Hurricane Harvey evacuees, tired but safe, arrive in North Texas

August 29,2017

By Matthew Martinez

A group of evacuees displaced by Harvey’s torrential rainfall are expected to arrive Tuesday morning in Fort Worth, where they will be “routed through” the Wilkerson-Greines Activity Center before being assigned to a shelter.

The evacuees, who were flown in to Dallas Love Field early Tuesday, will be bused to a screening center in Mesquite before being moved to Wilkerson-Greines, a Fort Worth school district facility that is best known as a basketball venue.

Some will remain at Wilkerson-Greines, while others will go to two other shelters in Fort Worth.

Fort Worth received a request from the state on Monday evening to begin sheltering the evacuees.

The first wave of evacuees arrived Monday evening at Love Field. Shelters are also in place in Irving and Dallas.

The emerging scene is somewhat similar to the one that played out exactly 12 years ago, when tens of thousands of evacuees from the New Orleans area fled to the Dallas-Fort Worth area after Hurricane Katrina, living with relatives and friends or in makeshift shelters at churches or city-operated facilities, including Wilkerson Greines.

Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, and the storm surge in New Orleans breached the levees and flooded more than 80 percent of the city, killing more than 1,800 people and displacing another 250,000.

Fort Worth has five shelters in total ready to take in evacuees, Mayor Betsy Price said in a news conference Monday.

While it’s not known how many evacuees will be coming to Fort Worth, the city is equipped to house more than 1,000 people, Price said.

The shelters would be the latest efforts from Fort Worth leaders in helping flood victims.

Fort Worth police officers spent Monday collecting snacks and water donations for a planned trip to Houston, while more than two dozen firefighters continued helping with search and rescue efforts.

Twenty-four firefighters from the department’s dive team are working with the Texas Task Force rescue unit. The Fort Worth department also sent along a boat, an inflatable boat with a motor, ropes and four water-rescue suits.

In San Antonio, Fort Worth’s MedStar ambulance service has been staging with an ambulance bus, spokesman Matt Zavadsky said. The MedStar crews evacuated a hospital in Victoria on Saturday night and were in San Antonio awaiting their next assignment Monday.

Gov. Greg Abbott has activated the entire Texas National Guard, about 12,000 troops, to assist with search-and-rescue efforts in Houston and other flooded areas.