Kids displaced by hurricanes reunited (good news for a change)

from nola.com:

When 4-year-old Cortez Stewart was reunited with her mother and five siblings in Texas last week, it closed a happy chapter in the sad story of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Cortez represented the last of 5,192 Gulf Coast children listed as missing or displaced after the storms struck more than six months ago. The effort to reunite those youngsters became the largest child-recovery effort in U.S. history.....

Cortez, the final child, was reunited with her mother and five siblings in Houston on March 16. She hadn't seen her family since Katrina hit and was taken to a New Orleans hotel by her godmother.

The two were rescued by helicopter as floodwaters rose around the hotel, and they were eventually taken to Atlanta, O'Brien said. Meanwhile, Cortez's mother, Lisa Stewart, and her five other children were rescued by boat from their New Orleans home, taken to an interstate overpass and then to the Houston Astrodome, he said.

we've all been worried abt these kids, here's a bit of good news for a change, this is not kids swept out of arms during flooded, granted, but it is the kids separated in the aftermath

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/topstories/index.ssf?/base/national-61/1143039558203020.xml&storylist=topstories

thanks!

sorry about that

it's on the front page at the moment, no permalink yet for when it is archived

but you should be able to find it there for a day or so

they went on to say that only 14 children had died. That makes sense, parent will give up their kids if it means they will survive. There's a biological imperative there. This is good news.....Now if we can have a real accounting of everyone else...

part of it, of course, is that people w. kids were much more likely to evacuate than elderly couples

but even kids in superdome and other shelters have a much better chance of recovering from dehydration than an elder, after 65 or so, dehydration is pretty much a death sentence apparently

some died because they left, some died because they stayed. There was really no pat answer. We had the same problems with Rita, but we learned from Katrina....we evaced people AND their pets. It was just easier to encourage the elderly to evac if they could take their 4 legged family members.

I know most agencies worked really hard to track the kids. We got lots of calls and inquires. What was really sweet was that some folks took care of these kids, even though they weren't kin. It was a diaspora of biblical proportions and I remember reading that after WWII, most kids that had living relatives were placed. Kids have a high success rate.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-22-hurricane-kids_x.htm

This article says 12 were not found.

So I guess all those organizations and government offices work pretty well after all huh?

i think many people had no idea of the size of the devastation, this storm made andrew look like a spring shower

:hi:

Forget Monica, forget Whitewater, THIS is what a scandal looks like!