NEW ORLEANS — To cries of "Thank you Jesus!" and catcalls of "What took
you so long?," a National Guard convoy packed with food, water and
medicine rolled through axle-deep floodwaters Friday into what remained
of New Orleans and descended into a maelstrom of fires and floating
corpses.
IRWIN THOMPSON / DMN
A
National Guardman lays his weapon on top of bottles of water that
were being handed out to residents Friday at the Morial Convention
Center in New Orleans.
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"Lord, I thank you for getting us out of here!" Leschia Radford shrieked
amid a throng of tens of thousands of storm victims outside the New
Orleans Convention Center.
More than four days after the storm hit, the caravan of at least
three-dozen camouflage-green troop vehicles and supply trucks arrived
along with dozens of air-conditioned buses to take refugees out.
President Bush also took an aerial tour of the ruined city, and answered
complaints about a sluggish government response by saying, "We're going
to make it right."
In what looked like a scene from a Third World country, some people
threw their arms heavenward and others nearly fainted with joy as the
trucks and hundreds of soldiers arrived in the punishing midday heat.
But there were also profane jeers from many in the crowd of nearly
20,000 outside the convention center, which a day earlier seemed on the
verge of a riot, with desperate people seething with anger over the lack
of anything to eat or drink.
"They should have been here days ago," said 46-year-old Michael Levy,
whose words were echoed by those around him yelling, "Hell, yeah!"
"We've been sleeping on the ... ground like rats," Levy added. "I say
burn this whole ... city down."
The soldiers' arrival-in-force came amid angry complaints from the mayor
and others that the federal government had bungled the relief effort and
let people die in the streets for lack of food, water or medicine.
"The people of our city are holding on by a thread," Mayor Ray Nagin
warned in a statement to CNN. "Time has run out. Can we survive another
night? And who can we depend on? Only God knows." Earlier, in a rambling
radio interview, Nagin erupted in tears and anger, saying, "Get off your
asses and let's do something."
The president took a land and air tour of hard-hit areas of Louisiana,
Mississippi and Alabama, and admitted of the relief effort: "The results
are not enough." Congress quickly passed a $10.5 billion disaster aid
package, and Bush said he would sign it by day's end.
What were perhaps the first signs of real hope for recovery came on a
day that was ushered in with a thunderous explosion before daybreak and
scattered downtown building fires that only confirmed the sense that New
Orleans was a city in utter collapse.
The explosion at a warehouse along the Mississippi River about 15 blocks
from the French Quarter jostled storm refugees awake and sent a pillar
of acrid gray smoke over a city that the mayor has said could be awash
with thousands of corpses. Other large fires fire erupted downtown.
With a cigar-chomping general in the convoy's lead vehicle, the trucks
rolled through muddy water to reach the convention center. Flatbed
trucks carried huge crates, pallets and bags of relief supplies,
including Meals Ready to Eat. Soldiers in fatigues sat in the backs of
open-top trucks, their rifles pointing skyward.
Guardsmen carrying rifles also arrived at the Louisiana Superdome, where
a vast crowd of bedraggled people - many of them trapped there since the
weekend - stretched around the entire perimeter of the building, waiting
for their deliverance from the heat, the filth and the gagging stench
inside the stadium.
"The cavalry is and will continue to arrive," said Lt. Gen. Steven Blum,
commander of the National Guard. He said 7,000 Guardsmen would be in the
city by Saturday.
But another commander warned it may yet be days more before evacuations
from the convention center begin, because the first priority is bringing
in food and water.
"As fast as we can, we'll move them out," said Army Lt. Gen. Russel
Honore said. "Worse things have happened to America," he added. "We're
going to overcome this, too. It's not our fault. The storm came and
flooded the city."
Within minutes of the soldiers' arrival at the convention center, they
set up six food and water lines. The crowd was for the most part orderly
and grateful for the first major supply convoy to reach the arena.
Diane Sylvester, 49, was the first person through the line, and she
emerged with two bottles of water and a pork rib meal. "Something is
better than nothing," she said as she mopped sweat from her brow. "I
feel great to see the military here. I know I'm saved."
Angela Jones, 24, began guzzling her water before she even cleared the
line.
"Like steak and potatoes!" she said of the cool water. "I didn't think I
was going to make it through that."
A rag shielding her from the searing heat and a cart holding her only
belongings, 70-year-old Nellie Washington asked: "What took you so long?
I'm extremely happy, but I cannot let it be at that. They did not take
the lead to do this. They had to be pushed to do it."
With Houston's Astrodome already full with 15,000 storm refugees, that
city opened two more giant centers to accommodate an additional 10,000.
Dallas and San Antonio also had agreed to take refugees.
One group of Katrina's victims lurched from one tragedy to another: A
bus carrying evacuees from the Superdome overturned on a Louisiana
highway, killing at least one person and injuring many others.
At the broken levee along Lake Pontchartrain that swamped nearly 80
percent of New Orleans, helicopters dropped 3,000-pound sandbags into
the breach and pilings were being pounded into place to seal off the
waters. Engineers also were developing a plan to create new breaches in
the levees so that a combination of gravity and pumping and would drain
the water out of the city, a process that could take weeks.
Law and order all but broke down in New Orleans over the past few days.
Storm refugees reported being raped, shot and robbed, gangs of teenagers
hijacked boats meant to rescue them, and frustrated storm refugees
menaced outmanned law officers Police Chief Eddie Compass admitted even
his own officers had taken food and water from stores. Officers were
walking off the job by the dozens.
Some of New Orleans' hospitals, facing dwindling supplies of food, water
and medicine, resumed evacuations Friday. Rescuers finally made it into
Charity Hospital, the city's largest public hospital, where gunfire had
earlier thwarted efforts to evacuate more than 250 patients.
Behind, they left a flooded morgue where residents had been dropping off
bodies. After it reached its capacity of 12, five more corpses were
stacked in a stairwell. Other bodies were elsewhere in the hospital.
Administrator Don Smithburg said his numbed staff was forced to subsist
on intravenous sugar solutions.
"Some of them are on the brink of unable to cope any longer," he said.
