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Refugees — and samaritans — arrive at Astrodome

HOUSTON — Gaynell Warden is cool and fed and safe for the first time in days, but already she wants out.

Gaynell, her mother, Barbara, her two grandchildren and other relatives, seven in all, are the founding citizens of Astrodome Town.

ERICH SCHLEGEL/AP Photo (enlarge photo) Hurricane Katrina refugees begin to fill cots on the floor of the Astrodome, Thursday in Houston.

On a sweltering day Thursday, Astrodome Town grew busload by busload with refugees from Louisiana: thirsty, hungry, insulin-deficient, heart medication-needy people who had, by 3 p.m., taken more than 3,000 green and red cots laid head-to-foot in 25 rows from end zone to end zone in the Astrodome.

By this morning, the number will most assuredly double, as emergency workers gird for an expected 25,000 evacuees from Louisiana in the coming days.

A coordinated effort involving federal, state and local officials and thousands of volunteers — many of whom showed up spontaneously outside the Astrodome Thursday — was prepared to do whatever was humanly possible to stabilize lives that had been swamped and, in some cases, taken under.

"We want to establish some sense of normalcy, if we can use that word, in these peoples' lives," said Mike Montgomery, the Harris County fire marshal. Social service workers have already arrived to help, and telephones and computers were being installed Thursday.

Anthony Lewis, 26, stood outside the Astrodome with the asthma pump for a child in a bag over one shoulder and a pastel print bag with nipple bottles of formula and juice on the other.

Lewis didn't stop driving the stolen po' boy truck until he got to Houston Thursday morning. The police in New Orleans let him and his family have it, he says, because they knew he needed it. In exchange, he agreed not to touch the medical goods in the store where the truck was parked.

"We were on the third floor of an apartment building, no food, no water, no nothing. Bodies floating by," Lewis says. "The police knew we had to do what we had to do."

But Lewis expressed what many people in Astrodome Town — most of them refugees from a shelter in the Louisiana Superdome — were saying Thursday: Now that we are here, how are we supposed to live like this?

Gaynell, 46, has been here less than eight hours. "I don't understand how they expect us to stay in this dorm for a month, maybe more," Gaynell says.

It can't help that her 16-year-old son is missing. He and some of the other boys in Violet in St. Bernard Parish swam out in floodwater on Tuesday. The boys came back with stolen boats to which the local police tuned a blind eye. The boats, Gaynell's mother, Barbara Richard, 62, said, saved their lives. Her grandson, however, went out in the floodwaters to help one more time.

"I want to believe he's alive. I feel him alive inside of me," Gaynell says, sobbing suddenly. "But nobody seen him."

The family arrived by bus in Houston at 5 a.m. Thursday. They received cots, showers, and a breakfast of eggs. Word got around that a kind of bazaar had materialized in the shopping center on the Kirby Street side of the Astrodome.

Hundreds of people walked back and forth to the shopping center parking lot, stopped along the way by social services and housing volunteers trying to find more permanent homes for the evacuees. Gaynell and Barbara stopped at the open trunk of a Volvo, where Wanda Smith of Pearland and her mother Betty Green of Pasadena handed out baloney and cheese sandwiches as fast as they could make and bag them.

Gaynell picked up three small bars of soap, three old towels and a garish pillow. Wanda and Betty had ransacked their homes for clothing and food.

"I just said this morning, 'Mom let's go,'" Smith says. "One woman I just gave a sandwich to said she can't find her children or her mother. I just hugged her and we cried together."

Houston Police office Cab. Noon, who coordinated the traffic in this lot swollen with people, warned that well-meaning volunteers setting up these kinds of centers would invite people from Houston who would take advantage. Noon already arrested one of the neighborhood homeless men on the lot who was telling a New Orleans story of a missing mother for free food.

Such displays, though, were swamped by a thousand acts of unexpected generosity. At the drive into the shopping center, a man with a hearing aid in his right ear and a tracheotomy scar on his throat jumped out of his pickup and, in a minute, handed out $25 McDonalds gift cards to four refugee families.

J.R. Gibbs says his family was penniless growing up in Atlanta and he was homeless for a time when he first got to Houston. He now owns an electrical business.

"This is what I can afford right now," he says getting back in the truck. "I know what it's like."

He cannot know what it will be like for Gaynell Warden and her extended family.

"I love the handout. I love what you're giving me but I can't stay in there for no months," she says trudging back with her supplies to Astrodome Town.

"I want to hear someone say there is something out there for me. I don't know what that is."

Mark Lisheron writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: mlisheron@statesman.com