Firms look for their workers, offering support

Chevron, BellSouth and other companies are setting up tent cities for homeless employees. Northrop Grumman handed out paychecks in a parking lot yesterday. Dow Chemical placed ads in at least 14 newspapers asking missing workers to make contact with the company. Marathon Oil is knocking on doors, looking for employees.

Across the devastated Gulf Coast, big employers are trying to find, house, feed, pay and otherwise care for tens of thousands of workers chased from their homes and workplaces by Hurricane Katrina.

"We are trying to find out where they've gone, what their current situation is and what we can do to help them," said Mickey Driver, a spokesman for Chevron, which has 4,300 employees in the region. "We have gotten lots of calls in, but there are still a lot more people we need to hear from."

In many ways, the efforts are reminiscent of Sept. 11, 2001, when companies in the World Trade Center and elsewhere in lower Manhattan set up and advertised toll-free numbers for their workers to call to report their whereabouts and get help.

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And in many ways, such efforts are just as agonizingly slow to unfold as they were after the terrorist attacks. Half a dozen big employers in the Gulf region said that as of late Friday they still had not heard from large numbers of employees.

"A lot of people can't get to a phone or their phone batteries are dead. A lot of people can't get gas to get to a place with a phone," said Brian Cullin, spokesman for defense contractor Northrop Grumman, one of the largest manufacturing employers in the Gulf Coast. "We are going to be piecing this together for several days yet to come."

An executive at DuPont, which has about 1,500 employees in the region, is going from radio station to radio station, giving interviews and imploring workers to call a toll-free number to check in. The company still has not heard from many employees, especially those who worked at facilities in DeLisle and Pascagoula, Miss., both of which the hurricane hit directly.

DuPont spokeswoman Kelli Kukura said the company was trying to find temporary housing for workers displaced by the storm. But accommodations can be hard to find since the storm, and Kukura said the company also was in the process of setting up tent cities to provide food, shelter and utilities.

Several other companies also said they would set up tent cities. Chevron said it would have one open by today for 1,500 workers and family members from the company's Pascagoula refinery. Driver said the tent city would cover 500,000 square feet and would provide water, catered meals, electricity, satellite communications, laundry service and medical care. Chevron also placed ads in newspapers, including the Miami Herald and Houston Chronicle, asking employees to call a toll-free number.

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