Shelter for flood victims closes in Marietta

By Ralph Ellis

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Residents of the Red Cross shelter in Marietta began moving out Thursday morning as the last of eight metro shelters opened after last month's flooding closed its doors.

Shelter manager Nicola Phillips said  goodbye to the residents, many of whom she became close to during their brief stay. " You can't help but fall in love with them," Phillips said as she said a tearful farewell to 9-year-old Tiranke Sangare.

Like many people displaced by the Sept. 21 floods, Robert Ray of Austell and his family – three teenage children and an adult cousin – isn't sure what he will do. He and his cousin, Charlie Pope, work in landscaping and construction, two job areas hit hard by the economy and the floods.

“Something will come about,” Ray, 35, said as he smoked a cigarette outside the shelter Wednesday. “I try to stay positive.”

The Red Cross opened eight shelters in Georgia for people left homeless by the floods, with the Marietta shelter inside the Cobb Civic Center being the largest and the last to close. The Red Cross recorded more than 3,000 overnight stays across Georgia, said agency spokesman Reuben Brown.

Brown said Wednesday that relief workers were helping people find places to stay, if they can verify they are victims of flooding.

Employees from apartment complexes sat in the front of the Civic Center on Wednesday taking applications and offering discounts and deals to flood victims. For instance, the Carriage House and Riverside House complexes in Cobb County offers three months’ free rent to applicants who sign a three-month lease and put up the standard $300 deposit and cover utilities. The offer is only for people from the Marietta shelter.

Shelter residents looked to the future with various degrees of enthusiasm and fatalism.

Arnulfo Gomez, 34, carried a pink plastic dollhouse and garbage bags stuffed with clothing to his pickup truck. He, his wife and their eight children spent about two weeks in the shelter, which he said was pretty nice.

“After 9, it’s very quiet,” he said. “It’s very good control here.”

He plans to live in his house in Kennesaw, which had its furniture and carpet ruined by flooding, while his wife and kids stay with a friend. He hopes to finish the repairs in three or four days.

Tim Williams, 39, said he’d talked to numerous workers inside the Civic Center but gotten no help. The scrap metal worker lived in a campground before the flood ran him out. He injured his knee a few days ago and now hobbles around on a crutch. His work van is giving him problems.

“I don’t really want to talk to FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] anymore,” he said. “They’ve caused me a lot of stress and wasted my time.”

Dianna Gee, a FEMA public affairs specialist, overheard him and asked, “Would you like crisis counseling to help with your stress?”

“No, I can deal with my stress,” Williams said.

“How could we make you happy?”

“Give me assistance like everybody else,” Williams said.

Gee invited him inside to talk to more aid workers, but Williams said no thanks. “I’ll figure something out,” he said. “I was hauling scrap metal before this. I’ll haul it after.”

The Cobb shelter housed well over 200 people some nights, with people sleeping on cots spread across the basketball court. The number was down to 130 Tuesday night, Brown said.

When the cots are moved out, the Civic Center will return to its old life, with a martial arts tournament scheduled to take place Saturday.

Also planning their next move are Red Cross workers such as Roger Myers, 59, the shelter day manager for the past few weeks. The resident of Greenville, S.C., said Red Cross employees normally do a two- or three-week tour of duty, then go home for a spell.

“This has been a very peaceable shelter,” he said. “Everybody adjusted to shelter life.”

Staff writer Larry Hartstein contributed to this article.