Eye on New Orleans Hurricane Disaster

Chaos rules with 200,000 still stranded in the city.
Anarchy in New Orleans

Chaos rules with 200,000 still stranded in the city.

Looting, gunfire and a death toll still unknown

By Andrew Buncombe in New Orleans and Andrew Gumbel

Published: 02 September 2005

The effort to rescue as many as 200,000 people left stranded and hungry in the sinking city of New Orleans ran the risk of catastrophic breakdown last night, as under-prepared and under-resourced federal authorities faced the hostility of heavily armed residents seemingly bent on shooting their way out of town if necessary.

Authorities suspended the airlift of tens of thousands of people clustered in and around the Superdome stadium after a report of gunfire directed at a Chinook military helicopter - a major blow to the rescue effort. Fires raged in the immediate vicinity, making it too dangerous to activate either air or ground transport, a spokesman for a local ambulance service said.

Medical relief workers said they were afraid to offer their services because of the threatening presence of gunmen amid the stench and human misery of the Superdome, which has been without running water, electricity or basic food or medical supplies for two days. Gunmen simply took over working vehicles, looting those supplied with ice, fresh water, food or medicine.

In the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, the pilot of a medical rescue helicopter did not dare land outside a hospital after he saw a mob of 100 people, many of them armed, milling threateningly on the landing pad. Robberies, carjackings and even reports of rape and murder have all abounded in a city where the dead have been left lying where they fell or else float eerily down the rivers created by the water-filled streets. The death toll remains unknown, but official estimates of numbers in the thousands sound increasingly plausible in a city that appeared to be sliding into anarchy.

Survivors grew increasingly panicky last night as the transport they had been promised out of the city failed to materialise. "We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help," an elderly pastor told the Associated Press outside the city's Convention Centre, where corpses were laid out directly in front of the living. From the centre, a line of buses could be seen along the interstate highway, but they were going nowhere.

The streets, meanwhile, were filled with the stench of human waste, of discarded baby's nappies and empty bottles and assorted clumps of rubbish. Reporters were greeted with cries for help. One near-hysterical woman jumped up on to the steps of the Convention Centre and led the crowd in a recitation of the 23rd Psalm.

The Bush administration hurriedly sent a fresh consignment of 10,000 National Guardsmen into the disaster area to try to maintain order - bringing the total number of men in uniform to 28,000. President George Bush himself said he would adopt a "zero tolerance" attitude to lawlessness and urged people to work together. "I understand the anxiety of people on the ground," he told a television interviewer. "So there is frustration. But I want people to know there's a lot of help coming."

But the President found himself the target of an unusual degree of anger from across the political spectrum, as editorial writers demanded to know why he had sat out the first full day of the disaster, and present and former government officials detailed the numerous ways in which Congress and the White House has cut funding for the very emergency management programmes that the New Orleans area so desperately needs.

Despite the administration's efforts to catalogue the naval ships, helicopters, floating hospitals and essential supplies it was deploying, reports from along the Gulf Coast suggested it was not arriving nearly fast enough. "We're not getting any help yet," the fire chief in Biloxi, Mississippi, told the Knight-Ridder news service. "We need water. We need ice. I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."

Local officials already overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophe said they were particularly bewildered by the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to stem the gush of water pouring into New Orleans through broken levees protecting the city from both the Gulf to the south and Lake Ponchartrain to the north. "I'm extremely upset about it," said Louisiana's Governor, Kathleen Blanco.

The Army Corps, like every other authority charged with preventing the flooding of New Orleans, has had its budget cut repeatedly in recent years. The Federal Emergency Management Administration has had its resources diverted towards the Bush administration's "war on terror", and many of the National Guardsmen who might have been in place to intervene sooner have been diverted to Iraq.

The prospect of an ugly, elemental battle for survival in New Orleans was made worse by the fact that even before Hurricane Katrina it was the poorest urban area in the United States. The ghastly spectacle of overwhelmingly black residents caged in an unsanitary sports stadium and left almost entirely to their own devices could not but evoke memories of the darkest days of segregation and overtly racist Jim Crow laws in the American South. The potential for racial conflict has been quietly side-stepped in much of the US media coverage to date, but it is also impossible to ignore.

Tales of gun stores being looted and armed gangs roaming the streets were reminiscent of the opening salvos of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Police said their officers had been shot at, and news crews for at least one major national network let it be known that they had hired private security guards to guarantee their safety.

Looters raided shops and public buildings and used either rubbish bins or inflatable mattresses to float their takings down the water-filled streets.

The prospect of a major societal breakdown was not restricted to the disaster area. As the first evacuees were welcomed to their new temporary home, the Astrodome in Houston, officials felt obliged to deny that the dispossessed were being held in prison-like conditions. The Astrodome was "not a jail", the chief executive of Harris County, which encompasses Houston, insisted at a news conference.

Officials from President Bush down to Marc Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans, said the impact of Katrina was worse than that of the 11 September attacks on New York, and so required an even more energetic response. "So many of the people who did not evacuate could not evacuate, for whatever reason," said Mr Morial. "They are people who are African-American, mostly but not completely, and people who were of little or limited economic means. They are the folks, we've got to get them out of there."

The effort to rescue as many as 200,000 people left stranded and hungry in the sinking city of New Orleans ran the risk of catastrophic breakdown last night, as under-prepared and under-resourced federal authorities faced the hostility of heavily armed residents seemingly bent on shooting their way out of town if necessary.

Authorities suspended the airlift of tens of thousands of people clustered in and around the Superdome stadium after a report of gunfire directed at a Chinook military helicopter - a major blow to the rescue effort. Fires raged in the immediate vicinity, making it too dangerous to activate either air or ground transport, a spokesman for a local ambulance service said.

Medical relief workers said they were afraid to offer their services because of the threatening presence of gunmen amid the stench and human misery of the Superdome, which has been without running water, electricity or basic food or medical supplies for two days. Gunmen simply took over working vehicles, looting those supplied with ice, fresh water, food or medicine.

In the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, the pilot of a medical rescue helicopter did not dare land outside a hospital after he saw a mob of 100 people, many of them armed, milling threateningly on the landing pad. Robberies, carjackings and even reports of rape and murder have all abounded in a city where the dead have been left lying where they fell or else float eerily down the rivers created by the water-filled streets. The death toll remains unknown, but official estimates of numbers in the thousands sound increasingly plausible in a city that appeared to be sliding into anarchy.

Survivors grew increasingly panicky last night as the transport they had been promised out of the city failed to materialise. "We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help," an elderly pastor told the Associated Press outside the city's Convention Centre, where corpses were laid out directly in front of the living. From the centre, a line of buses could be seen along the interstate highway, but they were going nowhere.

The streets, meanwhile, were filled with the stench of human waste, of discarded baby's nappies and empty bottles and assorted clumps of rubbish. Reporters were greeted with cries for help. One near-hysterical woman jumped up on to the steps of the Convention Centre and led the crowd in a recitation of the 23rd Psalm.

The Bush administration hurriedly sent a fresh consignment of 10,000 National Guardsmen into the disaster area to try to maintain order - bringing the total number of men in uniform to 28,000. President George Bush himself said he would adopt a "zero tolerance" attitude to lawlessness and urged people to work together. "I understand the anxiety of people on the ground," he told a television interviewer. "So there is frustration. But I want people to know there's a lot of help coming."

But the President found himself the target of an unusual degree of anger from across the political spectrum, as editorial writers demanded to know why he had sat out the first full day of the disaster, and present and former government officials detailed the numerous ways in which Congress and the White House has cut funding for the very emergency management programmes that the New Orleans area so desperately needs.

Despite the administration's efforts to catalogue the naval ships, helicopters, floating hospitals and essential supplies it was deploying, reports from along the Gulf Coast suggested it was not arriving nearly fast enough. "We're not getting any help yet," the fire chief in Biloxi, Mississippi, told the Knight-Ridder news service. "We need water. We need ice. I've been told it's coming, but we've got people in shelters who haven't had a drink since the storm."

Local officials already overwhelmed by the scale of the catastrophe said they were particularly bewildered by the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to stem the gush of water pouring into New Orleans through broken levees protecting the city from both the Gulf to the south and Lake Ponchartrain to the north. "I'm extremely upset about it," said Louisiana's Governor, Kathleen Blanco.

The Army Corps, like every other authority charged with preventing the flooding of New Orleans, has had its budget cut repeatedly in recent years. The Federal Emergency Management Administration has had its resources diverted towards the Bush administration's "war on terror", and many of the National Guardsmen who might have been in place to intervene sooner have been diverted to Iraq.

The prospect of an ugly, elemental battle for survival in New Orleans was made worse by the fact that even before Hurricane Katrina it was the poorest urban area in the United States. The ghastly spectacle of overwhelmingly black residents caged in an unsanitary sports stadium and left almost entirely to their own devices could not but evoke memories of the darkest days of segregation and overtly racist Jim Crow laws in the American South. The potential for racial conflict has been quietly side-stepped in much of the US media coverage to date, but it is also impossible to ignore.

Tales of gun stores being looted and armed gangs roaming the streets were reminiscent of the opening salvos of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Police said their officers had been shot at, and news crews for at least one major national network let it be known that they had hired private security guards to guarantee their safety.

Looters raided shops and public buildings and used either rubbish bins or inflatable mattresses to float their takings down the water-filled streets.

The prospect of a major societal breakdown was not restricted to the disaster area. As the first evacuees were welcomed to their new temporary home, the Astrodome in Houston, officials felt obliged to deny that the dispossessed were being held in prison-like conditions. The Astrodome was "not a jail", the chief executive of Harris County, which encompasses Houston, insisted at a news conference.

Officials from President Bush down to Marc Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans, said the impact of Katrina was worse than that of the 11 September attacks on New York, and so required an even more energetic response. "So many of the people who did not evacuate could not evacuate, for whatever reason," said Mr Morial. "They are people who are African-American, mostly but not completely, and people who were of little or limited economic means. They are the folks, we've got to get them out of there."

'Casual to the point of careless' - Bush under fire
'Casual to the point of careless' - Bush under fire for slow reaction
By Andrew Gumbel
Published: 02 September 2005

President Bush faced not only the fallout of Hurricane Katrina but also an intense political storm yesterday as relief experts, government officials and newspaper editorials criticised everything from his administration's disaster preparedness policies to the manner in which he made his public entry into the growing crisis on the Gulf coast.

The New York Times said of a speech he made on Tuesday: "Nothing about the President's demeanour yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."

No less trenchant - and more heartfelt - was the Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi which surveyed the disaster around its editorial offices and asked: "Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in south Mississippi been pressed into service?"

As when the Asian tsunami hit last year, Mr Bush found himself on holiday at his Texas ranch when disaster struck. As with the tsunami, he was soon in the firing line for reacting slowly - he spent Monday on a fundraising tour of the American West - and failing to provide adequate leadership. As survivors complained of a lack of water, food and medical supplies yesterday, fingers from across the political spectrum were pointed at the White House.

Experts on the Mississippi Delta pointed out that a plan to shore up the levees around New Orleans was abandoned last year for lack of government funding. They noted that flood-control spending for south-eastern Louisiana had been chopped every year that Mr Bush has been in office, that hurricane protection funds have also fallen, and that the local army corps of engineers has also had its budget cut. The emergency management chief for Jefferson parish told the Times-Picayune newspaper:"It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay.".

The torrent of criticism contrasted sharply to the reaction to the 11 September attacks, when political sniping was put on hold and dissenters were told their complaints were both unwelcome and unpatriotic. The change in tone partly suggests a growing disenchantment with Mr Bush.

The usually restrained New York Times said: "Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?"

President Bush faced not only the fallout of Hurricane Katrina but also an intense political storm yesterday as relief experts, government officials and newspaper editorials criticised everything from his administration's disaster preparedness policies to the manner in which he made his public entry into the growing crisis on the Gulf coast.

The New York Times said of a speech he made on Tuesday: "Nothing about the President's demeanour yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."

No less trenchant - and more heartfelt - was the Biloxi Sun Herald in Mississippi which surveyed the disaster around its editorial offices and asked: "Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in south Mississippi been pressed into service?"

As when the Asian tsunami hit last year, Mr Bush found himself on holiday at his Texas ranch when disaster struck. As with the tsunami, he was soon in the firing line for reacting slowly - he spent Monday on a fundraising tour of the American West - and failing to provide adequate leadership. As survivors complained of a lack of water, food and medical supplies yesterday, fingers from across the political spectrum were pointed at the White House.

Experts on the Mississippi Delta pointed out that a plan to shore up the levees around New Orleans was abandoned last year for lack of government funding. They noted that flood-control spending for south-eastern Louisiana had been chopped every year that Mr Bush has been in office, that hurricane protection funds have also fallen, and that the local army corps of engineers has also had its budget cut. The emergency management chief for Jefferson parish told the Times-Picayune newspaper:"It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay.".

The torrent of criticism contrasted sharply to the reaction to the 11 September attacks, when political sniping was put on hold and dissenters were told their complaints were both unwelcome and unpatriotic. The change in tone partly suggests a growing disenchantment with Mr Bush.

The usually restrained New York Times said: "Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane's surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area's flood protection?"

Why the Levee Broke
Why the Levee Broke

By Will Bunch, Attytood

09/01/05 "AlterNet" -- -- Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters continued to rise in New Orleans on Wednesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.

There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:



The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.





The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.





"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."



On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:



"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."



The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:



The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.





"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.



There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:



That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.





But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.



The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions: "We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich. Now Bush has lost that gamble, big time.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home. Yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the blog Attytood.

Refugees tell tales of horror

Mothers scrape out their babies' nappies so they may be used again.

A woman calls for someone to help her patient outside the convention centre
A woman calls for someone to help the elderly lady she cares for

At the New Orleans' Superdome stadium, refugees describe piles of faeces, knee-high, after the toilets overflowed and people were forced to relieve themselves on staircases.

At least seven bodies are scattered outside the city's convention centre.

People sheltering at New Orleans' main refuges say they have been robbed of their humanity.

"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at a woman who lay dead in her wheelchair outside the convention centre.

"We pee on the floor. We are like animals," 25-year-old Taffany Smith told the Los Angeles Times, cradling her three-week-old son in the Superdome stadium.

Up to 20,000 refugees from the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina have been corralled into each building.

This is where they were told to come, but the authorities were woefully unprepared for the arrival of such numbers, who include the very young, the very old, and the very infirm.

Pervading stench

For days they have been without adequate electricity, sanitation, or food supplies waiting to be taken from what many describe as a scene from hell.


We got dead bodies sitting next to us for days. I feel like I am going to die
Thomas Jessie

All who have been inside the Superdome speak of the pervading stench of human waste.

Amid the deteriorating conditions at both refuges, horrific stories are emerging.

At the Superdome there were two reports of rape, one involving a child, while police at the convention centre said there had been similar reported incidents.

Others described what it was like to live among the dead.

"We got dead bodies sitting next to us for days. I feel like I am going to die. People are going to kill you for water," Thomas Jessie, a 31-year-old roofer, told the AFP news agency after spending the night in the convention centre.

Keep on coming

And the slow evacuation has only contributed to tensions. The head of the city's emergency operations, Terry Ebbert, warned it had become an "incredibly explosive situation".

A woman is carried away from the evacuation queue
Heat and exhaustion proved too much for some in the queue
"This is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace," he said.

At the Superdome, fighting and gunshots broke out in the long desperate line of people waiting for the chance to board one of the school buses deployed to take them away.

Medical evacuations from the Superdome on Thursday were temporarily disrupted after a gun shot was fired at a rescue helicopter.

Meanwhile people continued to arrive, many wading through water to get there. Their homes destroyed, they have nowhere else to go.

By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the evacuation began, the stadium had 10,000 more people than it did at dawn.






A woman calls for someone to help the elderly lady she cares for