Calm exodus still tough on evacuees

The hurricane devastation, the emotional exhaustion, the panic and fear — Felicia Leonard knows all about these things.

But the woman who had fled New Orleans to Atlanta after Hurricane Katrina made a very different decision than some of her family. She stayed here, eventually moving into a house in Norcross.

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Mikki K. Harris/mkharris@ajc.com

Janay Jones (left), 11 tries to watch television while her sister and cousins goof off in the Norcross home of relatives they are visiting from Louisiana. ‘I’m having fun with my cousins, but I feel sad about the hurricane,’ Janay said.

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Mikki K. Harris/mkharris@ajc.com

‘I’m just holding on, I barely have any strength,’ said Lynnette Gibson, who fled from Hurricane Gustav to a cousin’s house in Norcross.

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Now, as her relatives evacuate from Hurricane Gustav, the woman who sought help before is providing it now. She has taken in her cousin and her two children. She has given up her bed to sleep on a couch.

“It was family, and family is supposed to stick together,” Leonard, 31, said Monday. “I’m just glad we have a place for them to come to.”

Her cousin Lynnette Gibson lost her first home in Katrina and now fears she’ll lose her second. It took her two years to get her life together enough to move into a new home, and this storm brings back all the terrible memories: the flooded house, the struggles with FEMA and the insurance company, the sustained sadness.

In recent days, nearly 2 million people left coastal Louisiana on a mandatory evacuation order. Monday was Labor Day, a holiday that many would have spent celebrating the fruits of their labor. Instead, they worried about losing those things.

While New Orleans wasn’t submerged, there were scores of homes that suffered damage.

By Monday evening, Gustav had slammed into the heart of Louisiana’s fishing and oil industry with 110 mph winds. But it delivered only a glancing blow to New Orleans, which raised hopes the city would escape the kind of catastrophic flooding brought by Katrina.

As they did in the hurricane before, hundreds sought shelter in Georgia and in metro Atlanta. Red Cross officials said approximately 580 evacuees are in about a half-dozen Georgia shelters, the great majority of them having filled the Gold Dust Recreation Center in Villa Rica. Others went to motels.

But many came to Georgia because of family or friends here, and they spent the night on hastily purchased air mattresses, couches and blankets on the floor.

This time, they brought the birth certificates and other papers they would need to enroll their children in new schools, should it come to that. They brought laptops and irreplaceable photo albums. And they got out early.

Lynnette Gibson drove her own car. “I lost my other car in Katrina,” she said.

For many, Monday was Day Two, or even Day Three, of their storm-driven migration. The effect on Georgia was nothing like the epic influx of people three years earlier, when back-to-back hurricanes sent 100,000 storm victims rushing into the state. The response required a combination of efforts from government, churches and other charities. The government spent millions housing evacuees in motel rooms for months. Ordinary people welcomed strangers into their homes, volunteered at shelters and opened their wallets.

Three years ago, Rose Campbell and some members of her family were rescued by helicopter from the roof of a New Orleans school. The rooftop evacuation happened after five days of heading from flooded home to flooded home.

This time, Campbell, 61, said the family made it to Atlanta but the hotel they had reserved was full. She called a relative in Texas, who called the Red Cross and found them the shelter in Villa Rica, about 30 miles west of Atlanta.

For all that was different about this hurricane evacuation, much was the same.

After spending days and nights together, people in the Villa Rica shelter started to show some semblance of a community.

Elizabeth Harney pushed a broom and chatted with her husband, trying to make the recreation center in Villa Rica feel a bit like home.

Harney, 45, said they brought the essentials: clothes, food and milk of magnesia. “You know you’ll be eating lots of fast food.”

As for Lynnette Gibson, she had to get away from all the worrisome TV news Monday, so she spent part of the day at a bookstore. Her two little girls — Janay, 11, and Jayla, 6 — looked forward to spending some time visiting with their relatives and their children in Norcross.

But their mother knows that behind the smiles, the girls remember the TV news show during Katrina that showed emergency workers removing their neighbor’s body from her home. And Jayla still gets occasional nosebleeds that the family blames on their 15-month stay in a FEMA trailer.

An estimated 84,000 evacuees remained in metro Atlanta a year after Katrina hit, according to a nonprofit study.

Depending on what happens, Gibson said she might relocate to Atlanta rather than return home.

“Would I be willing to rebuild in Louisiana?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.