New Orleans police abandon rescue efforts
With thousands feared dead and the city’s remaining residents told to evacuate for weeks, conditions deteriorated further in submerged New Orleans today as looting spiralled out of control.
Mayor Ray Nagin ordered virtually the entire police force to abandon search-and-rescue efforts and stop thieves who were becoming increasingly hostile.
“They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas – hotels, hospitals, and we’re going to stop it right now,” Nagin said.
Tempers also were starting to flare.
Police said a man in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, fatally shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice. Dozens of carjackings were reported, including a nursing home bus and a truck carrying medical supplies for a hospital. Some police officers said they had been shot at.
Earlier, Nagin had called for a total evacuation, saying that New Orleans will not be functional for two or three months and that people would not be allowed back into their homes for at least a month or two.
The first of nearly 25,000 refugees being sheltered at the city’s Superdome football stadium were transported in buses to the another stadium in Houston, Texas, 350 miles away.
Conditions in the Superdome had become horrendous: There was no air conditioning, the toilets were backed up, and the stench was so bad that medical workers wore masks as they walked around.
Asked how many people died in the hurricane, Nagin said: “Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands.” The death toll has already reached at least 110 in Mississippi.
If the mayor’s death-toll estimate holds true, it would make Katrina the worst natural disaster in the United States since at least the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which have been blamed for anywhere from about 500 to 6,000 deaths. Katrina would also be the nation’s deadliest hurricane since 1900, when a storm in Galveston, Texas, killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.
Just outside New Orleans, gunmen held up a supply truck carrying food, water, medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, prompting officials to ask police and the US Coast Guard to help evacuate a 203-bed hospital.
“We have to close it down because we can no longer ensure the safety of our patients or our staff in that hospital,” said Steven Campanini, a spokesman for Tenet Healthcare Corp.
He said there were about 350 employees and between 125 to 150 patients inside the hospital, which is not flooded and is functioning.
Looters used garbage cans and inflatable mattresses to float away with food, clothes, TV sets – even guns. Outside one pharmacy, thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break through the glass. The driver of a nursing-home bus surrendered the vehicle to thugs after being threatened.
President George Bush flew over New Orleans and parts of Mississippi’s hurricane-blasted coastline in Air Force One. Turning to his aides, he said: “It’s totally wiped out. … It’s devastating, it’s got to be doubly devastating on the ground.”
“We’re dealing with one of the worst national disasters in our nation’s history,” Bush said later in a televised address from the White House, which most victims could not see because power remains out to 1 million Gulf Coast residents.
He planned to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America programme today to discuss the tragedy and recovery efforts.
The federal government dispatched helicopters, warships and elite SEAL water-rescue teams in one of the biggest relief operations in US history, aimed at plucking residents from rooftops in the last of the “golden 72 hours” rescuers say is crucial to saving lives.
As fires burned from broken natural-gas mains, the skies above the city buzzed with National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters frantically dropping baskets to roofs where victims had been stranded since the storm roared in with a 145mph fury on Monday.
Atop one apartment building, two children held up a giant sign scrawled with the words: ”Help us!”
Hundreds of people wandered up and down shattered Interstate 10 – the only major motorway leading into New Orleans from the east – pushing shopping trolleys, laundry racks, anything they could find to carry their belongings.
On some of the few roads that were still open, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway.
Nagin, whose pre-hurricane evacuation order got most of his city of a half a million out of harm’s way, estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people remained, and said that 14,000 to 15,000 a day could be evacuated in ensuing convoys.
The floodwaters streamed into the city’s streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80% of the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, petrol and rubbish.
Yesterday officials with the state and the Army Corps of Engineers said the water levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain had equalised, and even appeared to be falling. But the danger was far from over.
The Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 15,000-pound bags of sand and stone into a large gap in the failed floodwall.
But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbagsand dozens of highway barriers to the site because the city’s waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.
The full magnitude of the disaster had been unclear for days – in part, because some areas in both coastal Mississippi and Louisiana are still unreachable, but also because authorities’ first priority has been reaching the living.
In Mississippi, for example, ambulances roamed through the passable streets of devastated places, in some cases speeding past corpses in hopes of saving people trapped in flooded and crumbled buildings.
On the flooded streets of New Orleans, dozens of fishermen floated in on caravans of boats to pull residents out.
One of those rescued was 40-year-old Kevin Montgomery, who spent three days shuttling between the attic of a one-story home and a canopy he built on the roof. Every once in a while, Montgomery would see a body float by. But he cannot swim and had to fight the urge to wade in and tie them down.
“It was terrible,” he said. “All I could do was pass them by and hope that God takes care of the rest of that."
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