One year later, local residents proud of aid given to Katrina evacuees

By Sheila Elliott

Looking northeast from Fosco Park, located at 13th Street and Racine Avenue, affords an amazing urban view. The Sears Tower stands only a few blocks away from Fosco’s grassy fields and nearby residential streets, reaching skyward until it becomes the summit in a man-made mountain range of commercial buildings, residential highrises, factories, and church spires.
Other, less visible areas of the city also demonstrate Chicago’s urban unity and the remarkable ways different neighborhoods can fit and work together.

Last September, the Fosco Park Field house was thrust into the spotlight when it became the primary intake center for Chicago’s Hurricane Katrina relief effort, making it the port of entry for thousands of New Orleans area residents fleeing Katrina’s damage.

“There were so many people, I couldn’t even count” all of them, Patrice Wilberton said as she recalled those hectic days one year ago, when Fosco Park, a place designed for children’s crafts programs and community sports, was transformed into a bevy of makeshift social service offices, health care stations, and city service agencies, all designed to help people who had decided to make Chicago at least their temporary home.

Wilberton spoke softly and modestly about the help she provided in that effort, then shifted quickly to sharing some of the human moments she witnessed.

The evacuees she saw predominantly had come to Chicago looking for friends or relativessomeone who could help them, she said. Wilberton particularly recalled a woman she encountered while doing the routine task of cleaning a locker room. The woman simply broke down in tears for no apparent reason.

'Stay strong'
“The only thing I could say was ‘stay strong.’" Wilberton said.
Exactly why Fosco Park was chosen to serve as the initial intake center seems to have gotten lost in the hectic pace that characterized life at the park during those days, as America began to understand the vastness of the tragedy that had visited the Gulf region. By Sept. 4 last year, Cong. Bobby Rush (D-1st) already had announced he would help lead an effort to bring up to 10,000 Katrina victims to Illinois, offering the longstanding relationship between Chicago and New Orleans as a rationale. Families from the South seeking new lives often had looked to Chicago as a destination point, Rush noted, and the Katrina relief effort would be a natural extension of that connection.

Earl Norris was Fosco Park’s supervisor at the time. Today, he holds a comparable post at a park district center near Williams School at 27th and Federal Streets but regards his work with the Katrina victims as one of the most memorable experiences of his long career with the park district.

Much accomplishment
Norris explained that what was so remarkable was just how much really was accomplished in such a short period of time. Katrina survivors arrived with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing, but within a matter of hours they were wearing fresh clothing and underwent preliminary health examinations. Computers helped them contact people they were trying to reach, and they studied transportation routes to find their way around the city. They had been fed warm meals, had a place to rest, and many of them, he said, even were able to laugh and joke a little. "A sense of humor was a valuable asset then," he said.

Determining the exact number of hurricane survivors who passed through Fosco Park in those first few weeks is not easy. An officer with Heartland Alliance, the non-profit agency that eventually coordinated the entire relief effort, said that between 8,000 and 9,000 men, women, and children received some type of help before all of the social service agencies that had set up temporary offices in the park district building finally disbanded. The Chicago Department of Human Services said about 5,000 people received some type of help at the park between Sept. 6, when the intake center first opened, and Sept. 23, 2005, when it closed.

It was “a staging area” for the relief effort, said Charna Epstein, an assistant director of crisis prevention and disaster recovery for the Heartland Alliance, describing Fosco Park’s role in the overall effort. From the start, the Katrina relief effort was unique in the scope of the work it took on, she said, noting that, to a great degree, even the individuals most closely involved did not know what it would be like to help so many people, all of them so desperately needing assistance, in such a short time frame.

Epstein is one of several individuals who prepared Life after Hurricane Katrina, a Heartland Alliance report released this fall about Chicago’s Katrina relief effort. In describing how Chicago responded to the human need the natural disaster presented, it paints a vivid picture of how many of Chicago’s social service, religious, and philanthropic groups willingly joined the effort, including the American Red Cross, Catholic Charities, the Chicago Department of Human Services, the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications, the Illinois Department of Human Services, the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, Lutheran Social Services, Metropolitan Family Services, the Salvation Army, and the United Way.

Comprehensive goal
From the start, these organizations’ goal was comprehensive, the report said. They wanted nothing less than to help resettle and relocate all of the hurricane evacuees, and the lessons Heartland and the other agencies learned by helping Katrina survivors will serve them well if another crisis ever arises.

Unquestionably humanitarian in spirit, the Katrina effort also was expensive. While much of the help and many of the provisions for survivors were donated (including much of the clothing and food products), certain portions of the effort, including some services provided by the City, still await reimbursement.

Outreach work, an attempt to provide some type of follow-up care and assistance to individuals and families once they had left the park and started rebuilding their lives, was another task that continued long after the last social service agency departed.

Differences in the job market, lack of social networks that help secure employment, and other factors made adjusting to life in Chicago and finding work difficult for many people, the Heartland report said. A special program is now helping those who remain.

About 150 evacuees still in Chicago are living in temporary but stable housing with friends or family, though most hope to move into their own houses or apartments. Many others have faded from the Chicago scene, as they continue the steady climb back to a life of security and safety elsewhere.

Perhaps most remarkable about the relief effort at Fosco Park was how quickly people moved through everything. As a result, Norris said, he did not really get to know any of the people. "You did what you could to help them, and then they moved on," he observed.