The Disaster Recovery Center in Houston that was supposed to FINALLY open today at 8am... it opened. And then it closed again! I don't know why.
I can guess, though.
Because too many people came. Want to bet?
People were probably parked there overnight - people in cars who had no money and nowhere to go and no more gas.
The last few days, everyone has said the post office will be at Reliant. (Why is this important? If you have been in a motel for the last week or a tiny apartment and your FEMA check and all your mail was sent to you when you were at the Astrodome, that's why.) But today that turns out not to be true and the post office for both zip codes is at the George R. Brown Convention Center - all the way across town, though fortunately somewhat near the light rail. So if you got up this morning with your little kids and hauled them to the Astrodome to see if the check came, you can walk back to the rail, pay for it, ride for 40 minutes, walk a mere... 8 blocks or something? and check your mail at the Convention Center. Maybe. If it's true.
The Joint Information Center was celebrating its "mission accomplished" last week - if their mission was to ship all the Katrina evacuees out of Texas on one-way tickets, well, they failed miserably. Evacuees' 14-28 day motel stays paid for by the Red Cross, well, those motel programs are expiring, and where do people go now? There is no plan. Because the people in charge making the programs can't for the life of them imagine the situation of the evacuees. If all your family and friends are in tiny church-run shelters all over the south, where are you supposed to go TO with your one way ticket out of town? The DRC is offering "services" but NOT shelter or donations - and in fact no one could answer my questions yesterday about where to go right now, today, if you need shelter. No one! Not in Houston. In Austin, after a whole day of phone calls I finally got a straight answer about the one remaining Red Cross sponsored shelter. (In Houston, I got names of shelters, but when I called those shelters, they were closed or weren't shelters at all.)
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