained glass.

Beyond the destruction of the Buckley & Son fabrication shop, beyond the extensive damage to the Ford dealership and the Wells Fargo bank and the Dairy Queen, the starkest change to Orange was a sense of its having been stripped bare, now that thousands and thousands of its soaring cedars, oaks and pines — most too large at the trunk to hug — had toppled like saplings.

Few missed the irony. More than a century ago, Orange sprouted from the surrounding forests to become a lumber capital. Long after shipbuilding and chemicals came to define the city, the trees continued to shade Orange under a private canopy, providing respite from the relentless muggy heat.

Then, just like that, Hurricane Rita turned those plants of comfort into weapons of destruction that crushed houses, toppled power lines and blocked roads.

"The most notable difference to me is the skyline," said Ms. Manasco, the librarian. "It wasn't so much the trees on the ground. It was the sky."

Gradually, Orange was able to achieve an approximation of its former self, but only because it had been spared by a last-minute twist and shift that spun the storm surge toward unfortunate Cameron Parish in Louisiana. Orange was lucky, considering.

More than a million cubic yards of debris, much of it trees, was hauled away, though more still needs to be picked up. Most of the blue tarps over damaged roofs gradually gave way to new shingles, though fights with insurance and construction companies continue to be waged. The library reopened in February, the Dairy Queen in April.

The city made the best of it. An artist carved animal figures from fallen timber. Gary Stelly, owner of the local radio station, KOGT-AM, printed T-shirts for people to announce they had survived the hurricane. Prison inmates cleaned up debris from the properties of elderly residents, some of whom moved away for good.

With the Duke peering over his shoulder, Winford Smith, the owner of Gary's Cafe, said the city had actually improved. "New face-lifts, new looks, new paint jobs," he said. "The town is looking much better."

Still, a sense of the irreplaceably lost clings like the humidity.

Linda Warner, a longtime administrator at Little Cypress-Mauriceville High School, the keeper of the all-important ring of keys, lives near the school. She said that with the absence of trees, "the exterior of everything is so different."

"For example, I can see the lights for the football stadium," she said. "I could never see the lights before."

And she can still see him under those lights, the boy no one called Benjamin, helmet gleaming, dressed in the green and gold of the Battlin' Bears. The nicest young man, above average in grades and comportment, but put him on that football field and he became, as Mrs. Warner said, "a determined little sucker."

His old coach, David Williams, sees him too, refusing to wilt during practice drills in soupy, 100-degree heat. His best friend, Jerald Monceaux, sees him in the locker room at halftime, wearing a determined look of ferocity that cowed even teammates.

And his old quarterback, Buster Ascol, sees him in one game — against Liberty, maybe, or maybe Kirbyville — when the fullback he called Dewayne the Pain was hit three times, kept his balance with one hand on the ground and the other clutching the ball, and ran 40 yards for a touchdown.

"He always had this goofy-looking smile," Mr. Ascol said. "This goofy smile that said: it can get a lot worse; be thankful for what you had. He said it without speaking it."

A few days after graduating in 1994, the boy-man enlisted in the Marine Corps. He returned to Orange two years ago for his class's 10-year reunion at the Sunset Grove Country Club; still Dewayne, still a marine. Then he went away again.

Several days ago, word arrived that a Staff Sgt. Benjamin D. Williams, of Orange, had been killed in Iraq during his third tour. People paused awhile before making the connection between man and city.

"I didn't even know his name was Benjamin," his old coach said.

A memorial service for the boy better known as Bubba, or Willie, or Dewayne the Pain, is scheduled for Saturday in this storm-changed city. But its Fourth of July fireworks were at risk of being canceled, because of weather.

    For a Town Swept by Storm, a Wound Before Healing, NYT, 4.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/us/04highway.html

FEMA Halts Evictions From Trailers in Mississippi

June 22, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, June 21 — In yet another change of housing plans for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has suspended the eviction of 3,000 families who are living in government trailers in Mississippi.

The move is the latest in a series of announcements and reversals that have caused confusion and occasionally panic among families unable to live in their ruined homes in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast. For several months, FEMA has repeatedly changed deadlines, sent conflicting letters to applicants, and declared people ineligible for housing assistance for the lack of signatures or failures to appear in person for property inspections.

In Mississippi, 500 of 3,000 planned eviction notices were sent out in late April and early May, giving people 30 days to leave the trailers that the agency had provided. Many families complied.

But now, the agency is trying to contact the recipients of the letters with instructions to disregard them, said a spokesman for the agency, Aaron Walker.

Kathryn James of Pass Christian, Miss., who received an eviction notice in April, said she had grown weary of what she said was the constant backtracking.

"In the beginning," Ms. James said, "they were pretty much helpful. And now it seems that they don't really care."

Ms. James said that after the notice, she received another letter saying she was eligible for rental assistance — although few rental units were available— and still another letter saying that she was eligible for a trailer after all.

In Mississippi, nearly 40,000 families live in FEMA trailers or mobile homes. Agency officials said that in most disasters trailers were used just for long-term shelter, but that after Hurricane Katrina they were also provided for short-term emergency housing, which has looser eligibility requirements.

Since March, the agency has been reviewing evacuees to ensure that they meet the stricter long-term requirements. An evacuee who had insurance that covers interim housing would not be eligible for a trailer or an agency-financed apartment. Nor would a resident whose primary home was not damaged be eligible. Several families said they had been told that they could stay in their trailers for 18 months and did not know that they risked eviction.

An agency official who was granted anonymity because he is a policy expert and not an authorized spokesman, said the difference between emergency and long-term requirements had not been explained, because the agency's experience had been that shell-shocked storm victims could not comprehend such distinctions.

Mr. Walker said halting evictions was not a policy change but a delay for cases to be reviewed.

"We want to make sure that the people who have been determined ineligible are actually ineligible," he said. "So what we're doing is allowing them to stay in their trailers while we go through and dot all the i's and cross the t's to make sure that the case file is absolutely accurate."

Reilly Morse, a senior lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which helped evacuees fight eviction notices, said the move was a sign that advocates were becoming swifter and more effective at combating a system that sometimes seemed intended to discourage storm victims from obtaining the benefits that they were entitled to.

"But," Mr. Morse added, "it's still just a small piece of a very huge broken system, and it just lumbers on endlessly and leaves people in misery."

Heather Walden, manager of the End of the Rainbow trailer park in D'Iberville, Miss., said she suspected that some families in FEMA trailers did not need or deserve one. But there were others, Ms. Walden said, who were being unfairly evicted.

She was given an eviction notice, Ms. Walden said, because she had failed to provide proof that she had paid rent before the storm. After she was featured on a television report, she was moved into a larger mobile home, she said.

Mr. Walker of FEMA said the review did not indicate that mistakes had been made.

    FEMA Halts Evictions From Trailers in Mississippi, NYT, 22.6.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/22/us/22trailers.html

NYT        June 13, 2006

Lives Suspended on Gulf Coast, Crammed Into 240 Square Feet        NYT

14.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/us/14road.html

The Road Back

Lives Suspended on Gulf Coast,

Crammed Into 240 Square Feet

June 14, 2006
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

LAKESHORE, Miss., June 12 — If you were to fly over rural Hancock County here, you would see more than 9,000 of them, white rectangles clumped in sun-bleached parks and scattered in piney woods like pieces of a trashed picket fence. Pick any one, and contained within that FEMA trailer are lives in claustrophobic suspension.

Paulette Shiyou invites you into her family's trailer with a natural hospitality that has remained intact. Her husband, Hugh, offers a can of beer, and her son, Cody, itching to show you his card collection, his rock collection, his pocketknife, kicks off his sneakers.

And suddenly, in this tight trailer of 240 square feet, an 11-year-old boy's shoes loom like ottomans.

"I'm constantly yelling at him because you're always tripping over him," Ms. Shiyou says, scolding but smiling. "And he yells at me to turn the lights out."

Cody defends himself by nodding toward the droning television set that sits near the only door, about five feet from his cubbyhole bunk bed. "I'll be going to bed," he says, "and she'll be watching TV and have all these lights on."

As the television set gabs and a boy complains and a mother justifies her liberal use of lights by saying she just cannot tolerate darkness, not since the storm, it seems that in a FEMA trailer even words take up space.

FEMA trailer. The phrase has nearly lost meaning, so embedded is it in the national memory of last year's crushing hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided trailers to people whose homes were damaged or destroyed; got it.

But tens of thousands of people continue to live crammed in FEMA trailers, greeting this year's hurricane season the same way they said goodbye to the last one: in light-metal boxes that even a tropical storm could flip like playing cards and which seem so vulnerable alongside the brush fires crackling through some stretches of the Gulf Coast.

Ms. Shiyou hurries through her family's FEMA trailer back story, which is extraordinary, but here, mundane: Returning to a home that was miles from shore but destroyed, then moving like nomads, from a gymnasium to a warehouse to a tent to a FEMA trailer encampment for five months. Then, finally, back to their property, into this FEMA trailer on their former front lawn, where they have lived since March.

She takes you on a tour.

To keep from tracking mud into the trailer, the Shiyous have placed a recovered piece of their old deck on the ground. "This was the color of my house," Ms. Shiyou says, walking on it. "A country blue."

She takes one step into the trailer, and the initial urge is to hunch. Mr. Shiyou, a gangly 6-foot-2, stretches out his arms to demonstrate how he can simultaneously touch the ceiling with one hand and the floor with the other.

His wife slides open a door to her immediate right, revealing a room taken up almost entirely by the master bed. "You just crawl in from the foot and pull the blankets up as you go," she says.

The hangers in the small closet have to be tilted sideways to fit, and the space-eating fan is necessary because you lose the air-conditioning if you slide the door shut for privacy. Mr. Shiyou says he sleeps less than five hours a night because that is all he can take of this confinement.

Moving left, the kitchen, with the bread and cookies stored in the microwave, paper plates and plastic cups from Wal-Mart in the cabinet and a couple of Reed & Barton silver coffeepots the family found in the woods after the waters receded.

"I'm going to put them in my china closet when I get one," Ms. Shiyou says, talking over the television set, which is blaring MTV beside her. "He usually always watches cartoons," she says of Cody. "And it drives me crazy."

Take one step off the small stretch of tan linoleum, which she keeps clean with the mop at the door, and onto the patch of worn dun-colored carpet, which she keeps clean with the carpet sweeper beside the mop, and you are now in the dining room, living room, and practically into Cody's bed.

A small, hard couch. A small booth with a small table, under which are stored a blue suitcase, Cody's book bag, Cody's suddenly massive sneakers and shoes and his father's even larger shoes. Cody's bed, where he stashes Doritos, and the bed above, used for storing blankets and winter clothes.

Finally, the bathroom, whose door, when opened, blocks Cody's bed. You have to lean over the toilet to see yourself in the mirror. Mr. Shiyou practically kneels to fit into the shower.

This, then, is the home where the Shiyous had family over for an Easter barbecue.

"There was Vanessa and Joe, Jessica, Tim, Raegan and Kiley," Ms. Shiyou says. "And then Heather and Jasper, and then my niece Mindy her boyfriend, Josh, and their two kids, John and Jared. And wasn't David and Regina here? Yes, they were."

Mr. Shiyou, 43, is a welder, and Ms. Shiyou, 40, runs a check-cashing store. When they look out from their FEMA trailer, they see two other FEMA trailers, occupied by two of her daughters and their families. They can also see the raised dirt foundation where they plan to build a home at a higher level, even though the land is well beyond the flood zone.

Insurance paid off the note on their old home, and nothing more. They have secured another loan, but have yet to hear whether they will receive any federal grant to ease their financial burden. Either way, they plan to start building next month, and with luck will be out of the trailer by Christmas.

Dusk has descended; a full moon is rising over the gulf. Mr. Shiyou returns to working on the all-but-destroyed house of a beloved 89-year-old neighbor. Ms. Shiyou, meanwhile, recreates in her mind the home they shared for 10 years and lost nine months ago.

The Kia Sephia and the Dodge pickup in the driveway. The curio cabinet, with all those angels collected by her late mother. The framed family photographs. The children's encyclopedias. Her set of dishes, whose pattern was, was —

"God, what color was my kitchen set?" Ms. Shiyou asks, her voice breaking. She says it will come to her, but it doesn't.

    Lives Suspended on Gulf Coast, Crammed Into 240 Square Feet, NYT, 14.6.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/us/14road.html

For Many,

Education Is Another Storm Victim

June 1, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

BAKER, La. — For hundreds of children at Renaissance Village, this is their lost year. After fleeing Hurricane Katrina, they have landed in a vast gravel moonscape of government trailers, lacking even a playground.

All day they play video games, ride bikes or sit at a picnic table, watching men play horseshoes. They are not in school.

Of the 560 children who are evacuees and were enrolled in the Baker school district in mid-September, only 190 were still attending when the school year ended on May 19.

Part of the decline occurred because some families moved, but as of April there were still more than 800 children under 18 at Renaissance Village and the other trailer parks run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Child health experts and advocates for evacuees say that Baker, on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, is not unique. Throughout the areas where hurricane evacuees ended up, they say, are pockets where education has fallen by the wayside, raising the possibility that thousands of children could become permanent dropouts.

More alarming, said Sister Judith Brun, who works with children at Renaissance Village through the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, is that the problem is not limited to high school students. "I think the big reason is that school has not engaged them, not comforted and motivated them," she said. "They all had terrible stories racing around in their heads."

Since many of the parents did not graduate from high school, the children's relationship to school was already tenuous, Sister Judith said. "Any breeze is adequate to keep them out of school, any vicissitude."

On a recent Thursday at the park, children were plentiful. "I don't go to Baker Middle no more," said David Williams, an eighth grader who was hanging out under one of the two white tents that provide virtually the park's only shade. "I stopped going."

Lisa Casborn, 15, agreed. "Everybody stopped going to school," she said.

"Sometimes I get up and I look out the window for the bus," Lisa said, "and if the bus ain't out there, I go back to bed."

Parents, children and educators give a variety of reasons for the children's truancy. Most families have moved several times since the hurricane, and children grew frustrated when they could not catch up.

Some parents never enrolled their children because they thought they would be able to return home much sooner. Parents and children also cited separation anxiety and the perception that they were not welcome by their host students or teachers.

Linda W. Lewis, the principal of the Capitol Pre-College Academy for Girls, where many evacuees enrolled while they were living at the large shelter at the Baton Rouge River Center, had another explanation. "I think it's just apathy," she said.

Ms. Lewis said that some of the students from New Orleans, whose school system was notoriously poor, had trouble with the strict routine at Capitol.

In Baton Rouge and Houston, fights have occurred between New Orleans teenagers and their hosts. Dozens of New Orleans children were expelled or suspended and never went back. In Baker, children who were expelled had no alternative but private school, which their families could not afford.

"They were thrown into a big classroom without close monitoring, without the necessary mental health help that they needed, and the only thing they had left that they owned was their ego," said Tommy Cowsar, a volunteer who has been teaching children on site at Renaissance Village. "When they were pushed slightly, they pushed back."

Michael Lewis, an eighth grader who was expelled from Baker Middle School for fighting, said he had not gotten into similar trouble back in New Orleans. "You can't really hardly communicate with other people" in Baton Rouge, he said. "I don't know why they have such a grudge on us. They just do."

If it were not for the hurricane, Michael said, he would be enrolled. "I love school," he said. "There's no place I would rather be, during school hours, than school."

Mr. Cowsar said Michael had asked to join his group, whose efforts to become an official charter school have faltered. The group lost financing for the two teachers it had in the fall, and it had only a couple of volunteers to handle about 15 children ages 4 to 14. There was no room for Michael.

Michael said he had wanted to go to summer school, for which parents must pay in some districts. At any rate, he said, his mother did not have time to sign him up. "I want to stay in a child place," he said, "but life keep putting me in a man's place."

One parent, Trinest Sylve, said that two of her children liked their East Baton Rouge school but that one, her son Holden, stopped going after repeatedly getting into trouble. The school called frequently while she was at work, asking her to pick him up, she said.

Like many children, Holden did not view his absence from school as permanent. Some thought, however optimistically, that in the coming fall they would be back at the schools they left last August. Others, like Lisa and Michael, said they wanted to take summer school to make up for what they missed.

But Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the president of the Children's Health Fund, said children who disconnected from school would suffer more than just an academic setback, especially if they had untreated mental health issues. "It's almost like we're creating conditions for them that are virtually impossible to overcome," he said.

One problem, Dr. Redlener said, was that so many major questions about the future of New Orleans remained unanswered. "The kids really cannot afford to wait until all those big things are resolved before they stabilize the basics," he said.

While some children seem to have simply lost interest, others have found their enthusiasm thwarted. Chris Waller, a junior, said he was turned away by several area high schools that told him they were full. "I said, 'How can you deny a kid an education?' " he recalled. "And they said, 'Sorry.' I was stunned."

Chris's father, James Waller, a manager at a fast food restaurant and a leader of the Renaissance Village residents' council, said he waited until his son turned 17 in December and then enrolled him in GED classes for adults. He spoke from the front steps of his trailer, painted in the purple and gold of Louisiana State University, where Chris had planned to attend.

"Now my chances of going," Chris said, "are slim to none."

    For Many, Education Is Another Storm Victim, NYT, 1.6.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/us/nationalspecial/01truancy.html