Some Hurricane Sandy Evacuees Are Set Adrift Again People who had been given shelter at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts were sent elsewhere as the school prepared to reopen to students. In a school cafeteria where the fragrance of ravioli and green beans fought the smell of rancid clothing, there were mothers with little girls who tossed back neatly beaded braids, a brooding young man with dreadlocks who dreams of being a world-traveling photographer, and two mature women who call Penn Station home. There were evacuees from a Chinatown old-age home, wrinkled regulars from the Bellevue Men's Shelter, and a Desert Storm veteran who since March has been living in the Staten Island Ferry terminal with his fragile wife and his uncle, who uses a wheelchair. They had all found a temporary home at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts, one of eight city public school buildings used as evacuation centers in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. But because the school was to reopen to students on Wednesday, they found themselves on the move again Monday and Tuesday, as the city sent the evacuees on to a grab bag of other shelters, including a Brooklyn homeless shelter, a high school in Washington Heights and a church in Chinatown. Some men and women returned to the school, on West 49th Street, late Monday night after being bused to other shelters that would not take them in, including the John Jay High School campus in Park Slope, another makeshift evacuation center. It was coping with an outbreak of norovirus, a common and highly contagious intestinal bug. The virus has hit 13 children since Friday, and that building's reopening as a school was delayed until Thursday, after all the people were moved out and it underwent a thorough cleaning. Jay Varma, the deputy commissioner for disease control at the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the outbreak was not surprising, considering the time of year and the fact that "these are schools and there wasn't an expectation that they would be long-term facilities for the homeless." He said that the virus could not live for long after the school was disinfected and cleaned. "We don't think there is a risk to students after they get back to school," he said. The zeal for sanitizing was strong at Graphic Arts, where reports of floors used as toilets spurred outrage and alarm. But there, as at other evacuation centers being partially or completely cleared for students, the evacuees said they had no better options. And they offered another perspective on the bathroom problems. "Some are disabled and seniors," said John Lewis, a man with an unkempt gray beard who said he worked in the kitchen of a private Hasidic school in Brooklyn before problems with his landlord left him living on the streets in Chelsea. Some are not able to move fast enough to make it to the toilet. Some couldn't make it to the third floor," where the only bathroom available to the men was located. It had one working toilet. The atmosphere turned ugly after officials of the city's Department of Homeless Services officials took over the shelter from the American Red Cross, several evacuees said, describing workers who yelled through bullhorns at those who did not follow directions fast enough. "People don't mind going to an evacuation center, but they don't want to go to a homeless shelter," Mr. Lewis added. Seth Diamond, the city's commissioner of homeless services, disputed that description and said social service providers had been working since Friday to make case-by-case assessments, whittling down a population of at least 800 to 150 by Monday. By dusk Monday, several men and one couple emerged with $5 Metro cards and orders to make their own way to wherever they were going. "They kicked us to the curb, like that," said Eugene Randolph, 56, who had been in the Bellevue Men's Shelter when its boiler failed in the flood. He trudged off with his girlfriend, Eurgine Cassimir, saying they would try to get to her storm-damaged apartment in Far Rockaway. Many of the homeless had first been sent to an evacuation shelter at Baruch College, only to be evacuated to Graphic Arts because of a power failure and a gas leak. The Chinese contingent had first been at Seward Park High School, and an elderly woman in a wheelchair, her bare feet in bedroom slippers, shivered under blankets as AmeriCorps workers from Montana helped hoist her into a Department of Homeless Services van bound for the church in Chinatown. In the cafeteria at Graphic Arts, Velyn Hemings and June Bartholomew described being evacuated from Penn Station by the police when train service was shut down before the storm. "I didn't even know there were homeless people in Penn Station until I became homeless," added Ms. Bartholomew, 64, in the lilting accent of her native Trinidad. She was a baby nurse who went home with newborns, and lived in Yonkers until, she said, she fell behind on the rent a few years ago and "they changed the locks on me." Ms. Hemings, 45, whose tremors and hobbling gait match the permanent side effects often left by psychotropic drugs, said she entered the world of showers at drop-in centers and food from pantries after losing her room in a single-room-occupancy building three years ago. "This is not a psych ward," she said. We're just like regular everyday people trying to get back in the mainstream, to get housing.