Gov. Bill Owens announced Saturday that up to 1,000 people from the area devastated by Hurricane Katrina will be flown to Denver and housed in dormitories at the former Lowry Air Force Base.
“We’re moving them out of the Gulf Coast to centers like this where we can meet their immediate needs,” Owens said.
The local relief effort, dubbed Operation Safe Haven, will use money from the State Disaster Emergency Fund, which will be replaced by the federal government. There are no official numbers yet, but the cost will exceed $1 million, said Joe Morales, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety.
While the state prepares for a large influx of refugees, smaller groups trickle into the state as residents open their doors to friends and relatives displaced by the hurricane.
Twenty-seven refugees sat in Mell J.-Branch Roy’s crowded Centennial home Saturday with dazed expressions on their faces.
Roy, a New Orleans native, invited three generations of her family to come to Colorado. Of the 10 families she took in, there were 10 homes destroyed in the flooding that followed Katrina and dozens of friends and family members still missing.
“I have no idea how I’m gonna make this work,” she said. “The good Lord is my game plan.”
Roy and others who have refugees in their homes are turning to relief agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army for support.
Owens told reporters that refugees could be transported in military and civilian aircraft to Buckley Air Force Base in the next several hours, or in a day or two. Buses would transport the people to Lowry.
“We’re focusing on what to do in the first 48 hours,” he said. “This could be a matter of weeks for some people, a matter of months for some.”
The hurricane survivors will live in apartment-style dorms managed by the Colorado Community College System.
They will receive kits that include personal items such as a toothbrush, shampoo and lotion, a map and instructions on how to avoid altitude sickness.
“All we know is they have the clothes on their back, and that’s it,” Morales said.
The governor thanked Colorado residents for responding so quickly to the relief effort with financial donations, but he advised against trying to help the effort in other ways.
“Don’t expect to go to Buckley and pick a family and say come with us,” he said.
That was exactly how officials with Frontier Airlines got 18 refugees in the Houston Astrodome to board an airplane for Denver on Saturday night.
The officials “went person to person and said we have the ability to get you to Denver, and we have housing for you,” Frontier spokesman Joe Hodas said. The Adam’s Mark hotel, the Doubletree and the Marriott SE offered to house the refugees, who were scheduled to arrive in Denver by Saturday night, for up to two months.
For many Coloradans, taking refugees into their homes was not a matter of choice. It was a matter of family.
That was the case for Roy, who paid for hotel rooms for two nights for her family members. The Red Cross paid for the rooms for three more days and helped get prescription refills for those who needed them. Roy’s aunt, Shirley Williams, 63, has pancreatic cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy in New Orleans.
Williams and her sister, Hilda, 64, married Williams brothers and both lived in east New Orleans for decades.
Shirley Williams said she did not want to leave when the evacuation was first ordered, but she was glad when her son and Hilda talked her into it. Her entire house is under water.
“It feels like you’ve lost someone in your family real close to you, and they’re never coming back,” said Shirley Williams, who lived in her house for 35 years.
Children ran through the rooms of Roy’s house playing, unaware of the changes that would come. Adults with tired eyes drank water and listened to stories of escape.
Letitia Denson said her brother told her via cellphone he didn’t think he was going to make it. She heard him running up flights of stairs in a New Orleans hospital as rising waters forced him onto the roof. The family heard days later that he had been rescued by helicopter.
Some of the family members are still in the dark about lost loved ones.
On a couch in Roy’s living room, Kermit Williams held the woman he married a week ago in New Orleans in his arms as she trembled and cried, surrounded by her new family.
“I don’t know where they are,” Valencia Harris said quietly of her three sisters and one brother who disappeared after the flood struck.
Staff writer Abbe Smith can be reached at 303-820-1201 or asmith@denverpost.com.
