I'd also like to discuss some preliminary findings on the employment status of persons directly affected by Hurricane Katrina. Shortly after the hurricane struck, Bureau analysts, together with our colleagues at the Census Bureau, devised a short series of hurricane-related questions for inclusion in the October Current Population Survey. These questions were designed to identify and solicit information from survey respondents who had evacuated from their homes, even temporarily, because of Hurricane Katrina.
It is important to note that the estimates based on these questions are not representative of all evacuees, but only those who were interviewed through normal household survey procedures. Some evacuees reside outside the scope of the survey, such as those currently living in hotels or shelters.
Based on information collected from CPS-sampled households, there were about 800,000 persons age 16 and over who had evacuated from where they were living in August due to Hurricane Katrina. About 300,000 of these persons had returned to the home from which they had evacuated, and the remaining 500,000 had not returned to their August residence.
Of the 800,000 evacuees, 55.7 percent were in the labor force in October, and their unemployment rate was 24.5 percent. The jobless rate among those who have not been able to return home (33.4 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for those who had returned to their August place of residence (10.5 percent). Again, these figures do not reflect the situation of persons still residing in shelters, hotels, or other places out of the scope of the household survey.
Even with their limitations, we believe that these data provide useful information about the employment status of those persons affected by Hurricane Katrina. As people make the transition to more permanent housing, the estimates may become more representative of the situation of all evacuees. We plan to keep these special Katrina-related questions in the survey at least through January 2006.