(HISD) school employees drove evacuees home from shelters
We told you the other day about HISD providing the city with last minute shelters and then HISD driving over 400 of those evacuees back to where they came from. Yesterday Matt Stiles wrote a story about the mayor's last-minute shelter plan and, well, read on:
But at least 400 remained later Saturday at Delmar Stadium Fieldhouse, a domed structure on Mangum road, as school district officials and the American Red Cross decided what to do with them.
They expressed mixed emotions as they waited in the dim, hot high school gymnasium.
A few, interviewed before HISD officials ordered a Chronicle reporter and photographer out of the facility, were grateful they were spared weathering the storm outdoors.
Others felt abandoned at the crowded site, saying they didn't know when they would leave or where they would go.
"These aren't affluent people, and they were treated with less respect than they should have," said Beaumont evacuee Dennis Daniels.
He pointed to people wearing bandages or sitting in wheelchairs, waiting outside the building in the early afternoon as the weather altered between sunshine and drizzle.
He and others at the site said those people had been brought to the shelter on Metropolitan Transit Authority buses from Ben Taub General, the city's largest charity hospital.
Hospital officials said they just couldn't take them all in.
"We were inundated with people who came to Ben Taub thinking it was a shelter," said Carol Oddo, Harris County Hospital District spokeswoman. "No one was discharged from the hospital who wasn't ready to go."
Others at the shelters, officials said, had been stranded on freeways in disabled cars or found wandering the streets in the hours before the storm came ashore.
[snip]
So school employees drove people around the city, dropping them off at their desired locations after clearing out the facility.
School employees? Which school employees? Oh! It must've been HISD school employees!
So let me see if I have this straight: the city's last-resort shelter plan was HISD, and then after directing people to those facilities, the city didn't make sure the last several hundred evacuees had a way back to where they came from. So HISD employees played taxi drivers. That was nice of HISD. Again.
As for the Chronicle reporter and photographer who were shooed away, if I was in a shelter as a hurricane was bearing down, I don't think I'd be too eager to chit-chat with the media. Matt Stiles is probably a great guy, but still...
KEVIN WHITED ADDS: A reporter and photographer were ordered out? My goodness, why didn't Kyrie O'Connor, Kristin Finan, and other Features STAR editors spring into action with a plan to impersonate a refugee? They could surely have smuggled in a small camera, and O'Connor could have praised the whole effort as compassionate and responsible first-person journalism!
Finan and O'Connor, by the way, continue to ignore our emails about that first-person journalism, and the reader representative, who promised to address the matter on his blog, has been missing for some time. Their treatment of the matter has not been what one would expect of professional journalists.
In any case, that stupid stunt of theirs might well have been on the minds of HISD officials, and may well hurt the Chronicle's news gathering efforts in the future. Stupid stunts sometimes have ramifications.
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 09/27/05 08:37 PM | Hurricane Stuff | Print | Comments (0)
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