Downtown Dallas Mega-shelter for Harvey Evacuees to Close Wednesday

The downtown Dallas "mega-shelter" still housing about 200 Hurricane Harvey evacuees will close Wednesday, city officials say. The remaining evacuees will move to a smaller shelter at the Tommie M. Allen Recreation Center in southeast Oak Cliff, where evacuees were staying before the shelters were consolidated downtown.At its peak, the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center was home to about 2,650 evacuees. The convention center also provided refuge for about 1,500 more people who visited for various services, including meals, FEMA benefits and other services like replacing documents lost to flooding.The southern Dallas rec center will be the final Harvey shelter open in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, according to Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas' office of emergency management."We're transitioning to a smaller shelter just so that we're not burning up resources in a big place that has very few people," Vaz said.  Continue reading...