Just last week I published a reflective piece on the Latino experience three years after Hurricane Katrina (which, by the way, you can read by visiting the opinion section in El Diario NY) without ever imagining that on our three-year anniversary we would be considering an evacuation.  In my piece I didn’t write about my family’s experience evacuating, it was more of a general reflection on the Caribbean people who live here.  But now, with the approach of Gustav, I am wondering about our new neighbors who have been with us since September 2005 and who are not accustomed to hurricane evacuation procedures, hurricane preparedness, and so on.

There are many good organizations trying to get the information out, but regardless of how many of us do this, there will still be many people in the city, most probably without transportation, without knowledge of the language, maybe without radio or television, who will end up stranded, confused, afraid and lost.  Some of these people may even be small children that some of our newly arrived families have brought with them.  I only hope that each of these people, whomever they may be, are touched by somebody who is aware of the news and who can at least encourage them to plan to evacuate.  We all learned from Katrina that we cannot take these storms lightly.  Regardless of how safe or confident we may feel about our chances, it is a life and death risk any time we decide to stay put during a major hurricane, and Gustav has the potential to become a major hurricane.

From my own personal experience during Katrina, I recall that it wasn’t until the very last minute possible that my brother, my two sisters and my mother finally decided to pack up and leave.  We had lived here thirty years, and despite the evacuation of Ivan in 2004, we felt confident that we could stay home and ride out the storm.  It wasn’t until my son’s mother called me at 5AM Sunday morning to inform me that she and her husband were on their way to pick up my son because they were headed to Tennessee.  That sense of alarm caused me to rethink my level of confidence and urged me to corral my family and evacuate.  That morning I checked with the rest of my family; my four uncles and aunt were heading to Houston.  My cousins were all going, too.  I checked with my friends–they were evacuating with their families.  So, I did the same, but only after verifying with everyone that it was the right thing to do.  I share this because, as most of us who live here know, we like to deny that we have to leave our homes.  We don’t like having to leave our homes, having to disrupt our lives, and having to go to strange places we had no intention of visiting.

So it can easily happen that our new neighbors may be in more danger than we think.  If we, who have been here a long time, and have evacuated before, still believe that we don’t have to evacuate, what do you think a newcomer will believe, particularly if he or she doesn’t really have a network that can provide a good gauge about what to do?  I hope they, at the very least, pay attention to the neighbors they don’t talk to and do as they do–heed the call to evacuate.

Good luck to all of us, and especially to the City of New Orleans, which we love.

Lucas

Tags: gulf coast, gustav, hispanic, hispanic community new orleans, hurrican gustave, immigrants in hurricane gustav, latino, latino issue, latinola, latinos in hurricane gustav, new orleans

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 10:12 am and is filed under Puentes Director. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.