Roughly 95 percent of some 270,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees were cleared from shelters around the US by Saturday. After the hurricane,
President George W. Bush set a mid-October goal of emptying the shelters and FEMA (
Federal Emergency Management Agency) officials adopted October 15 as their deadline.
As of Saturday afternoon, 14,468 people remained in shelters, according to state and federal officials. Louisiana shelters held 9,003 of them and the remainder were spread among 11 other states.
Katrina displaced an estimated 1.5 million people when it struck August 29. The shelter population peaked at about 273,000 in the days after the storm, according to FEMA.
