This comes as no surprise to me -- I've alread had one of the Katrina kids at my school tell me his family is staying.

Fewer than half of all New Orleans evacuees living in emergency shelters here said they will move back home, while two-thirds of those who want to relocate planned to settle permanently in the Houston area, according to a survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

The wide-ranging poll found that these survivors of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath remain physically and emotionally battered but unbroken. They praised God and the U.S. Coast Guard for saving them, but two weeks after the storm, nearly half still sought word about missing loved ones or close friends who may not have been as lucky.

However, I do have a methodology question about this poll. So does the Post, but they bury that nformation deep in the article.

A total of 680 randomly selected evacuees living temporarily in the Astrodome, Reliant Center and George R. Brown Convention Center, as well as five Red Cross shelters in the Houston area, were interviewed Sept. 10 to 12 for this Post-Kaiser-Harvard survey. More than 8,000 evacuees were living in these facilities and awaiting transfer to other housing when the interviewing was conducted.

More than nine in 10 of these evacuees said they were residents of New Orleans, while the remainder said they were from the surrounding area or elsewhere in Louisiana. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus four percentage points. Potential differences between these evacuees and those not living in shelters or those who lived elsewhere in the affected Gulf Coast region make it impossible to conclude that these results accurately reflect the views of all Gulf Coast residents displaced by Katrina.

Most of the evacuees never resided in our big public buildings or the Red Cross shelters. Those who were in those public buildings were among the poorest of the poor, according to reports. Those left there are often among the hardest-luck cases. And more importantly, theey are likely very unrepresetative of the 70-80 thousand who never lived in any of those locations. After all, those who never went to the shelters would have self-evacuated and are therefore less likely to be hard-core chronic poor.

But we will live this and see what happens.

(More from Captain's Quarters, Neo-Neocon, and Publius Rendevous)

Posted by: Greg at 11:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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