By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
Mainer Jeffrey Nevins describes life in an evacuee city.

From his home in Monroe, La., Jeffrey Nevins heard the sirens all day.

In a seemingly ceaseless stream, ambulances pulled into Monroe Regional Airport on Saturday, took on airlifted victims of Hurricane Katrina and sped off to a local hospital.

For Nevins, a Maine native and former spokesman for Rumford’s paper mill, the sound was unsettling.

“It just leaves you sad,” he said Wednesday.

The airport set up a triage center in a hangar, sorting through the people who arrived on transport planes and helicopters. The worst cases were rushed away on one of the 1,000 or so ambulance runs, Nevins said.

Some waited. Some were treated and taken to a growing crowd at the Monroe Civic Center.

In the days after the storm hit the Gulf Coast, the city became a central stop for evacuees of New Orleans, about 90 minutes by car to the south.

By the middle of last week, as many as 3,000 people filled the city’s civic center. Locals have been doing what they can.

“People are just struggling to feed the folks,” Nevins said. Local food banks have emptied their shelves. To keep them going, people have been pulling groceries from their cupboards and leaving them outside the auditorium, which is about the same size as Portland’s Cumberland County Civic Center.

The impromptu shelter is also draining the area’s pool of volunteers.

Nevins, who works as a communications manager for phone company CenturyTel in Monroe, said his employer is working on a plan to send some of its workers to join the ranks of volunteers.

But the company has its own troubles, he said. The storm ravaged its offices in New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss.

Even in Monroe, which saw only a tiny fraction of Katrina’s wind and rain, the storm has brought inconveniences. For instance, long distance phone calls are tough. As often as not, calls outside the area are greeted with an abrupt recording saying that “all circuits are busy.” However, such concerns are small compared to what so many have suffered, Nevins said.

Last Thursday night, evacuees at the civic center boarded six buses and were taken to a football game on the nearby University of Louisiana campus. Nevins and his wife attended, too, sitting not far from the crowd of refugees. Uniformly, the people seemed dazed and depressed.

“We talked to a couple,” Nevins said. They had lost their home and all their possessions.

“We don’t have anyplace to go back to,” they told him. “It’s gone.”