KATRINA’S WAKE
NEW ORLEANS — When John Yates wakes up under a blanket in the lush shrubbery of a French Quarter municipal park, he heads directly to a grocery and buys a 24-ounce can of beer.
“I wake up; I go get a Bud,” said Yates, 50, one of the few people who didn’t evacuate downtown when emergency buses showed up after days of uncertainty and violence.
He and an older friend, who have been homeless for decades, said they rode out Hurricane Katrina on Aug. 29 without injury, then shunned evacuation during the days of chaos that followed.
Roy Allain, a shelter official, said the men were among about 100 chronic homeless people who remained in New Orleans, which might have had as many as 3,000 people living on the street or in shelters before Katrina.
While widely publicized images in newspapers and on television showed long lines of emergency buses leaving Sept. 1 packed with people who lost their homes, a small number of hard-core homeless stayed behind.
“For days we had nothing. No food. No water,” Yates said.
He and several others survived by getting help from National Guard troops. As they always did, they slept wherever they could find a dry place.
“Why leave? Especially when you don’t know where they’ll take you,” Yates said.
Some street people here said Katrina had made survival easier because emergency food stations and cleanup jobs to earn a little money were plentiful.
Others said that with all but one of the city’s rescue missions closed because of storm damage, life was even more uncertain.
Freddie Lea, 49, lost an apartment he shared with a friend, a job, a dog and his pickup to the flooding. For him, daily existence is bitter. He said he chose not to board an evacuation bus because he thought he could restart his life by helping to clean up New Orleans. Instead, he ended up on the street.
He lives in a small tent on a sidewalk outside Washington Square Park a few blocks from the French Quarter, where a loose-knit volunteer group known as the Rainbow Family has been feeding people for two months.
“I’m stuck right here. There is no help. No real work,” he said.
The future for New Orleans’ remaining homeless people is grim, said Lou Banfalvi, director of the New Orleans Rescue Mission, which won’t reopen for months because of heavy storm damage.
“Day by day the homeless come by asking if they can stay,” Banfalvi said. “We have to turn them away. We’ve turned away 30 or 40 in the last two weeks. Some of them have stayed with us for years. Now they have no place.”
