Houston – A plan by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to relocate evacuees from the Astrodome and other shelters here to luxury cruise ships hit a snag Tuesday: Residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina don’t want to move again.
“We had no immediate takers for the option,” Ed Conley, head of FEMA operations in Houston, said of the proposal to turn cruise ships in Mobile, Ala., and Galveston into storm shelters.
FEMA announced Sunday it had leased three ships for six months as a way to move as many as 6,000 people out of shelters and provide them with beds, private rooms and hot meals.
The agency was so confident the cruise liners would prove popular that it established a priority system to determine who could board the Ecstasy, the Sensation and the Holiday, leased from Carnival Cruise Lines.
But FEMA workers found that evacuees were reluctant to move and further risk not finding relatives, jobs and schools. Officials said the computer networks established by the Red Cross and other agencies to reunite families would be available aboard the ships.
“It’s not a perfect solution,” Conley said of the idea, “but it’s a better solution than we have today.”
Dr. Stuart Yudofsky, a psychiatrist who has examined evacuees, said he was not surprised that they did not immediately like the idea of moving to a cruise ship.
“They have a level of certainty in their lives now,” he said. “They’ve been through a lot of change.”
The first evacuees from Louisiana arrived at the Astrodome a week ago, but the facility was never intended as a long-term solution. The official mantra is that the shelters are “transitional facilities” until evacuees can find better accommodations either by themselves or with the help of public and private relief agencies.
Coast Guard Lt. Joe Leonard, a top official in the evacuation effort in Houston, said he regretted having used the phrase “the dome is home,” because it seemed to imply permanence. Like other officials, he was surprised that the cruise-ship idea was not going over well.
“They’re going to get world- class food on the ship,” Leonard said.
As the largest shelter for victims of Katrina, the Astrodome has become a reluctant symbol of the nation’s relief effort.
A stream of politicians and celebrities have visited, and the site has become the preferred venue for announcing large- scale relief efforts.
