WASHINGTON — Government and private relief agencies scrambled Tuesday to cope with a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gulf Coast cities and towns devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and President Bush decided to cut short his Texas vacation and return to the capital to oversee the relief effort.
Officials at a host of federal agencies -- including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Defense Department and Coast Guard -- rushed thousands of rescue workers, emergency medical personnel and disaster recovery experts to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, along with mountains of food, water, tents, medical supplies and other equipment.
With floodwaters still rising in New Orleans and other cities, the American Red Cross said its effort -- which included caring for about 70,000 people in more than 200 shelters stretching in an arc from Florida to Texas and as far north as Tennessee -- may be its biggest ever inside the United States.
"We have an American refugee situation on our hands," said Laura Howe, a Red Cross spokeswoman working in Birmingham, Ala. "We have a mass migration of people who are homeless. It is an incredible thing to see and experience, and I don't think any of us in our lifetimes ever thought we would see anything like this."
The need for shelter alone threatened to overwhelm the relief effort. Emergency housing facilities in the three states directly in Katrina's path, as well as shelters as far away as Memphis, Tenn., and Dallas, were already at or near capacity, Howe said, with more people arriving by the hour. Thousands who had evacuated early and moved to hotels outside the storm area were descending on public shelters after running out of money. Thousands more who tried to ride out the hurricane were also seeking shelter.
"We have a new wave of evacuees coming out simply because they're homeless," Howe said. "They have nowhere else to go."
Ordinarily, she said, Red Cross shelters begin to empty within days after a natural disaster strikes, but that may not be true this time. "We expect to have people in these shelters for quite some time -- for weeks."
The Salvation Army was distributing about 150,000 meals a day from locations in Mobile, Ala., Jackson, Miss., and Baton Rouge, La., along with 120,000 meals a day dispensed from six mobile kitchens on 54-foot semi-trailers, Salvation Army official Mark Jones said.
