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US braces itself for Hurricane Gustav4:00AM Monday September 01, 2008
Darryl Campbell began his Hurricane Gustav escape at 4am. After 10 hours of lines and traffic, he was finally speeding down the highway to an uncertain future.
With swing jazz piping through the bus speakers, and the slouched shoulders of the elderly and poor filling the seats, he borrowed a cellphone to check on his mother, who had boarded another bus to flee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"The Lord is with everyone, so of course everything would be OK with her," he said, finishing his call and handing the phone back to its owner, a furniture maker who goes by his artisan name Ramsey.
Nearly all the 50 people on the ride yesterday, including Ramsey, said they might never return home to a city still recovering from 2005's Hurricane Katrina.
"I think once I get there [to Arkansas] I'm going straight to Stone Mountain, Georgia," said the 51-year-old, who has family there. "I gave myself a year and a half to make it in New Orleans. But the city isn't back from Katrina, and it's time to leave."
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By last night the evacuation of New Orleans had swollen to an estimated one million people fleeing their homes along the US Gulf Coast, as officials issued a hurricane warning from far-western Louisiana to the Alabama-Florida border.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin called Gustav the "mother of all storms" and told residents to "get out of town. This is not the one to play with".
Issuing a mandatory evacuation order, he warned residents that staying would be "one of the biggest mistakes you could make in your life". He emphasised that this time the city would not offer emergency services to anyone who chose to stay behind.
Last night Gustav - which killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean - had weakened to a Category 3 storm. But it is expected to regain strength to a Category 4 hurricane as it crosses the Gulf of Mexico and to reach the US coastline tomorrow somewhere between East Texas and Western Mississippi.
As New Orleans' poorest residents fled the city over the weekend, the interstate highway out of town became a place for evacuees to ponder their futures and the future of the storm-threatened city at their backs.
A few said they were eager to return to New Orleans no matter what Gustav left in its wake, particularly if they wound up staying in Shreveport, 644 km away but still in the same state.
But the bus driver was uncertain if the shelter would have space or if they had to press on another 370 km to Fort Chaffee, a former Army base near the city of Fort Smith in northwest Arkansas.
"Arkansas. Are you ready for Arkansas?" asked Damien Foster, 44, a chef who knew something about hurricane displacement. He left his home town New Orleans during Katrina and ended up spending the next two-and-a-half years in West Palm Beach, Florida. He had been back in New Orleans for only six months when he had to leave again.
Mr Foster flung his arm around a young woman he had never met before, and said he might have given up on the city for good this time. "If I can find the work, I don't have to go back," he said.
As they continued to talk, Mike Watson, 49, passed their seats. He had cooled off from being angry earlier in the day at television news reporters who pointed their cameras at his family of four struggling with their luggage in the evacuation line.
"Exploitation. That's what it felt like," said the construction worker. "It's just making us look like refugees."
Mr Watson said he would also consider a new life in Arkansas. He described himself as a lifelong New Orleans resident, finally beaten by the high rents brought on by the Katrina housing shortage and by the new storm coming to town.
"I can make it anywhere," he said. "That's what those cameras don't understand. Everyone on this bus just wants a better life, no matter where we find it."
Some residents ignored the evacuation order. Standing outside his restaurant in the city's Faubourg Marigny district, Dale DeBruyne prepared for Gustav the way he did for Katrina - stubbornly.
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"I stayed for Katrina," he said, "and I'll stay again."
-APNZ
From http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10529969
Incredibly sad. I don't pray often - but I am for this.
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