I spent my last night in Houston in the Astrodome. It’s a much more chaotic scene than the Convention Center. The Astrodome is a gigantic complex that includes two stadiums, an arena, storage facilities and vast expanses of gated parking. It must cover several square miles. The sight that greets you is of evacuees milling about everywhere - talking in clusters, sleeping on benches, pushing strollers, tossing footballs wherever there are islands of grass; gangs of teenagers dressed like rap stars standing on the pavement looking tough; volunteers scurrying around with tasks to do; Houston police on foot and horse directing traffic; state cops clustered around their cars every few hundred yards; trucks unloading at cavernous docks; bags, boxes and pallets of donated supplies stacked everywhere. It was still near 100 degrees at 6:00 p.m. when I inched my car through the crowd to the medical clinic that has been set up in the Reliant Arena…
Houston’s two medical schools have split the job, with University of Texas staffing the medical clinic at the Convention Center and Baylor taking on the Astrodome. Both clinics have the feel of MASH units. Frame partitions divide the space into specialty areas: general medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, orthopedics, trauma. Each is marked with a handwritten paper sign taped to the cloth. Within each area are ten or twelve numbered examining rooms enclosed by white curtains. The acoustics are what you would expect in a cement sports arena - there’s a constant murmur of voices, you can hear every clang and siren, and a stethoscope is useless while the generator is running. All the doctors and nurses there are volunteering their time, sometimes coming to the Astrodome to help out after finishing long shifts in the hospital.
All the patients have stories to tell, most of them horrifying. One woman, who came in to get blood pressure medicine and to treat a skin rash, said:
You will never know what happened in that city during the flood. We saw people climbing to the attics of the houses, and then the water rose to where the whole house was under water. I’m sure those people never made it out. They died in their houses. I saw women with three-day-old babies in the Superdome, in the pitch black all night. With people shooting and dying. All you see in TV is the looters. But people were breaking into stores to get food. No one knew when help was coming. It was days, and we thought they had forgotten about us. There were old people, sick people. They should have sent in the army right away, but no one did anything. You will never hear the real story of what happened in those days.
She was glad to be out, alive, in Houston. She was very appreciative of the volunteers. I gave her prescriptions and told her she could go over to the pharmacy and get them without charge (CVS and Walgreens were doing this). She asked politely if she could hug me, and then did, crying.
After a couple of hours in the medical clinic I was pulled aside with a few others to screen evacuees to relocate to a cruise ship. A cruise company had offered a ship docked in Galveston. We were supposed to decide who was healthy enough to board. There was a very nice geriatrician named Aimee Garcia, and - of all people - Robert Rakel. He’s the author of Conn’s Current Therapeutics and a popular textbook in family medicine. An old Public Health Service hand, he’d come down with everyone else to voluteer. He’s not Sean Penn but, OK, for me, he’s a celebrity.
They kept us sitting around for about two hours, during which time we decided which conditions to screen for and made up a checklist. They weren’t going to tell the evacuees where they were going until they got to Galveston. Aimee and I objected - you can’t just bus people out to Galveston and then tell them they’re going on a boat. They have a right to make their own decisions.
Everyone agreed, once the argument was made - but in the end it was a moot point. We went over to the staging area across the arena at 10:45 p.m. There were two employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was coordinating relocation to the cruise ship, and about twenty-five people who were identified as FEMA “contractors”. Evidently their job was to process the paperwork. They stood out a bit as paid employees in a sea of volunteers.
Come 11:00, the FEMA employees decided to knock off. The processing would have to wait until tomorrow, they declared - as if it made little difference whether four hundred hot, miserable evacuees got to leave the Astrodome now or later. This lassez-fair attitude struck me as inappropriate in representatives of the agency whose slow response left thousands of New Orleaneans to die in the flood. I told the FEMA supervisor this. She smiled and assured me that my concerns would receive full attention in the morning. Then she left for her hotel.
Aimee and I spent the rest of the night running the gastroenteritis clinic. I want to emphasize that the City of Houston is doing its absolute best to manage the influx of evacuees - but this is what happens when you crowd six thousand malnourished people together in an open space on cots. We had a steady stream of patients with vomiting and dehydration. We laid them down on stretchers, gave them intravenous fluids, anti-emetics, cleaned them up, found them new clothes. Once they were able to keep down some water, we sent them out to the quarantine area. They were remarkably cooperative about it once they understood that they could infect others in the Astrodome.
One young man wandered in who was autistic and mute. He had been separated from his group. We had no idea how to find them. He was frightened as well as sick. Aimee contacted a local agency that cares for the retarded. They were willing to take him in. How he will ever be connected with his prior caregivers, I don’t know.
As the night wore on and patients came and went, I began to imagine that he symbolized all the hurricane victims. It’s as if they’ve lost, not just their homes, but their place in the world: their individual voices, their collective voice, their power to choose. Who is representing them politically? All kinds of decisions are being made about them without their input.
When I left Houston and had time to look again at the media coverage, this feeling was even stronger. The administration is working assiduously to shift the focus away from the disaster, away from the three days that people were trapped in the flood zone with no food or water, and toward rescue and reconstruction efforts now underway. We see soldiers patrolling the now empty streets, politicians posing in front of demolished houses. Everyone cares! The great crisis is be the damage to the President’s reputation. Can he save his legacy?
We should not allow ourselves to forget the real experience of the people of New Orleans, those who were abandoned in the flood. I hope their stories will be collected and told. I hope that they will not disperse silently to whatever homes can be found for them. I hope they will not be bought off by a $2,000 ATM card. Their lives have been changed forever. I would like to know what happens to them.
There is an opportunity there for community organizing. It’s not my specialty - but I think it would be possible to establish groups, elect leaders, create a structure for collective action. I put this out in case anyone reading this post has the skill and motivation to begin the process. The flood victims I met were strong, smart, decent people. Their story should not become what the press and the politicians want it to be. They should have their own voice. They should be allowed to decide their own future.
