Baton Rouge swelling to it's seems

[NT80]

Influx of refugees swells Baton Rouge

By Lee Feinswog, Tom Vanden Brook and Mark Memmott, USA TODAY

BATON ROUGE — Until Katrina, about a half-million people lived in greater Baton Rouge.

Thursday, it was anybody's guess. The only certainty: The population increased by the hour.

As New Orleans empties, this metropolitan area and its biggest city, Baton Rouge, are filling up. Every condo, every apartment, every hotel room is filled. Traffic is a snarl.

Parish, city and school officials, like everyone else who has witnessed the exodus, are overwhelmed. Shelters burst at the seams, schools struggle to accommodate an influx of children, and police hope to hold it all together.

"It's human for it to be overwhelming," Mayor Melvin "Kip" Holden says. "You can look at a mountain and say it's too high, or you can take it one step at a time."

The first step may be getting a handle on how many people are in the city and parish, Louisiana's version of a county.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Department estimates there are 10,000 people at three shelters. Fred Rayford, a spokesman for the department, says they are at their capacity. Yet a stream of people from New Orleans, 75 miles away, continue to arrive.

Some are dropped at the shelters by buses. Others wander in on their own.

"Some, as we understand it, are being dropped off at the parish line and told to fend for themselves," Rayford says.

Tommy Teepell, 54, chief marketing officer for Lamar Advertising in Baton Rouge, says he hears from friends that displaced professionals from New Orleans are snapping up houses, apartments and office buildings.

"The word I got Monday at the Rotary Club meeting was that we could expect 500,000 people would be moving in," Teepell says.

Many of the evacuees are schoolchildren. The Louisiana Department of Education estimates that more than 135,000 students have been displaced and are looking for new schools.

That's evident at St. Joseph's Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school. Principal Linda Fryoux Harvison says the school has about 800 students and could accommodate about 200 more. Applicants were lined up at 7 a.m. Thursday, two hours before the school opened. Teachers from New Orleans have also showed up, looking for work.

"They no longer have jobs," Harvison says. "They no longer have schools."

Brittany Young, who would have been a senior at Ben Franklin High in New Orleans, manages a smile as she fills out an application.

"It's horrible," she says. "Your friends are going everywhere else, and you don't know how to get in touch with people."

Because cell phone service is spotty, she says, text messaging works best. She says some of her classmates have settled in California, Alabama, Texas, "everywhere."

Housing the refugees has squeezed the real estate market.

State Rep. Roy "Hoppy" Hopkins, from Oil City in the northwest corner of the state, says the apartment he keeps near the Capitol is jammed with refugees.

"Right now, there's 11 people in that apartment — families of legislators from southern Louisiana," Hopkins says. "We're glad to let them use it. We don't know how long they'll need to be there. Neither do they."

Shelly Nolan and her family moved to Baton Rouge after the roof blew off their home in New Orleans. They have found an apartment, and her husband, who lost his State Farm agency, is working for that company here. They hope to place their daughter, Kelly, at St. Joseph's. "It's just weird being put in an environment you're not used to," Kelly Nolan says. "Your whole world is turned upside-down."

There are concerns about crime, too. Deputies were called to check out reports of looting at a shopping center, Rayford says. They found nothing.

Mostly, the crimes have been petty, such as purse snatchings, but officers respond to all the calls, and that has become taxing.

"We are getting kind of maxed-out on security," Rayford says.

Mayor Holden acknowledges his city will have growing pains. The airport needs to triple in size, traffic is a headache and the police and fire departments are stressed, he says.

"God has blessed me with a lot of different talents, and handling this is one of them," he says. "I can't panic, because if I panic, a whole city collapses."