Shelvin Cooter isn't even sure where he was. 'œWhat do they call this, the upper West or something?' he asked, taking his first good look at Utah last week. When his home in New Orleans was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, Cooter was airlifted to a National Guard evacuation camp outside Salt Lake City, all his belongings stuffed into a garbage bag. 'œWe're getting a lot of stares like we're aliens or something,' he said. 'œAm I the only person out here with dreadlocks?' Cooter is one of nearly a million Katrina evacuees who constitute one of the greatest diasporas in U.S. history, said Timothy Egan in The New York Times. Some 250,000 of them'”most of them poor and black'”were sent to official shelters on the desert mesas of New Mexico, the breezy shores of Cape Cod, and in the mountains of Utah. Another 750,000 people from the hurricane region have found refuge in hotels or friends' and families' homes across the U.S. Most say they've found a warm welcome but feel 'œutterly lost, uprooted from all that is familiar.'
The question is, Will they ever go back? said Gary Rotstein in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Many of those now setting up lives in other states say they're seriously thinking of staying put, and giving up on New Orleans. More than half of the Big Easy's housing stock was rented, so a sizeable portion of the diaspora lacks a 'œcritical incentive' to go back. Most homeowners have no flood insurance, said Diane Wedner and Gayle Pollard-Terry in the Los Angeles Times, so they, too, lost everything. And with a foul flood leaving toxins behind, even those who do get insurance payouts may think twice about rebuilding on 'œwhat may be environmentally tainted land.'
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