A week after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans, engineers plugged the levee break that had swamped much of the city and flood waters began to recede, but along with the good news came the mayor’s direst prediction yet: as many as 10 000 dead.
Crews had put up metal sheets and dropped 1 350kg sandbags from helicopters on to the 17th Street canal leading to Lake Pontchartrain to plug the 60m-wide gap, and water was being pumped from the canal back into the lake.
State officials and the United States Army Corps of Engineers say once the canal level is drawn down 60cm, pumping station number six can begin pumping water out of the bowl-shaped city.
Some parts of the city already showed slipping floodwaters as the repair neared completion, with the low-lying Ninth Ward dropping more than 30cm. In downtown New Orleans, some streets were merely wet rather than swamped.
”We’re starting to make the kind of progress that I kind of expected earlier,” New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said even before the plug of the break, which opened up a day after the hurricane and flooded 80% of the city.
The news came as many of the 460 000 residents of suburban Jefferson Parish waited in a line of cars that stretched for kilometres to see their flooded homes briefly and to scoop up soaked wedding pictures and other cherished mementos.
”A lot of these people built these houses anticipating some flood water but nobody imagined this,” sobbed Diane Dempsey, a 59-year-old retired army lieutenant colonel who could get no closer than the water line 1,6km from her Metairie home.
”I’m going to pay someone to get me back there, anything I have to do.”
”I won’t be getting inside today unless I get some scuba gear,” added Jack Rabito, a 61-year-old bar owner who waited for a ride to visit his one-storey home that had water lapping to the gutters.
Katharine Dastugue was overjoyed to find that floodwaters had gone across her lawn but stopped just centimetres from her doorstep. As she stood waiting for a boat to take her in, she made a list of things she hoped to salvage before being forced to leave again on Wednesday.
”If I can just get my kids’ baby photos,” she said. ”You can’t replace those.”
High death toll
In New Orleans, Nagin upticked his estimate of the probable death toll in his city from merely thousands, telling NBC’s Today showL ”It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10 000.”
As law-enforcement officers and even bands of civilians — including actor Sean Penn — launched door-to-door searches of the city for survivors, they were running up against a familiar obstacle: people who had been trapped more than a week in damaged homes, yet refused to leave.
”We have advised people that this city has been destroyed,” said Deputy Police Superintendent WJ Riley. ”There is nothing here for them and no reason for them to stay — no food, no jobs, nothing.”
Riley, who estimated fewer than 10 000 people were left in the city, said some simply did not want to leave their homes, while others were hanging back to engage in criminal activities, such as looting.
Nagin said the city had the authority to force residents to evacuate but didn’t say if it was taking that step. He did, however, detail one heavy-handed tactic: water will no longer be handed out to people who refuse to leave.
With almost a third of New Orleans’s police force missing in action, a caravan of law-enforcement vehicles, emblazoned with emblems from across the nation and blue lights flashing, poured into the city to help establish order on the city’s anarchic streets.
Between 400 to 500 officers on New Orleans’s 1 600-member force were unaccounted for. Some lost their homes. Some were looking for families.
”Some simply left because they said they could not deal with the catastrophe,” Riley said. Officers were being cycled off duty and given five-day vacations in Las Vegas and Atlanta, where they also would receive counselling.
At a news conference in Baton Rouge, police Superintendent Eddie Compass denied that officers deserted in droves, acknowledging some officers abandoned their jobs but saying he didn’t know how many.
Two police officers killed themselves. Another was shot in the head. Compass said 150 had to be rescued from 2,5m of water and others had gotten infections from walking through the murky soup of chemicals and pollutants in flooded areas.
”No police department in the history of the world was asked to do what we were asked,” Compass said with a mix of anger and pride.
The leader of troops patrolling New Orleans declared the city largely free of the lawlessness that plagued it in the days following the hurricane. He angrily lashed out at a reporter who suggested search-and-rescue operations were being stymied by random gunfire and lawlessness.
”Go on the streets of New Orleans — it’s secure,” said army Lieutenant General Russel Honore. ”Have you been to New Orleans? Did anybody accost you?”
Criticism over slow federal response
Hopeful signs of recovery were accompanied by President George Bush’s second visit to Louisiana, which exposed a continued rift between state and federal officials over the slowness of a relief effort. The first significant convoy of food, water and medicine didn’t arrive in New Orleans until four full days after the hurricane, and the mayor and others said some survivors died awaiting relief.
Louisiana’s largest newspaper, The Times-Picayune, called for the firing of every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency in an open letter to Bush that it published.
At a stop in Baton Rouge, Bush said all levels of the government were doing their best, and he pledged: ”So long as any life is in danger, we’ve got work to do.”
In Texas, US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared a public health emergency for that state, saying it will speed up federal assistance to help almost 240 000 storm evacuees — the most of any state.
US television’s often deferential treatment of government officials has been replaced by fiercely combative interviews and scathing commentary.
”We talk to mothers holding babies, some of these babies three, four, five months old, living in horrible conditions,” the usually urbane CNN reporter Anderson Cooper told viewers from New Orleans last week.
”These people are being forced to live like animals. People need to see what it’s really like here. People are dying at the convention centre, and there’s no one coming to get them,” the anguished journalist said as US officials insisted that the rescue operation was in hand.
Another CNN anchor branded Bush’s first visit to the Katrina disaster zone an exercise in political public relations, while interviewers universally challenged top government officials who said the situation was under control.
Even on conservative Fox News, which usually gives weight to the administration’s point of view, anchors and reporters faulted the government for not getting help to survivors of the calamity for five days.
CNN’s Miles O’Brien on Thursday became locked in a war of words with Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a member of Bush’s Republican Party, over whether the government and military had done enough to prepare for the ferocity of the category-five Hurricane Katrina as she headed for the US coast.
O’Brien challenged the governor, whose state was also hit by Katrina, when he denied that the US government had ”dropped the ball” in its handling of what has become one of the country’s worst-ever natural disasters.
”Governor Barbour, surely there was enough knowledge in advance that this was a huge killer storm a matter of days, not hours, before it ever struck a landfall?” O’Brien asked.
Homes of the rich
While the New Orleans refugees were mostly poor and black, Jefferson Parish brought the storm’s destruction to a much wider economic cross-section.
The sprawling parish stretches from Grand Isle on the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Pontchartrain in the north, and includes some of the metropolitan area’s most exclusive neighbourhoods.
In the enclave of Old Metairie, the rows of palatial, six-bedroom homes sustained little structural damage but had some of the worst flooding. Water rippled up the knobs at front doors and completely covered Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs in garages.
Many residents were happy that the storm spared their homes, but angry that the failure of the levee system left them swamped. Some were considering a lawsuit against the federal government for having a levee that could survive no more than a category-three hurricane.
”That’s what’s so devastating, that goddamned levee breaking,” said Bobby Patrick, who is now staying in Houston. ”My home didn’t lose a shingle but it’s got six feet of water in it.”
Since the storm, rumours had swirled that looters had crossed over the parish line and began breaking into evacuated homes in Jefferson. Many were relieved to return home on Monday to find their belongings untouched.
Across the neighbourhood, residents took what items they could fit in a boat. One woman loaded up her boat with her collection of cashmere sweaters, her cat and the 1957 Leica camera that belonged to her grandfather. A man packed his pick-up truck with his silverware, his wife’s clothes and a cherished animal figurine.
Unlike the poor in New Orleans, these refugees had other places to go. And few here planned to stay through what could be a long recovery. With police checkpoints on every major street corner, even looting was not a major concern.
Said personal trainer Rod McClave: ”I’m more concerned about them damaging my stuff just for the hell of it.” — Sapa-AP, AFP