Massive explosions rocked the New Orleans riverfront a few kilometres south of the French Quarter before dawn on Friday.
At about 4.35am, the huge blasts jolted the residents of this hurricane-devastated city awake. The extent of any possible damage was not immediately known.
An initial explosion sent flames of red and orange shooting into the sky. A series of smaller blasts followed, and then acrid, black smoke could be seen even in the dark. The vibrations were felt all the way downtown.
The explosions appeared to originate close to the east bank of the Mississippi River, near a residential area and rail tracks. At least two police boats were at the scene.
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on Monday causing 230 000 square kilometres of devastation, but it was the failure of New Orleans’s levee system the following day that prompted the evacuation of the city’s nearly 500 000 inhabitants.
Chaotic scenes
Chaos has spread through this desperate city since the hurricane struck, despite the promise of 1 400 national guardsmen a day to stop the looting, a $10,5-billion recovery bill in Congress and a relief effort United States President George Bush called the biggest in US history.
The hungry beg for help, bodies lie along flooded sidewalks, and bands of armed thugs have thwarted fitful rescue efforts.
Gunfire in some areas on Thursday halted search-and-rescue efforts.
”This is a national disgrace,” said New Orleans’s emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert. ”We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.”
At the hot and stinking Superdome, where tens of thousands were being evacuated by bus to Houston, fistfights and fires broke out on Thursday in a seething sea of tense, suffering people who waited in lines that stretched nearly 1km to board yellow school buses.
After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the scramble to get on to the buses that finally did show up, and a group of refugees broke through a line of heavily armed national guardsmen.
Nearby, about 15 000 to 20 000 people who had taken shelter at the New Orleans Convention Centre grew ever more hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead.
Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad of 88 officers that they retreated when they went in to check out reports of assaults.
”We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten,” Compass said. ”Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon.”
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco called people who committed such crimes ”hoodlums” and issued a warning to lawbreakers, saying hundreds of National Guard troops hardened on the battlefield in Iraq have landed in New Orleans.
”They have M-16s and they’re locked and loaded,” she said. ”These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will.”
Bush was to tour the devastated Gulf Coast region on Friday and has asked his father, former president George Bush, and former president Bill Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign.
Evacuation nightmare
By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10 000 more people than it had at dawn. Evacuees from across the city swelled the crowd to about 30 000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town.
Some of those among the mostly poor crowd had been in the dome for four days without air conditioning, working toilets or a place to bathe. One military police officer was shot in the leg as he and a man scuffled for the MP’s rifle. The man was arrested.
By late Thursday, the flow of refugees to the Houston Astrodome was temporarily halted with a population of 11 325, less than half the estimated 23 000 people expected.
Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that Dallas would take 25 000 more refugees at Reunion Arena and 25 000 others would relocate to a San Antonio warehouse at KellyUSA, a city-owned complex that once was the site of an air-force base. Houston estimated as many as 55 000 people who fled the hurricane were staying in area hotels.
While flood waters in New Orleans appeared to stabilise, efforts continued to plug three breaches that had opened up in the levee system that protects this below-sea-level city.
Helicopters dropped sandbags into the breach and pilings were being pounded into the mouth of the canal on Thursday to close its connection to Lake Pontchartrain.
There were continued reports of looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings on Thursday, a day after the mayor took 1 500 police officers off search-and-rescue duty to try to restore order in the streets.
Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Michigan, said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was: ”Go to hell — it’s every man for himself.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said some operations had to be suspended in areas where there has been gunfire, but it is working to feed people and restore order.
Search for the dead
Mississippi’s confirmed death toll from Katrina rose to 126 on Thursday as more rescue teams spread out into a sea of rubble to search for the living, their efforts complicated at one point by the threat of a thunderstorm.
All along the 55km coast, other emergency workers performed the grisly task of retrieving bodies, some of them lying on streets and amid the ruins of homes, stretching back blocks from the beach.
Adding to the misery were tonnes of rotting shrimp and chicken, blown from their containers at a shipping dock and dumped into the water and on to the tattered landscape.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour said he knows people are tired, hungry, dirty and scared — particularly in areas hardest hit by Katrina. He said the state faces a long and expensive recovery process.
”I will say, sometimes I’m scared, too,” Barbour said during a briefing in Jackson, Mississippi. ”But we are going to hitch up our britches. We’re going to get this done.”
Dailies slam government aid effort
Meanwhile, leading United States newspapers on Friday slammed the US government for its sluggish response to the hurricane-spawned crisis in New Orleans, asking why it was so unprepared for such a long-predicted tragedy.
”How could the government have been so unready for a crisis that was so widely predicted?” asked The Washington Post, adding that experts ”issued repeated warnings for years about the city’s unique topography and vulnerability”.
The rampant looting and general chaos that followed the hurricane, coupled with the apparent slow response of federal emergency services, has led to growing criticism against the administration of President George Bush.
”The sluggish, initial response … has embittered and inflamed tens of thousands of people awaiting relief, most of them poor and black and many of them old and sick,” said the Post editorial.
USA Today expanded on the racial aspect of New Orleans’s tribulations, blaming the chaos on Louisiana state authorities’ ”failure to address that reality that appears to be a central reason … lawlessness is the inevitable companion of mass poverty”.
”The people who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave New Orleans are overwhelmingly poor and black. As are the looters,” said the nationally distributed newspaper, adding that authorities should have anticipated the threat to civil order.
”Many of the poor lacked cars, leaving them unable to escape the city. Lacking money, many also surely lacked places to go. Lacking education, many may not have grasped the threat, and lacking good health, many were too weak to survive,” said USA Today.
For the conservative Wall Street Journal, generally supportive of Bush’s Republican administration, the authorities were partly to blame for the rampant looting and lawlessness in New Orleans.
”Americans sometimes expect their government to do far too much — such as ensure low gasoline prices — but they do have a right to expect that it will at least provide for the safety of its citizens, even or perhaps especially in a crisis,” said the economic daily.
The New York Times, calling the government’s response to the crisis ”a very costly game of catch-up”, attributed the social breakdown in New Orleans in part to the lack of manpower and the Iraq war.
”Watching helplessly from afar, many citizens wondered whether rescue operations were hampered because almost one-third of the men and women of the Louisiana National Guard, and an even higher percentage of the Mississippi National Guard, were 7 000 miles away, fighting in Iraq,” said the daily. — Sapa-AP, AFP