In the days and months after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, many Lake County residents were busy doing anything they could to make life better for evacuees arriving in the Chicago area.
At the same time, many people from northern Illinois were headed south to act as emissaries or offer emergency assistance at the scene of the disaster.
To address immediate shelter needs in late summer and fall of 2005, PADS Lake County added evacuees to its clientele of local homeless.
“There were an awful lot,” PADS Executive Director Joel Williams said this week of the evacuees who needed immediate shelter.
While Williams was not yet with the organization, PADS administrators estimated that the organization assisted between 100 and 125 families and individuals arriving from the Gulf Coast.
Meanwhile, the Lake County Housing Authority used Hurricane Katrina FEMA funding to finance inspections of federal, local and private homes that were being opened up to evacuees.
“We had a number of families and we worked with county and FEMA dollars to make sure any Katrina individuals did have inspections of their new homes to make sure they were up to certain standards,” said David Northern, executive director of the Housing Authority, who was a deputy director at the time.
According to authorities at the time, a total of 341 hurricane victims found their way to Lake County after the storm. Area schools, including schools in Woodland District 50 where nearly 100 evacuees were housed, opened their doors to children of evacuees.
More than 30 evacuee families were still in Lake County in late December 2005.
Some remain today.
While governmental entities, charities, civic groups and individuals were opening wallets to help the victims of Katrina, local law enforcement was actively sending help to New Orleans and other coastal areas.
Dozens of trained Lake County emergency workers — nurses, police, firefighters and paramedics — went to the Gulf Coast and brought equipment from a variety of local agencies and departments.
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Four sheriff’s squad cars were sent to Jackson County, Miss. because that sheriff’s office lost its entire fleet of squad cars in the storm.
Lake County-based corporations and community fundraisers gave millions in cash. Days after the hurricane struck, more than $7 million was donated out of Lake County.
Scores of Lake County residents offered evacuees space in their own homes or in apartment units they owned, while the Lake County Board assigned $161,000 in federal funding to help Katrina evacuees pay for rent in Lake County.
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