The devastation set to be revealed by Hurricane Katrina’s receding floodwaters will shock the United States, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin predicted on Tuesday as military engineers plugged one of the biggest gaps in the city’s levee system.
”It’s going to be awful and it’s going to wake the nation up again,” he said, estimating that it would take three weeks to drain the water, several more to clear up the debris and a further two months to reconnect electricity in the urban area.
But there were also signs of cautious optimism as the US army corps of engineers started to pump water out of the flooded city. ”I’ve gone from anger to despair to seeing us turn the corner,” he said.
On Monday the army corps strengthened the damaged levee along the 17th Street canal in the west of the city using metal sheets, before stopping the gap by dropping dozens of 1 200kg sandbags onto the 135m breach from helicopters.
Another 90m break in the London Street canal was also closed up, but some engineers estimated that pumping out all the water could still take up to 80 days.
Much of New Orleans lies below the level of the Mississippi river to the south and lake Pontchartrain to the north. The levee system of steel, earth and concrete embankments has been used for nearly 300 years to protect the urban area.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said that 80% of the city was flooded after Hurricane Katrina broke open several critical levees last week.
Floodwaters rose to six metres in parts, while the pressure of flooding knocked out several of the pumps which normally draw seeping water from the streets.
The army corps said that the biggest pump, which can remove up to 285 cubic metres of water per second, was also turned on on Monday.
But it was only operating at three cubic metres per second and was slowly being ramped up to full power. Officials fear that moving too quickly could put too much pressure on intact parts of the levee system, causing fresh flooding.
More than a million people have deserted the affected areas in New Orleans and 10 000 are feared dead. So far, however, there have been only 59 confirmed deaths in Louisiana state and more than 100 in neighbouring Mississippi.
Once the floodwaters are drained, emergency teams expect to find toxic waste, rotting matter and dead bodies, and officials spent Monday scouring the streets to remove the last remaining survivors before the grimmer tasks of the operation begin.
”There are no jobs. There are no homes to go to, no hotels to go to, there is absolutely nothing here,” deputy police chief Warren Riley said.
”We advise people that this city has been destroyed, it has completely been destroyed.”
Swollen bodies floated in the streets and authorities are worried there may be thousands more dead inside New Orleans homes.
In the suburb of Jefferson Parish, traffic queues formed as residents were allowed back for 12 hours on Monday to assess the damage from the storm.
Many were already thinking of moving away. ”I like the northern states,” said 25-year-old Javetta Jackson. ”I like the seasons. I’ve always wanted to live in Baltimore so maybe we’ll go there. It’s an opportunity, isn’t it?”
The Jefferson Parish president, Aaron Broussard, told CBS news that government scalps would have to be taken for what had happened.
”Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before congress today,” he said.
”Take whatever idiot they have at the top, give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don’t give me the same idiot.”
At least 240 000 people from Louisiana had been evacuated into neighbouring Texas, where Governor Rick Perry said the state could handle no more and asked remaining evacuees to be airlifted to other states.
In Houston, former presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior met evacuees taking shelter in the city’s Astrodome and set up an emergency fund for the displaced. Around 4 000 of those sheltering in the Astrodome were due to be moved on Tuesday to two cruise ships in Galveston, Texas, but this plan was later cancelled as victims protested that another relocation would be too much too soon.
Asked about widespread criticism of his son’s slow response to the crisis, Bush replied: ”What do I think as a father? I don’t like it … [but] it goes with the territory.”
US Senate leaders on Tuesday promised a ”fair, constructive and bipartisan” investigation into government failures in responding to the hurricane.
”We would be remiss … if we did not ask the hard questions needed to understand what went so wrong and what our country must do to improve our ability to respond to future crises, whether they are natural disasters or terrorist attacks,” said Republican Susan Collins, who heads the Senate’s Government Reform and Homeland Security Committee.
Collins said her probe would help ensure that future disaster response is better coordinated than with Katrina.
Describing the overall government response as ”poor,” Collins noted that what she sees as a massive failure in US disaster preparedness comes as the four year anniversary approaches of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, that killed about 3 000 people.
”If our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy, how would the federal, state and local governments have coped with a terrorist attack that provided no advance warning and that was intent on causing as much death and destruction as possible?,” she said.
”How is it possible that almost four years to the day after the attacks on our country, with billions of dollars spent to improve our preparedness, that a major area of this nation was so ill prepared to respond to a catastrophe?”
The Senate, which held an emergency session last week to allot $10,5-billion for Katrina victim relief, formally reconvenes later on Tuesday with a resolution of sympathy for the victims. – Sapa-AP, Guardian Unlimited Â