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08/31/2005:

"In Search of a Place to Sleep, and News of Home"

SARALAND, Ala., Aug. 30 - Hundreds of thousands of evacuees from the New Orleans area stranded in overcrowded hotels, motels and makeshift shelters and on highways across much of the South underscored a new reality on Tuesday: an extended diaspora of a city's worth of people, one rarely seen in the annals of urban disaster.

As news spread that the devastated, largely emptied and cordoned-off New Orleans area would not be habitable until at least next week, hurricane refugees gathered in hotel lobbies and shelters around television sets beaming images of their waterlogged city and turned to cellphones and laptops, usually in vain, for information about the homes, relatives and neighbors they had left behind.

Hotels as far away as Houston (350 miles from New Orleans), Memphis (395 miles) and Little Rock (445 miles) were booked, and the American Red Cross had opened more than 230 shelters in schools, churches and civic centers spread through six Southern states.

Many found themselves wandering anew after maxing out credit cards or being forced to leave previously booked rooms.

America Williams, 34, evacuated on Sunday, piling into a sport utility vehicle with her boyfriend and 13 of his relatives - seven of them children. "They just told us to drive, to drive east or west to get as far from the storm as possible," Ms. Williams said. "Our intention was to go to Atlanta, but it was raining so hard we stopped in Birmingham."

After two nights in three $50 rooms at a motel, the family ran out of money and moved on Tuesday to the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center, where the Red Cross had just opened a shelter. "We're down to our very last," Ms. Williams said. "We came here for some type of assistance, some type of help."
nytimes.com