Relative Hell

New Orleans:

NEW ORLEANS ? On Saturday afternoon, as the Louisiana Superdome was finally emptying out, a lesser-known humanitarian crisis was in its fifth day a few blocks east, at the wrecked, mile-long Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

There, up to 20,000 survivors of Hurricane Katrina, desperate and dehydrated, waited in the punishing midday sun to board buses bound for Texas. By nightfall, almost 19,000 had been evacuated, according to the National Guard.

The convention center was a disaster area, with excrement smeared on the floor of the La Louisiane Ballroom and people sprawled on dirty mattresses amid the stench of urine, sweat and rotting garbage. Outside, the street was clogged with trash and evacuees trudging with their meager possessions toward long lines waiting to board buses parked several blocks away.

Like those crammed into and around the Superdome, the convention center dwellers described living in misery among gunshots, looting and filth. They also spoke angrily of being abandoned by emergency authorities ? cut off until Friday, they said, from food, water and medicine.

"The only thing the authorities have given us is a bunch of false hope," said Debra Ann Spencer-LeBeau, 49. She said she had survived Tuesday through Friday on scavenged scraps of food inside the cavernous hall. "They just left us here to die."
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"Nobody tells us anything," said Dwight Wiliams, 34, a truck driver who came to the center Tuesday after his apartment flooded in East New Orleans. "They ignored us day after day. We had to survive completely on our own."

Not everyone was in a rush to leave. About 200 Vietnamese Americans from the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in the Michoud neighborhood of New Orleans sat patiently on chairs, chatting and playing cards. They had decided to wait until the crowds jamming the bus lines had eased, said Viet Tran, 17.

"We've come through this together, as a group, so we want to wait till we can all go out together as a group," Tran said.