Once-bustling New Orleans was reduced on Monday to a few thousand people as rescuers went house to house searching for survivors of Hurricane Katrina and mobile morgues stood by to collect the dead.
A week after Katrina walloped the Gulf Coast, leaving thousands feared dead, some residents headed back to relatively undamaged areas while President George Bush made his second tour of the devastation in three days.
And with troops continuing to pour into the stricken region, an aircraft carrier joined nearly two dozen other military ships anchored off the coast in support of the massive relief effort.
General Russel Honore, commander of operations in New Orleans, said evacuations have brought the population of the one-time jazz capital from nearly half-a-million people to ”much less than 10 000, I would believe”.
The authorities said a fleet of refrigerated semi-trailer tractor trucks has been assembled to harvest the rotting corpses. But in an interview with ABC television, Honore was unable to say how many dead they would find.
”We expect it to be a significant number of people based on those who were evacuated and in the low-lying areas,” he said. ”There’s some bad news still yet to come on that subject.”
Bush headed off on his second trip to the stricken region a day after sending top members of his Cabinet to show support and defend a relief effort that he has acknowledged was slow to get off the ground.
He was scheduled to travel to nearby Baton Rouge but not New Orleans, where local officials have been particularly critical of the early federal failure to speed troops and supplies.
The president said on Sunday: ”The world saw this tidal wave of disaster ascend upon the Gulf Coast, and now they’re going to see a tidal wave of compassion.”
The United States Northern Command said on Monday the number of active-duty US troops in the area had risen to 11 700 and would increase by Tuesday to 15 700, on top of the more than 30 000 National Guard forces deployed.
It said the aircraft carrier Harry S Truman had arrived off the Gulf Coast, bringing the number of military vessels in the area to 23, with a hospital ship and a salvage ship due to arrive on Tuesday.
Political fallout
But the political fallout continued, with a Senate committee set to begin hearings this week and Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton urging Bush to set up a ”Katrina commission” to probe the government’s response.
”It has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared,” said Clinton, whose husband, former president Bill Clinton, was tapped by Bush to help in fund-raising efforts for hurricane relief.
On the ground and over the airwaves, Bush aides have been stressing that now is the time to discuss what can be done to help, not for a debate about the widely criticised response to the storm.
”In due course, if people want to go and chop heads off, there will be an opportunity to do it,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said during a round of appearances on Sunday talk shows from a New Orleans suburb.
A Washington Post-ABC poll published on Sunday found the country sharply divided over how Bush has handled rescue and relief efforts, with 46% approving and 47% dissatisfied.
Fifty-one percent rated the federal response as not so good or poor, and 48% said it was excellent or good. But two-thirds said Washington should have been better prepared.
The political fallout from the country’s worst natural disaster comes at a time when Bush’s popularity ratings are at the lowest of his presidency and his policies in Iraq face mounting opposition.
Breach closed as residents jam highway
Officials said construction crews and army engineers have closed the deadly breach in a levee that sent floodwaters surging into New Orleans, leaving it 80% under water.
”Work was completed on repairing the breach on the 17th Street canal on Sunday night,” said Cleo Allen, of Louisiana’s department of transportation and development. ”They are now pumping water out of the canal and into the lake.”
Thousands of evacuated New Orleans residents jammed a highway leading into a dry part of the city in a cavalcade of rental trucks, cars and vans after a local leader said they could return to their homes.
A tailback stretched 40km as residents of the western Jefferson Parish, parts of which escaped the worst flooding from Hurricane Katrina, disregarded warnings by Louisiana state authorities to go home.
At the same time, authorities geared for the largest resettlement operation in US history with hundreds of thousands of evacuees likely to need food, homes, schools and other essentials for months, if not longer.
Twenty US states from coast to coast have offered to take in victims of Katrina, with authorities scouting military bases, sports stadiums, hotels and other facilities for lodging.
But with New Orleans expected to be largely unhabitable for a while, they were counting the cost of a prolonged resettlement effort.
In Texas, which has taken in nearly 250 000 evacuees, Governor Rick Perry warned the state is nearing the limit of its resources and has to transfer people elsewhere.
Authorities warned of gruesome scenes to come as the dead victims of Katrina are plucked from the fetid lake submerging New Orleans. Rescuers have been told to tie any bodies they stumble upon to street poles and leave them floating for eventual pick-up.
A 11 600-square-metre warehouse in the north-western suburb of St Gabriel stands ready to take in more than 1 000 bodies.
”We were working for the living, and now we are working for the dead and the living,” said Dr Louis Cataldie, a state medical official in Louisiana. ”It’s pretty tough, pulling out dead bodies.” — AFP
