Katrina and Tallahassee
This is sick. From the
Houston Chronicle:
Katrina refugees must make room for Miami, FSU fans
First it was Hurricane Katrina chasing them away. Now it's college football fans.
Hundreds of refugees from Hurricane Katrina are being evicted from Tallahassee hotels to accommodate fans coming to town for the Miami-Florida State game Monday night.
"There is absolutely no compassion here whatsoever," Lynne Bernard wrote on a bulletin board on the Web site of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. "The Hampton Inn in Tallahassee is pretty much throwing us out because of a football game."
A message left for the manager at the Hampton Inn was not returned, but other hoteliers said there was little they could do to help those who fled homes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama because they had to honor long-standing reservations for the football weekend.
At the Courtyard Marriott near the Capitol, evacuees were taking up 15 of the hotel's 154 rooms on Wednesday. A Quality Inn had several dozen of its 90 rooms occupied by storm refugees.
"This weekend has been booked for a couple of months," said Antwan Hinkle, the Quality Inn's front desk manager.
Hinkle said people who have planned trips for months would not take it well if they were told just days before the game that the hotel could not provide rooms. "We're going to have a whole bunch of angry people," he said.
Emphasis mine -- this guy has a capacity for understatement but I don't think he is talking about the same group of angry people...
Cripes -- set them up on cots in an unused function room. Ask the football people to double-up on rooms. It is not as though Katrina is an unpublicized event. If I was booked to come into the hotel and I heard that there were refuges staying there, I would be more than happy to double-up with someone on a room.
As for angry people, doing something like this will get publicized and I bet that Mr. Antwan Hinkle will be spoken to by his management. The Hotel could have generated some wonderful (and favorable) publicity by extending themselves to take care of the refugees and the football crowd but no, they didn't think and took the easy way out and bumped the people who needed the room the most...
Fortunately:
Christian Heritage Church announced plans to open its doors for as many as 200 refugees for four nights starting Friday, then began referring people to the local chapter of the American Red Cross, which is planning to open shelters for as many as 3,000.
Posted by DaveH at September 3, 2005 9:43 AM