Denver Post columnist Diane Carman writes:
If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought I was peering through the fence at a concentration camp.
The signs on the buildings say “Community College of Aurora,” though for now they’re serving as an impromptu Camp Katrina. About 160 hurricane survivors are being housed in the dorms, surrounded by fences, roadblocks, security guards and enough armed police officers to invade Grenada.
There’s a credentials unit to process every visitor, an intake unit to provide identification tags and a bag of clothes to every evacuee, several Salvation Army food stations, portable toilets, shuttle buses, a green army-tent chapel with church services three times a day and a communications team to keep reporters as far away from actual news as possible.
It probably was easier for a reporter to get inside Gitmo on Tuesday than to penetrate the force field around Lowry. But survivors occasionally breached the lockdown and came to the fence to tell their stories, each one astonishing.
Link to article (Thanks, Noah Shachtman).
Image: “Verne Stovall, foreground, and her daughter-in-law, Jacquelyn Augustine, stand at a fence separating them from reporters and others Tuesday at the Community College of Aurora. Stovall recalled how she was rescued Sunday with 23 other people from a flooded house in New Orleans. (Denver Post / Glenn Asakawa)”