Katrina is bugle call to take note of poverty

SALT LAKE CITY — Some seemed ecstatic. Some, as they descended from the plane that brought them here, looked bewildered. When they were hurried on the aircraft in Louisiana, they'd been told they were going to Texas, but here they were in Utah.

Some clutched all the possessions they now owned in a couple of plastic shopping bags. Most had no homes to go back to after Katrina had destroyed everything in its path.

Some had been separated from their children or left other relatives behind.

Some had tearfully left behind pets that the crews in the rescue boats had said could not be taken aboard.

But their relief was evident as they set foot in Utah, on dry land, with good drinking water and food, to find a community that had opened its arms and its pocketbooks to them and would help put behind them the flooding and chaos of New Orleans.

Utah undertook to receive 2,000 evacuees ("Don't call us refugees," said one man, "We're Americans, not refugees"), from the stricken Southern states.

This first batch of several hundred was soon installed in a National Guard camp and determining where they should go after their rescue. After a couple of days, some left in buses for Houston to continue the quest for missing family members. Some left for other destinations to live with family members in states not blitzed by Katrina. Some liked the look of Utah and declared they would stay and job-hunt and make their lives anew here.

In the finger-pointing going on about bureaucratic ineptness in the handling of the disaster, there have been charges of racism. There was the ugly suggestion that a predominantly white community would have received faster relief than did the black community in New Orleans. But there was no hint of racism in the welcome that a predominantly white state like Utah gave a predominantly black group of evacuees from the South these past few days.

What quickly became known to the rescuers were the sorry economic conditions under which many of the evacuees had been living even before Katrina added to their plight. Many, although warned to leave before the hurricane hit, could not because they did not own cars. Many were unemployed. Many did not own their homes but rented them. Some lived hand-to-mouth in poverty. Said one young man of about 20, "I ain't going back whatever. Even before the hurricane it was a terrible place to live. Shootings, crime and no jobs. I'm gonna start my life again, maybe Utah. Maybe somewhere else."