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   Vol. 69/No. 36           September 19, 2005,         SPECIAL ISSUE  
 
 
Workers warehoused at Houston Astrodome speak out
 
BY JOSÉ ARAVENA
AND ANTHONY DUTROW
 
HOUSTONTexas governor Richard Perry hung out the ‘No Vacancy’ sign September 4, claiming the state had reached its capacity in housing some 240,000 working people from the New Orleans area who fled or were evacuated here in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

These reporters were able to talk with workers and their families, gathered at corners or under the small shade trees that surround the Houston Reliant Stadium, Reliant Center, and Astrodome complex.

Most had been penned up in the New Orleans Superdome for days before being bussed into the Houston stadium complex. All were wearing neon pink bracelets that allow them to re-enter the center.

Tony Riley, her husband Raymond, and daughter Candy, spoke about their five days in the Superdome. “The soldiers searched me and took my son’s schizophrenia medicine,” Tony said, “and I never got it back. They finally got to us with food and water but they would just go to an area of the dome open up a box of MREs (Army-issued food packets) and throw it down in front of us like we were dogs.”

Raymond said he could not get over the backed-up sewage system and the constant, overwhelming stench of human feces. “That was the most humiliating experience of my life.”

Candy, 25, who worked at a Wal-Mart store in New Orleans, expressed her anger at the mayor and other officials in charge. “They could have put us on the barges and the big cruise ships on the river before the hurricane and floods hit and gotten us out of there,” she said.

Many of those Militant reporters talked to were eager to expose the treatment they received at the hands of police and other government personnel. “I don’t have any idea what I’m going to do now,” Dorothy Milton, a 35-year-old single mother, said. She arrived here September 1 with her brother, sister, and four children. She described wading through neck-deep water until they got to the dome in New Orleans where, “We were treated like animals, I felt like Rodney King after that.” Milton added, “Now it’s like we’re homeless.”

Margaret Gordon, who worked at a retirement home in New Orleans, explained she was picked up in the projects where she lived with her daughter. “The police treated us so bad,” she said, “they threatened to leave us there under the overpass, they were pushing us around.” Like so many other parents, Gordon is separated from her child. “I still don’t know were she is,” she said.

Jerome Barra, a restaurant worker, described how he left his apartment and made it on his own to the Superdome. “We were there for four days before we were evacuated. It was terrible,” he told the Militant. “There was a lack of medical attention, and people didn’t get properly fed. There were no lights and no water. The bathrooms were getting backed up. And there were dead bodies everywhere.”

Barra gave a picture of the cooperation among people rarely mentioned in press reports. “We were all helping each other out,” he said, “bringing the elderly people to the front, holding people, getting them medical attention —we were doing all that.” On the other hand he described National Guard members with M16 rifles, fingers on the trigger. “They did not have to be over us like we were enemies when we were only looking for help.”

While most who have been bussed into Houston are from the largely Black working-class neighborhoods of New Orleans, many Latino workers were also trapped there. A first wave of 500 arrived, including Honduran workers who had fled to New Orleans when Hurricane Mitch devastated their country in 1998.
 
 
Related articles:
Gulf social disaster: twin capitalist parties at fault,
workers need labor party based on fighting unions

Workers outraged at class-biased and racist gov’t response
‘We had to organize to get what we needed’  
 
 
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