NEW ORLEANS — With thousands feared drowned in what could be America's
deadliest natural disaster in a century, New Orleans' leaders all but
surrendered the streets to floodwaters Wednesday and began turning out
the lights on the ruined city - perhaps for months.
Smiley N. Pool / DMN
Residents wait to be evacuated Wednesday from the flood waters of
New Orleans.
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Looting spiraled so out of control that Mayor Ray Nagin ordered
virtually the entire police force to abandon search-and-rescue efforts
and focus on the brazen packs of thieves who have turned increasingly
hostile.
Nagin called for an all-out evacuation of the city's remaining
residents. Asked how many people died, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most
likely, thousands."
With most of the city under water, Army engineers struggled to plug New
Orleans' breached levees with giant sandbags and concrete barriers, and
authorities drew up plans to clear out the tens of thousands of
remaining people and practically abandon the below-sea-level city.
Nagin said there will be a "total evacuation of the city. We have to.
The city will not be functional for two or three months." And he said
people would not be allowed back into their homes for at least a month
or two.
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 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.
A slow exodus from the Superdome began Wednesday as the first of nearly
25,000 refugees left the miserable surroundings of the football stadium
and were transported in buses to the Astrodome in Houston, 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.
In Mississippi, bodies are starting to pile up at the morgue in hard-hit
Harrison County. Forty corpses have been brought to the morgue already,
and officials expect the death toll in the county to climb well above
100.
Slidell, Louisiana, is still flooded in parts -- and a mess in most
others.
Tempers were beginning to flare in the aftermath of the storm. Police
said a man fatally shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice in
Hattiesburg, Miss.
President 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 natural 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.
The federal government dispatched helicopters, warships and elite SEAL
water-rescue teams in one of the biggest relief operations in U.S.
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 145-mph fury Monday. Atop one apartment building,
two children held up a giant sign scrawled with the words: "Help us!"
Looters used garbage cans and inflatable mattresses to float away with
food, blue jeans, tennis shoes, 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.
Police were asking residents to give up any firearms before they
evacuated neighborhoods because officers desperately needed the
firepower: Some officers who had been stranded on the roof of a hotel
said they were shot at.
Police said their first priority remained saving lives, and mostly just
stood by and watched the looting. But Nagin later said the looting had
gotten so bad that stopping the thieves became the top priority for the
police department.
"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas - hotels,
hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said in a
statement to The Associated Press.
Hundreds of people wandered up and down shattered Interstate 10 - the
only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east - pushing
shopping carts, 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.
"We have to," Nagin said. "It's not living conditions."
He also expressed concern about people staying in the water: "People
walking in that water with those dead bodies, it can get in your pores,
you don't have to drink it."
In addition to the Astrodome solution, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency was considering putting people on cruise ships, in tent cities,
mobile home parks, and so-called floating dormitories.
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 percent of
the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage,
gasoline and garbage.
Around midday, officials with the state and the Army Corps of Engineers
said the water levels between the city and the lake had equalized, and
water had stopped spilling into New Orleans, 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 as early as
Wednesday night into the 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall.
But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and
dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's
waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.
In Washington, the Bush administration decided to release crude oil from
the federal petroleum reserves after Katrina knocked out 95 percent of
the Gulf of Mexico's output. But because of the disruptions and damage
to the refineries, gasoline prices surged above $3 a gallon in many
parts of the country.
The death toll has reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone. But the
full magnitude of the disaster had been unclear for days - in part,
because some areas in both coastal Mississippi and New Orleans are still
unreachable, but also because authorities' first priority has been the
living.
In Mississippi, for example, ambulances roamed through the passable
streets of devastated places such as Biloxi, Gulfport, Waveland and Bay
St. Louis, in some cases speeding past corpses in hopes of saving people
trapped in flooded and crumbled buildings.
State officials said Nagin's guess of thousands dead seemed plausible.
Lt. Kevin Cowan of the state Office of Emergency Preparedness said it is
too soon to say with any accuracy how many died. But he noted that since
thousands of people had been rescued from roofs and attics, it could be
assumed that there were lots of others who were not saved.
"You have a limited number of resources, for an unknown number of
evacuees. It's already been several days. You've had reports there are
casualties. You all can do the math," he said.
On the flooded streets of New Orleans, dozens of fishermen from up to
200 miles away 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, Mongtomery 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."
Associated Press reporters Robert Tanner, Holbrook Mohr, Mary Foster,
Allen G. Breed, Cain Burdeau and Jay Reeves contributed to this report.
