The Crawling Chaos
Things have been so crazy since Katrina. For those of you who aren't exactly clear on where I live, I live in Lafayette, Louisiana, the next major population center after Baton Rouge. New Orleans is about sixty or seventy minutes from Baton Rouge, and Lafayette is about forty-five minutes from Baton Rouge. You have to keep in mind, that from here to Baton Rouge is all swamp -- the drippy low-lying Atchafalaya Basin -- and then from Baton Rouge to New Orleans it's a whole lot of swamp too. As far as livable land goes, Lafayette may as well be next door to New Orleans.
So I guess it's not surprising that we have somewhere around the order of 10,000 refugees from New Orleans staying in our stadium, the Cajundome. Blackham Colliseum has been turned into a shelter for all the animals that the people from New Orleans evacuated with, and I'm going to try and get in touch with whichever of the humane societies is running that to see if I can help volunteer this weekend.
When I said 10,000 refugees, I mean that those are the ones accounted for and staying in the shelters. Lafayette is positively thronged with people who evacuated on their own with their cars and families and are staying with friends or in hotels or trying to rent apartments in the city. Honestly, today Bryan and I had to run three errands: pick up a deposit from one bank and take it to another bank no very far away, and then buy milk and bread and butter and eggs at the store. We left two hours before he had to leave for work. It took us an hour and a half to go to two banks just to make one withdrawl and one deposit. The traffic is terrible, and every place you go to is crowded insanely even in the middle of the day -- restaurants, stores, the banks, everything.
I said that I thought it was because there are all these people in town with nothing to do during the day, so they're going out. Bryan says he imagines that a lot of the traffic is from people who're looking for work. I guess that makes a lot of sense.
My middle brother Christopher had just finished the paperwork on his new rental place when the apartment complex was told they had to stop accepting new applicants because they would have to start taking in refugees. My mother said she talked to several apartment managers and that they'd said that they were running at almost 100% capacity anyway, since the economy has been booming. Instead of selling an old white elephant house, Bryan's Uncle Steve managed to rent it for fifteen hundred dollars a month (I should mention that this is totally acceptable rent for a place like this, as it's a very nice house in a nice part of town -- but really, people do not rent in Lafayette for 1500 $. They buy.).
There just isn't room in Lafayette for all these people. There aren't jobs enough for them. There isn't enough housing. Our grocery stores do not stock enough food. Suddenly having a population spike of 20,000 people with nothing to do during the day is an immense strain on the city. David told me the other day it took him almost forty-five minutes to drive from his house to the target to do his shopping -- and this was during the middle of the day on a wednesday -- not a high traffic time.
When we were out at the bank I saw that All-State had set up a catastrophe claims center in the parking lot of the Home Depot. God that's going to be awful. There was a huge line, and our heat index gets up to 105 degrees easily during the hottest part of the day. They had no shade except a little mostly transparent tarpulian. They were standing on hot blacktop. I think this is ending up being a hard time for all of us.
And that's not all. I haven't gotten to the worst part yet.
Crime has spiked. There are several new cases of TB at the local hospitals. There is a critical shortage of RNs. I will remind you all that I am not talking about New Orleans. I am talking about the city where I live: Lafayette.
Word on the street is that there have been carjackers operating out of the parking lot of the Northside Mall and also out of the parking lot of one of the Wal-Marts in town. Some stores have been robbed. People have been held up and assualted at the ATM (verified by the mayor and sheriff). Houses have been robbed, and one man was killed, although they didn't kill his wife after she opened the safe (verified by the sheriff). Six houses were robbed night before last on Foreman Drive, right near the Cajundome.
Bryan says he guesses he can't blame people, stealing after they've lost everything they own. I'm not sure I agree with that. Everyone is doing everything they can. I'm terrified my city is going to become an unsafe place to live because of this. I don't want to have to worry about being attacked when I take out the garbage or go shopping for my groceries after dark. Everything has gotten very scary very quickly.
Oh, and I don't think I mentioned this. All the cellular towers in the area are overloaded with call volume. You're lucky if you can get a call through, no matter who your provider is.
And you thought it was just bad in New Orleans.
If you want to know what's going on in New Orleans right now, then you should watch this livejournal. I am.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/
So I guess it's not surprising that we have somewhere around the order of 10,000 refugees from New Orleans staying in our stadium, the Cajundome. Blackham Colliseum has been turned into a shelter for all the animals that the people from New Orleans evacuated with, and I'm going to try and get in touch with whichever of the humane societies is running that to see if I can help volunteer this weekend.
When I said 10,000 refugees, I mean that those are the ones accounted for and staying in the shelters. Lafayette is positively thronged with people who evacuated on their own with their cars and families and are staying with friends or in hotels or trying to rent apartments in the city. Honestly, today Bryan and I had to run three errands: pick up a deposit from one bank and take it to another bank no very far away, and then buy milk and bread and butter and eggs at the store. We left two hours before he had to leave for work. It took us an hour and a half to go to two banks just to make one withdrawl and one deposit. The traffic is terrible, and every place you go to is crowded insanely even in the middle of the day -- restaurants, stores, the banks, everything.
I said that I thought it was because there are all these people in town with nothing to do during the day, so they're going out. Bryan says he imagines that a lot of the traffic is from people who're looking for work. I guess that makes a lot of sense.
My middle brother Christopher had just finished the paperwork on his new rental place when the apartment complex was told they had to stop accepting new applicants because they would have to start taking in refugees. My mother said she talked to several apartment managers and that they'd said that they were running at almost 100% capacity anyway, since the economy has been booming. Instead of selling an old white elephant house, Bryan's Uncle Steve managed to rent it for fifteen hundred dollars a month (I should mention that this is totally acceptable rent for a place like this, as it's a very nice house in a nice part of town -- but really, people do not rent in Lafayette for 1500 $. They buy.).
There just isn't room in Lafayette for all these people. There aren't jobs enough for them. There isn't enough housing. Our grocery stores do not stock enough food. Suddenly having a population spike of 20,000 people with nothing to do during the day is an immense strain on the city. David told me the other day it took him almost forty-five minutes to drive from his house to the target to do his shopping -- and this was during the middle of the day on a wednesday -- not a high traffic time.
When we were out at the bank I saw that All-State had set up a catastrophe claims center in the parking lot of the Home Depot. God that's going to be awful. There was a huge line, and our heat index gets up to 105 degrees easily during the hottest part of the day. They had no shade except a little mostly transparent tarpulian. They were standing on hot blacktop. I think this is ending up being a hard time for all of us.
And that's not all. I haven't gotten to the worst part yet.
Crime has spiked. There are several new cases of TB at the local hospitals. There is a critical shortage of RNs. I will remind you all that I am not talking about New Orleans. I am talking about the city where I live: Lafayette.
Word on the street is that there have been carjackers operating out of the parking lot of the Northside Mall and also out of the parking lot of one of the Wal-Marts in town. Some stores have been robbed. People have been held up and assualted at the ATM (verified by the mayor and sheriff). Houses have been robbed, and one man was killed, although they didn't kill his wife after she opened the safe (verified by the sheriff). Six houses were robbed night before last on Foreman Drive, right near the Cajundome.
Bryan says he guesses he can't blame people, stealing after they've lost everything they own. I'm not sure I agree with that. Everyone is doing everything they can. I'm terrified my city is going to become an unsafe place to live because of this. I don't want to have to worry about being attacked when I take out the garbage or go shopping for my groceries after dark. Everything has gotten very scary very quickly.
Oh, and I don't think I mentioned this. All the cellular towers in the area are overloaded with call volume. You're lucky if you can get a call through, no matter who your provider is.
And you thought it was just bad in New Orleans.
If you want to know what's going on in New Orleans right now, then you should watch this livejournal. I am.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/