Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Disasters

[SeriousMoney]

Uprooted and Scattered Far From the Familiar
<By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT, 9/11/05>

Excerpts...

Hurricane Katrina has produced a diaspora of historic proportions. Not since the Dust Bowl of the 1930's or the end of the Civil War in the 1860's have so many Americans been on the move from a single event. Federal officials who are guiding the evacuation say 400,000 to upwards of one million people have been displaced from ruined homes, mainly in the New Orleans metropolitan area...

Texas has taken in more than 230,000 people... But others are scattered across the United States, airlifted from a city that is nine feet below sea level to mile-high shelters in Colorado, to desert mesas in New Mexico, piney woods in Arkansas, flatlands in Oklahoma, the breezy shore of Cape Cod and the beige-colored Wasatch Mountain front in Utah.

Many say they will never go back, vowing to build new lives in strange lands, marked forever by the storm that forced their exodus...

"In some ways this is comparable to the close of the Civil War, or the Dust Bowl, but we have greater numbers now and there's the suddenness of this movement - within a day or two, nearly a million people left their homes,"...

The diaspora is also concentrated close to home. Baton Rouge has nearly doubled from its prestorm population of 250,000... From there, evacuees spread out in ripples, with heavy populations in Georgia, Arkansas and Texas, and then to the nation's far corners, to the Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific Northwest and New England...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national/nationalspecial/11diaspora.html?th=&emc=th&pagewa...