New Orleans Sinks Deeper Into Crisis
More National Guard Troops Ordered to Gulf Coast States;
Some Relief Operations Suspended
A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP
Unrest mounted across New Orleans on Thursday, as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured in to help restore order across the increasingly lawless and desperate city after Hurricane Katrina.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday the federal government is sending in 1,400 National Guard troops a day to control looting and lawlessness in New Orleans, quadrupling the regular police force in the city by the weekend.
Already, 2,800 National Guardsmen are in the city to help local police, Mr. Chertoff said. Another 1,400 troops and military police units are being added daily.
Mr. Chertoff maintained that "the Superdome is secure," amid mounting worries about fates of people still trapped in New Orleans and reports of widespread looting. Television networks showed new footage of dead bodies out on sidewalks and increasingly angry refugees.
Huge crowds, hoping to finally escape the stifling confines of the Superdome, jammed the main concourse outside the arena, spilling out over the ramp to the Hyatt hotel next door -- a seething sea of tense, unhappy people packed shoulder-to-shoulder up to the barricades where heavily armed National Guardsmen stood.
After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving at the Superdome for nearly four hours, a near riot broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up.
Outside the Convention Center, the sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement. Thousands of storm refugees had been assembling outside for days, waiting for buses.
NBC photojournalist Tony Zumbado, describing the situation at the Superdome on MSNBC television, said: "What I've seen I've never seen in this country."
Some Federal Emergency Management rescue operations were suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington. "In areas where our employees have been determined to potentially be in danger, we have pulled back," he said.
Police Capt. Ernie Demmo said a National Guard military policeman was shot in the leg as the two scuffled for the MP's rifle. The man was arrested.
Doctors at two desperately crippled hospitals in New Orleans called the Associated Press Thursday morning pleading for rescue, saying they were nearly out of food and power and had been forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters.
"We have been trying to call the mayor's office, we have been trying to call the governor's office ... we have tried to use any inside pressure we can,'' said Norman McSwain, chief of trauma surgery at Charity Hospital, the largest of two public hospitals.
Charity is across the street from Tulane University Medical Center, a private facility that has almost completed evacuating more than 1,000 patients and family members, he said. No such public resources are available for Charity, which has about 250 patients, or University Hospital several blocks away, which has about 110 patients.
Activating 30,000 National Guard Troops
An additional 10,000 National Guard troops from across the country were ordered into the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to shore up security, rescue and relief operations in Katrina's wake as looting, shootings, gunfire, carjackings and other lawlessness spread.
The Pentagon was sending a broad contingent of ships, aircraft, trucks, medical support and other personnel to support federal agencies already providing aid to the gulf region, including 60 helicopters to be used for search and rescue operations, damage assessment flights and the distribution of supplies.
The military expects to put 30,000 National Guard troops on duty in the Gulf states as demands grow for more security and relief assistance, the commander in charge of military relief and rescue efforts said Thursday.
About 24,000 of those will be on the ground in Louisiana and Mississippi in the next three days, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said in a telephone interview with reporters at the Pentagon. He also ordered the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan from the Louisiana coast to waters off Biloxi, Miss., to assist with hurricane relief operations there.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said President Bush will survey the Alabama and Mississippi coast by helicopter Friday, then go on to New Orleans. Mr. McClellan defended the administration's actions in response to the disaster. "It is a major catastrophe and a major response," he said.
Mr. Bush had said earlier Thursday that thousands more victims still need to be rescued and acknowledged the frustration of people who need food, water and shelter.
Massive Relief Effort
The federal government has launched the most massive relief effort in the nation's history to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, pledging to reach thousands of victims still needing to be rescued, Mr. Bush said Wednesday. (See full text of Bush's speech.)
He is asking former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush to help raise contributions to aid hurricane victims. The president has also directed his staff to try to assess the economic impact of the storm as the administration prepares an emergency budget request for Congress. Mr. Bush will hear his economic advisers" preliminary estimate in the afternoon after a lunch with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
The first of hundreds of busloads of people evacuated from Louisiana Superdome arrived early Thursday at their new temporary home -- another sports arena, the Houston Astrodome, 350 miles away. (See related article.)
At the Superdome, tempers and fires flared as frustration grew among the thousands remaining there. The evacuation was temporarily disrupted Thursday morning after a shot was reported fired at a military helicopter. The government had no immediate confirmation of the incident.
The military, which was overseeing the removal of the able-bodied by buses, continued the ground evacuation without interruption, said National Guard Lt. Col. Pete Schneider.
Astrodome officials said they would accept only the 25,000 people stranded at the Superdome -- a rule that was tested when a school bus arrived from New Orleans filled with families with children seeking shelter. At first, Astrodome officials said the refugees couldn't come in, but then allowed them to enter for food and water. Another school bus was also allowed in.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry's office said that his state has agreed to take in an additional 25,000 Louisiana refugees and plans to house them in San Antonio. More than 2,000 refugees have already arrived at the Astrodome, where preparations are still being made to accommodate them.
Scattered Dead Bodies
At least seven bodies were scattered outside the Superdome, and hungry, desperate people who were tired of waiting broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.
An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
Just above the convention center on Interstate 10, commercial buses were lined up, going nowhere. The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.
On Wednesday, Mayor Ray Nagin offered the most startling estimate yet of the magnitude of the disaster: Asked how many people died in New Orleans, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands." The death toll has already reached at least 121 in Mississippi.
If the estimate proves correct, it would make Katrina the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since at least the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which was blamed for anywhere from about 500 to 6,000 deaths. Katrina would also be the nation's deadliest hurricane since 1900, when a storm in Galveston, Texas, killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.
Mr. Nagin called for a total evacuation of New Orleans, saying the city had become uninhabitable for the 50,000 to 100,000 who remained behind after the city of nearly a half-million people was ordered cleared out over the weekend, before Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds.
The mayor said that it will be two or three months before the city is functioning again and that people wouldn't be allowed back into their homes for at least a month or two.
Orders to Abandon Search-and-Rescue Efforts
With New Orleans sinking deeper into desperation, Mr. Nagin ordered virtually the entire police force to abandon search-and-rescue efforts Wednesday and stop the increasingly brazen thieves.
"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas -- hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now," Mr. Nagin said.
In a sign of growing lawlessness, Tenet HealthCare Corp. asked authorities late Wednesday to help evacuate a fully functioning hospital in Gretna after a supply truck carrying food, water and medical supplies was held up at gunpoint.
The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80% of the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, gasoline and garbage.
The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 15,000-pound bags of sand and stone into a 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall. But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.
Tempers Flare
Tempers were starting to flare across the devastated region. Police said a man in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, fatally shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice.
Dozens of carjackings were reported, including a nursing-home bus. One officer was shot in the head and a looter was wounded in a shootout. Both were expected to survive.
Looters used garbage cans and inflatable mattresses to float away with food, clothes, TV sets -- even guns. Outside one pharmacy, thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break through the glass. The driver of a nursing-home bus surrendered the vehicle to thugs after being threatened.
As fires burned from broken natural-gas mains, the skies above New Orleans buzzed with National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters frantically dropping baskets to roofs where victims had been stranded since the storm roared in Monday. Hundreds of people wandered up and down shattered Interstate 10 -- the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east -- pushing shopping carts, laundry racks, anything they could find to carry their belongings.
On some of the few roads that were still open, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway.
Mr. Nagin, whose pre-hurricane evacuation order got most of his city's residents out of harm's way, estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people remained, and said that 14,000 to 15,000 a day could be evacuated in ensuing convoys.
The magnitude of the disaster had been unclear for days -- in part, because some areas in both coastal Mississippi and Louisiana are still unreachable, but also because authorities" first priority has been reaching the living. In Mississippi, for example, ambulances roamed through the passable streets of devastated places, in some cases speeding past corpses in hopes of saving people trapped in flooded and crumbled buildings.
The storm is exposing serious failures by government leaders and crisis planners before Katrina's arrival and flawed execution by relief agencies as the disaster unfolded. Despite decades of repeated warnings about a breach of levees or failure of drainage systems that protect New Orleans from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, local and federal officials now concede there weren't sufficient preparations for dealing with a catastrophe of this scale. Guidelines for coordination of emergency operations between state, federal and local agencies also were incomplete. (See related article.)
Federal officials said agencies are shipping 13.4 million liters of water and up to 1.5 million cases of prepackaged meals from military stocks. Trailers and rental properties are being secured for homeless victims.
With Katrina wrecking oil pumping and refining operations along the Louisiana coast, the government waived certain clean-air standards, released oil from the national petroleum reserve and lifted some restrictions on how long truckers can drive.
Water Levels Equalized
On Wednesday, officials with the state and the Army Corps of Engineers said the water levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain had equalized, and even appeared to be falling. But the danger was far from over.
Officials expected water levels to lower gradually in the city as the level of Lake Pontchartrain receded and pumping removed more water from inside the levees. Even so, officials predicted it would take at least 30 days, assuming the city's pumps worked well, to remove the water from the city.
New Orleans sits mostly below sea level, bordered by the massive lake to the north and the Mississippi River to the south. It depends on a 125-mile long network of earthen levees, concrete floodwalls, canals and pumping stations to protect it from floods. (See related article.)
Local officials and government engineers have long known the risks faced by the city. A publicly funded study begun in 2002 concluded that a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane would flood "the bowl of New Orleans north of the Mississippi River, locally known as the East Bank." Katrina hit New Orleans as a stronger Category 4 storm, and the East Bank is an area of the city that has sustained major damage. That study also identified at least 110,000 people who would need assistance in being evacuated, including the elderly and those with medical problems.
The Bush administration has consistently tussled with Congress over efforts on Capitol Hill to boost funding for the Army Corps. President Bush in 2002 fired his own Army Corps chief, former Mississippi congressman Michael Parker, after Mr. Parker backed lawmakers" efforts to push through a number of big projects, including a $188 million proposal to build a massive flood-control pump for the lower Mississippi River.
After last summer's deadly hurricane season, Army Corps engineers compiled a list of about $18 billion in projects needed to shore up Louisiana's levees and other flood defenses. But this June, the Army Corps" New Orleans district heard from Washington that under a House proposal it could expect its annual budget to fall by as much as 20% in 2006, to $272 million from $343 million. The Senate in July proposed slightly increasing the funding for the New Orleans district, and a compromise measure between the two chambers was supposed to be worked out in September.