Chaos spread across New Orleans along with the brown, toxic floodwater in the early hours of Wednesday, and the thousands of stragglers still trapped awoke to find themselves in a city with few laws, little mercy and no clear way out.
The police seemed to have all but evaporated in the course of a night of looting and gunfire, in which at least one police officer was badly injured. A few camouflaged national guard trucks could be seen moving through the downtown area in convoy, but there were no guardsmen on the streets to deal with the wreckage of the city.
A boy ran out of a petrol station on Lee Circle clutching boxes of chocolate bars, followed by an elderly man carrying all the cigarettes his arms could hold. He flashed a half-toothed smile and declared ”Everything’s cool”, offering a pack as a gift.
On the corner of Loyola Avenue and Julia Street, just a few blocks from the French Quarter, people emerged from abandoned buildings as the sun began to heat up the floodwater and turn the air to hot soup.
Nine out of 10 of these remnants were black. All were destitute, dressed in rags, and carrying what was left of their possessions in plastic bags.
They had survived the hurricane and the floods and a terrifying night, and now they were wandering the streets, looking for a way out.
As the occasional car negotiated its way around the few remaining dry stretches of road, people emerged from all sides asking for a ride out of town or, failing that, some water. The slowly rising tide at their feet was a lethal mix of the Atlantic Ocean, oil and faeces.
Everyone who had passed the night in the commercial district had lived their own nightmare.
”It was like a war zone here. There was shooting and looting, and I saw people beating women; it’s fucking ugly,” said a man with bare, tattooed arms, carrying an empty water canister. He identified himself only as Jason, pointing out he had been in trouble with the law himself. ”I’m just trying to get to a bus stop so I can get out of here. Which way are you going?” he wanted to know.
Most people had heard that there was a plan to bring buses into New Orleans and evacuate people from the Superdome, the huge arena whose badly tarnished gold roof loomed over the intersection. Salvation seemed so close. It was only a hundred metres away, but surrounded, like some brooding castle, by its own moat of deep floodwater.
Elisha James had spent the night in the lobby of a rundown block of flats calling itself the Plaza Towers. Along with her boyfriend and his seven-year-old daughter, she had been trying to get to the Superdome since 5am, but the three were turned back by police manning checkpoints, who told them it was too dangerous.
”The police said you were on your own,” James said. ”If you’re not in the Superdome, you’re on your own.”
After sitting out Hurricane Katrina, she and her small family had fled from her mother’s house when the waters began to rise on Tuesday evening. They had no water and little food left.
James, like most of the people left on the streets, felt she had been forsaken by whoever was in charge. There was talk of rescue efforts, but no one had come for her. ”We made a fire in the night so they could see us, but they went past us several times,” she complained. ”We saw seven or eight trucks, and most had no one on them.”
As if to illustrate her point, a convoy of six military lorries drove by at that moment, their drivers looking straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge the entreaties of those left on the pavement. They were empty, apart from some cardboard boxes of water bottles. Their high, thick wheels kicked up water on both sides.
”There are people who’ve been sleeping here for two nights now,” she said, pointing to a Greyhound bus station that had become a makeshift shelter for the desperate.
Then she pointed up to a multi-storey carpark and cried: ”A lady went into labour up there and no one came. We could hear the screams.”
She and her small knot of dependants moved on as the day got hotter and stickier. A police helicopter had landed on a dry car park nearby and a murmur went round that perhaps something was about to happen. But it took off again and the Superdome looked as far away as ever. — Â