United States authorities stepped up efforts to empty the hurricane-stricken city of New Orleans on Thursday, sending in thousands of troops to confront rampaging looters.
President George Bush vowed ”zero tolerance” for armed gangs and other profiteers from the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, which is feared to have killed several hundred people.
Hundreds of police were taken off search-and-rescue duties to counter looters who took over the streets, raiding stores and holding up the drivers at gunpoint.
About 4 000 National Guard troops were being sent to New Orleans, which is about 80% under floodwaters, to deal with the mayhem. More were being sent to other towns on the Gulf coast which have also seen widespread pillaging.
”The National Guard is quickly hoping to turn its mission to more law enforcement,” Bob Mann, spokesperson for Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, told reporters.
The guard was to be reinforced by 200 military police and civilian police from across the United States.
”I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting, price gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving, insurance fraud,” Bush said in a television interview on Thursday.
Roads out of the New Orleans region were again jammed with cars carrying refugees who rode out Monday’s fierce storm in their homes and emergency shelters.
Blanco and City Mayor Ray Nagin want to completely empty the city, and they have warned it could be up to four months before residents can return.
”We beg the people to get out,” Blanco told a press conference on Tuesday at a special emergency headquarters set up in the Louisiana city of Baton Rouge.
Thousands of people remained in New Orleans’s Superdome stadium, though a huge operation to move refugees to the Astrodome stadium in Houston has started. The Texas city has offered to take in 25 000 refugees.
Convoys of yellow school buses and tour buses took the homeless to Houston as emergency supplies headed in the opposite direction.
Around 10 000 patients as well as hospital staff were being moved out as fuel for generators ran out, said Don Smithburg, chief of Louisiana State University hospitals.
About 125 dead have been confirmed in neighbouring Mississippi state, but no toll has been given so far for New Orleans or Louisiana.
”The death toll will rise very dramatically,” Major General Harold Cross, commander of the Mississippi National Guard, told CNN.
Food, water and power supplies were desperately needed along the stricken Gulf coast, authorities and residents said.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said 90% of buildings in the worst-hit parts of the state were ”totally just gone”.
The US military sent ships and helicopters as well as troops to help the relief operation and join the increasingly desperate search for survivors trapped in their homes.
Teams of police, National Guard and volunteers were going from house to house in towns along the coast, sometimes finding whole families killed by the hurricane’s 7,5m-high storm surge.
Officials also warned of a potential public health disaster caused by outbreaks of mosquito- and water-borne diseases carried by floods contaminated with toxic chemicals, gasoline, human waste and corpses.
”We’re dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history,” Bush said on Wednesday after flying over the stricken area in Air Force One while returning to Washington early from his summer holiday.
”This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years,” he said.
News that floodwater levels had stabilised offered scant relief as authorities struggled to cope with mounting lawlessness in New Orleans.
As night fell, police chased looters across the darkened streets amid the increasing pillaging of stores, carjackings and armed robberies.
One nurse told how helicopters evacuating patients from a local hospital had been fired upon. There were also reports of men armed with automatic rifles opening fire in a police station.
The hurricane has added to global fears of a looming energy crisis, and while the hurricane disaster zone was suffering critical gasoline shortages, prices rose dramatically in the rest of the United States.
Queues formed at many petrol stations in major cities.
The US Coast Guard said at least 20 oil rigs and platforms were missing in the Gulf of Mexico and a ruptured gas pipeline was on fire.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said the government would tap emergency oil reserves to replenish Gulf Coast refinery operations devastated by Hurricane Katrina. But with oil prices again heading for $70 a barrel, experts said the government gesture would have little impact.
Switzerland’s Swiss Re company, the world’s second-largest reinsurance company, estimated that the damage caused by Katrina would cost the insurance industry about $20-billion. – Sapa-AFP