Impact of Katrina exodus felt far and wide

Bob Sullivan Reporter • Profile • E-mail

COVINGTON, La. - Hurricane Katrina may not have ruined your house, flooded your property or even blown wind through your trees, but it may still have pushed people into your backyard. Even now, one year after the storm, Katrina migrants are spread far and wide across the United States, making the impact of the storm far wider than the hurricane’s path of destruction.

In the days following the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane, refugees from the storm filed claims for emergency assistance from all 50 states, according to data supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Association and analyzed by USA Today.

Exactly where the refugees are now is a matter of hot debate. Various methods have been tried to track the Katrina exodus — one of the greatest displacements in American history, rivaling that of the Civil War — and all have been found wanting. The most authoritative study, published the U.S. Census Bureau earlier this year, is probably also the most criticized. 

But by weighing the available data, some general observations can be made. Clearly, Gulf Coast refugees are everywhere.

The map of hurricane migrants "looks like a map of the U.S. population density," said Ken Hodges, chief demographer at Claritas Inc., a commercial demographic data and market research firm. Nearly every population center took in refugees. "People are going to places where they had resources," he said.

This July, according to data supplied by Claritas to MSNBC.com, large pockets of Katrina migrants remained in far-flung places like Maricopa County, Ariz., Los Angeles County, Calif., and Cook County, Ill. According to Claritas estimates, there are 54 counties in 10 U.S. states, where at least 1,000 Katrina migrants still live.

Strain on available resources
In many places where they've landed, Katrina evacuees have added to classroom sizes, strained hospital resources, impacted crime rates and helped clog roads with traffic. So in some areas, an initial surge of generosity is beginning to be replaced by that uncomfortable feeling people get when the relatives stay a little too long.

And the resentment can flow both ways — frustrated evacuees can be heard complaining about the places they’ve landed, how they don’t compare to home in New Orleans or the Mississippi Gulf. The indelicate response they sometimes hear: “Then go home.” As American cities absorb Katrina evacuees — who at some point eventually come to be called migrants — stress on both sides is inevitable.

Nowhere has the strain of the Katrina exodus been felt more strongly than St. Tammany Parish, which sits just on the other side of enormous Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. The parish suffered damage, too, but not nearly as bad as that closer to the coast.

Just one 24-mile bridge ride away from New Orleans, once sleepy suburbs like Covington and Mandeville seemed a world apart from the seething city problems until Katrina’s storm surge brought a tide of people into the area.

Today, the north shore communities are enjoying a post-Katrina economic boom — local officials say the population of St. Tammany Parish has swelled from 200,000 last year to 270,000 now. But they are also trying to deal with the inevitable culture clashes that arise when the city and the country collide.

“What we're dealing with, the biggest things since the storm has been the influx of people from outside, south of Mandeville. They’ve come over here to recover and moved over here to work,” said Mandeville Police Chief Tom Buell. “Our neighborhoods have changed drastically. We are dealing with a lot of people we don't know.”

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