Agencies grapple with managing displaced citizens

Federal agencies struggled this week to coordinate the largest evacuation of citizens in U.S. history.

By Wednesday afternoon, more than 235,000 people displaced by Hurricane Katrina had been placed in about 750 emergency temporary shelters around the country. The exact number of people evacuated from the Gulf Coast region was not known.

"We were trying to keep tabs on those numbers in the first couple of days but it's become increasingly challenging to put precise numbers on the evacuations," said DHS spokesman Russ Knocke.

He said federal operations still are primarily focused on saving lives and facilitating evacuations, primarily in and around New Orleans, which was the hardest-hit area.

The Transportation Department said it was coordinating a massive operation involving airplanes, buses, trucks and ships to get supplies and personnel into affected regions and evacuate people from New Orleans. The department also is overseeing the largest airlift ever on U.S. soil to move residents away from the city and bring supplies into affected regions.

As residents are moved to temporary shelters, however, the federal government also must take on the responsibility for ensuring they have longer-term housing, education, employment and medical care.

"I will tell you the challenges we have ahead of us are that we are going to have a lot of evacuees," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. "Once we get them into temporary shelter, we have to deal with the issue of more long-term shelter, jobs, education, health care, what do we do to bring up the infrastructure again, how do we drain the city, how do we clean up any environmental hazards. There are huge tasks ahead of us."

DHS already has set up a housing task force to identify available assets, Chertoff said.

It is not clear, however, how the federal government will manage longer-term assistance for evacuees and the massive task of rebuilding New Orleans. Multiple departments and agencies are establishing special programs to help hurricane victims and support recovery, creating some confusion about exactly what help is available and how to access it.

For example, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao on Wednesday signed a $100 million grant to create 25,000 temporary jobs in the disaster areas, largely to assist in cleanup and recovery efforts.

"Ultimately the federal government is responsible for the care and assistance [of victims] and for them to get back on their feet, but it isn't one entity," Knocke acknowledged.

But Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., is pushing for the creation of a new single federal organization to manage ongoing relief and reconstruction, modeled on the efforts by President Herbert Hoover after a series of floods in the Louisiana area in the 1920s.

"You've got to have some central management entity that's on the ground, in the region, headed up by somebody of substance whom people respect," Gregg told The Wall Street Journal.