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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Trying to force authorities to open an Air Force base as a shelter, Jesse Jackson and other black leaders picked up 150 evacuees at the squalid New Orleans Airport and headed into the night.
Sep 4, 2005 | The New Orleans Airport sits on the north side of the city, removed from the bulk of the disaster that struck nearly a week ago when Hurricane Katrina battered the buildings, smashing through the levees and flooding the town. The highway leading into the airport is deserted, open only to official vehicles. The giant concrete overpasses are surreal empty loops, though nothing compared to the images inside the city itself.
I arrive at the airport Saturday afternoon with a convoy of three air-conditioned buses, two SUVs, and a state police escort. I'm with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, her husband, Ambassador Sydney Williams, chair of the Louisiana Black Caucus Cedric Richmond, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and State Sen. Cleo Fields. Cleo Fields has a plan to bring people to England Air Force Base, a decommissioned base in Alexandria, La., four hours northwest of New Orleans. The idea is to show up with hundreds of disaster victims and force the federal government to open the empty buildings. They did not receive permission from anyone to take the evacuees there. On Saturday a U.S. Army spokesman said bases, including England, were being considering as shelters.
When we left the Office of Emergency Management in Baton Rouge, Sen. Fields responded to harsh questioning from a television crew. The reporter wanted to know if they had working sanitation facilities at the base, and healthcare.
"These people are living beneath a highway," he responded incredulously. "It's been six days. Do they have healthcare now? Do they have beds now? People are dying, not from the storm. People are dying because they are being left to die." The reporter wasn't impressed. She wanted to know what would happen if they couldn't get in the base. "Worst case scenario: They'll sleep on the buses. It'll be the best night they've had in a week."
On the way to the airport we see six buses full of people, pulled over at the side of the road. We pass about 150 buses sitting empty on the opposite side of the highway. We see many other buses, also empty, driving in both directions. "You'd think they were full if you were taking pictures from a helicopter," a cameraman says. "All those empty buses moving around."
Around the airport the neighborhood is mostly empty, the stores closed. Many buildings were heavily damaged by the storm but not affected by the water that has submerged most of New Orleans.
Approaching the airport there are large groups of people sitting on the lawns in front. The airport looks like something out of a science fiction novel. Thousands of people are waiting outside the terminals next to an enormous pile of refuse. A large force of Guardsmen and police keep the peace. They patrol with automatic rifles at their waists, watch wearily from the roofs of sand-colored military transports. It's 90 degrees and the air reeks.
The people outside of the airport mostly arrived in the morning. Shuttled in from the Convention Center, the Superdome and the highways -- the causeway over Lake Pontchartrain and the I-10. Thousands of victims were waiting in the three spots. Less than a day ago there were reports of 4,000 people who were living beneath the highway, in the shade of the overpass. Most of these people have been stranded since Sunday in subhuman conditions. But the conditions now are no better. There is trash everywhere and people stand nervously in line, afraid to lose their place, hoping to get inside the airport where there is at least air-conditioning. Nobody has showered in a week.
"We were at the Convention Center five days," Charlotte Bradley tells me. "There was feces everywhere. Young girls were being raped. One night the lights went out. People were dying. People died in wheelchairs and they just put a sheet over them." With Charlotte is her blind sister and autistic son.
Also with Charlotte is her friend David Tousant, Sr., whose son is also autistic. "First we were on the bridge," he says. "I saw the waters rising and bodies appearing from the water. We were there two days when they came and got us and took us to the Convention Center. Then this morning they brought us here."
Thousands more people are inside the airport. There's a giant triage facility, like a big sloppy hospital. Seriously wounded and sick individuals lie on rows of dark green stretchers on the floor, some of them strapped into their stretchers. An old man sits on one stretcher in the middle of the floor, away from the others, a yellow band tied around his wrist. He's not wearing shoes and his pants are rolled over his knees. A doctor kneels next to him, asks him if he knows where he is.
A line of elderly women in wheelchairs sit nearby, their only possessions strapped in small bags to the chairs' handles. Each stares patiently ahead.
In the other part of the airport people are waiting in lines to be flown out or for buses to take them away. Nobody knows where they are being taken to or when. Time has nearly ceased to matter. Some people have bags; many others have nothing. Some just wander aimlessly. Families sit in corners, tribes that have formed since the disaster. A man in a blue shirt lies on a cardboard box next to the closed doors of the Body Shop, with its absurd signs behind the glass -- blemish cream, two for $10.
The people inside the airport are the lucky ones. They have air-conditioning and bathrooms. They don't want to go outside where the others are. They might not be allowed back in.
We fill the three buses quickly with the people waiting outside. Priority is given to women and children and elderly people as well as families. We take 150 people. Nobody asks where the buses are headed. Nobody cares. And I begin to worry. Permission has not been given to transport these people to the Air Force base. I worry that these victims are being used as fodder for a political agenda. I wonder where they would have been taken if the Black Caucus had not shown up with their own buses. Somewhere better? But then I think at what point do you just go? I wouldn't wish that airport on anyone. I console myself with Sen. Fields' comments earlier: Even if these people sleep on the buses it will be better than their last six nights.
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