11:30 AM CDT on Thursday, September 29, 2005

Lee Hancock / Dallas Morning News

NEW ORLEANS – Getting people out of New Orleans in the first chaotic week after Hurricane Katrina slowed significantly after FEMA officials, fearing violence at the Superdome, pulled personnel from the city, said a Louisiana Air National Guard general supervising the shelter and evacuations.

Brig. Gen. Brod Veillon told The Dallas Morning News that the abrupt departure of federal emergency managers and medical crews and the lack of communications in the city forced him to fly across the region in search of buses that had been summoned to the region, then left without orders.

The general said the delay in moving evacuees out of the dome slowed authorities' response when flood victims crowded into the city convention center. There, tens of thousands were stranded for days without food and water.

"We could not have done both of them [evacuations] simultaneously," he said.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials have defended their response. Marty Bahamonde, a Boston-based official sent to New Orleans two days after Katrina hit, said he and other FEMA workers left the Superdome only after a senior National Guard official warned of possible violence among the frustrated crowd there.

"They said 'we do not want to be responsible for your safety,' " he said. "We knew the buses were there to pick up the people at the Superdome. We knew that that process was beginning. We took the advice of the National Guard."

The hurricane passed over New Orleans on Monday morning. Gen. Veillon and other state Guard leaders arrived at the Superdome that night.

FEMA officials who arrived the next day began planning a bus evacuation as they and Guard leaders scrambled to fly in food and water.

The general said concerns about unrest stemmed from rumors. He said that city police asked for Guard help in restoring order at the convention center on Wednesday – the day before FEMA left the Superdome.

Buses began rolling to the dome Wednesday afternoon to move more than 30,000 evacuees.

But after FEMA officials left the next day, Gen. Veillon said, he had no way to communicate with them and no way to summon the hundreds of other buses that the federal agency had called in to help. Mr. Bahamonde said FEMA representatives returned to the dome after hearing that it was safe to return Friday, but the general said he never saw any of them.

He said FEMA's abrupt departure left Guard officials scrambling to keep the bus evacuation moving. He said he remembered someone from FEMA mentioning that a Texaco truck stop on the interstate near LaPlace, 25 miles outside the city, would be a staging area for incoming bus convoys. He flew there the next morning and found several hundred buses. "Some of them had been waiting [for orders] a day," he said.

He directed those buses to the Superdome and sent 150 school buses he found at a mall on the West Bank to the airport to help with evacuations there.

After the dome evacuation was well in hand, Gen. Veillon said, he sent food to the convention center Friday. On Saturday morning, he said, he dispatched 700 soldiers to the center to maintain order while buses were brought in to begin moving people out. Again, he went to the LaPlace truck stop to summon the convoys, and the civic center was quickly emptied.

"The scope of this and the depth of this was bigger than probably anybody imagined," he said. "It took 2-3 days for the fog of war to clear and for us to define the problems we were dealing with, and how to respond."

"It was never an issue of race," Gen. Veillon said. "It was never an issue of some are gonna get it and some aren't. We were dealt the situation we had. We emptied the dome and then turned around in 24 hours and emptied the convention center.

"I'm glad the National Guard was there," he said. "Because nobody else was."