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 News from Around the Americas | August 2005 
Flooding Continues in New Orleans as Rescuers Search City
 Joseph B. Treaster & Kate Zernike - NYTimes
New Orleans - With parts of this city under 20 feet of water and a death toll in the region that is reported at 55 and certain to climb, the Gulf Coast began today to confront the aftermath of one of the most devastating storms ever to hit the United States.
The waters of Lake Ponchartrain continued to rise and spill over into already flooded areas of New Orleans when two levees collapsed after Katrina tore through the area on Monday. Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in a television interview that the city was 80 percent under water, in some places 20 feet deep.
As dawn broke today, rescuers set out in boats and helicopters to search for survivors. A reporter who accompanied Jefferson Parish sheriff's rescue officials on a flight over the area saw floodwaters reaching to the eaves of some three-story houses. Hundreds of people trapped on roofs waved frantically for rescue. Coast Guard and police Blackhawk helicopters were plucking them off one by one.
"At first light, the devastation is greater than our worst fears - it's just totally overwhelming," Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said in a news conference today.
The death toll in just one county in Mississippi could be as high as 80, Gov. Haley Barbour said. Preliminary reports on Monday put the overall toll in Louisiana and Mississippi at 55, and officials could not provide updated numbers today.
"The devastation down there is just enormous," Governor Barbour said on the NBC "Today" show. "I hate to say it, but it looks like it is a very bad disaster in terms of human life," he added, referring to Harrison County, which includes Gulfport and Biloxi.
"This is our tsunami," Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi told The Biloxi Sun Herald.
The entire city of New Orleans was ordered evacuated before the storm, and Mayor Nagin said about 80 percent of the city's residents had left. But today, even as rescuers continued to search for victims, other officials had to deal with looters. CNN showed images of hundreds of people breaking into stores on Canal Street, at the edge of the French Quarter, and running away with bagloads of merchandise, with no one stopping them.
Officials at the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security said today that presidents of Plaquemines and Jefferson Parishes, which include New Orleans, as well as other communities throughout the state, had sought the imposition of martial law, which would suspend certain civil rights. Officials were awaiting direction from the attorney general's office.
President Bush, in a televised news conference in San Diego, urged people in the affected areas to listen to instructions from state and federal authorities, who he said were working to "get people back on their feet - we have a lot of work to do."
"These are trying times for the people of these communities," Mr. Bush said. "We know that many are anxious to return to their homes. It's not possible at this moment. Right now our priority is on saving lives, and we are still in the midst of search and rescue operations."
The White House said he would curtail his vacation in Texas by two days and return to Washington on Wednesday to deal with the recovery effort.
At 10 a.m., the National Hurricane Center in Miami said Katrina had now been reduced to a tropical depression, with maximum sustained winds of 35 miles per hour, and said it was centered near Clarksville, Tenn., just northwest of Nashville. It continued to cause flooding as it made its way north.
In Diamondhead, Miss., in a grim scene that is probably being repeated in countless other places nearby, the fire department was going door to door this morning to search for survivors. If they found no victims, members of the Fire and Rescue team painted large C's on the front doors of buildings, many of which were barely standing.
Many people had fled to this community, about 60 miles northeast of New Orleans, thinking they were reaching higher safer ground that would keep them out of harm's way. Instead, many were caught in Katrina's surge that pushed through Bay St. Louis on the Gulf Coast and into the bayous, forcing water to the top of second-story homes in Diamondhead.
Relatives of Rhea M. Finnila, 84, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, had brought her up to the attic of her son's home in Diamondhead, hoping to keep her safe, but the floodwaters that reached almost to the eaves of the house nearly carried her away on the mattress on which her family had placed her.
"When the surge came, the mattress was floating most of the time," said Rich L. Finnila, 59, a relative. "It was a struggle to get her in there."
Brian P. Finnila, Mrs. Finnila's grandson, said, "We started climbing and pushing."
After the storm, fire and rescue workers who found them used a blanket to carry Mrs. Finnila out of the house and then loaded her in the back of a Jeep to take her to another relative's house.
Jeff G. Garth, 34, and his family, from Waveland, which is on the coast, sought refuge in Diamondhead with his sister-in-law, Tammy L. Lick, 35, who had bought her home only a month ago.
The house did not survive Katrina.
"The whole house is gone - everything in it," Ms. Lick said. "They told us we needed wind and hail insurance, but [that] we didn't flood here. Little did we know."
Yet no one was injured.
In New Orleans, a survey team was sent to inspect an overflowing canal that was adding to already flooded areas, Lt. Kevin Cowan of the National Guard, serving in the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness, said in a telephone interview this morning. The assumption is that the canal is "simply overflowing," he said, but the team will also look for possible breeches in the levee system.
New Orleans lies mostly below sea level and is protected by a network of pumps, canals and levees. But many of the pumps were not working this morning.
More than 1,600 Mississippi national guardsmen were activated to help with the recovery, and the Alabama Guard planned to send two battalions to Mississippi, The Associated Press reported.
A Coast Guard officer in Louisiana, Capt. Terry Galbraith, told CNN that several hundred survivors still needed to be rescued in New Orleans, but that he did not have an estimate for nearby areas.
He added that the disaster and its aftermath would "change the face" of Coast Guard operations in New Orleans. "It's going to be catastrophic for everyone," he said.
A total of more than 2.1 million people have reported power outages in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, the United States Department of Energy said.
Scott Adcock, public information manager with the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, said in a telephone interview that more than 790,000 people were without power. Authorities are starting damage assessment today with helicopters and people on the ground, but flooding and debris are hampering efforts in some areas, he said.
About 66 shelters are now holding 5,300 people, and four medical-needs shelters are holding 36, he said, adding "We are dealing with widespread power outages."
"The serious flooding is in Baldwin and Mobile counties," Mr. Adcock said. "Some people were rescued in boats, but there are no confirmed reports of casualties directly related to the hurricane."
"We are looking at trees down, power lines down," he said. Parts of the downtown Mobile area are under water, he said, but he did not know how many feet deep.
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN from Baton Rouge, La., that additional medical teams were being brought in by air and that California search and rescue teams had been called in "for their expertise" in deep-water and swift-water rescues.
"Right now we have two priorities, saving lives and sustaining lives," he added.
"We have literally thousands of people in shelters whose lives we have to sustain, so we have to get commodities to those people," Mr. Brown said. "We're just in full operational mode right now."
"We have a disaster here that really as I can best describe it is of sobering proportions," he added.
Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared but inundating parts of the city and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi, where it killed dozens, ripped away roofs and left coastal roads impassable.
Packing 145-mile-an-hour winds as it made landfall, the storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center.
The storm was potent enough to rank as one of the most punishing and costliest ever to hit the United States. The insurance industry could face costs of between $12 billion and $26 billion, according to AIR Worldwide Corporation, a risk assessment company in Boston.
In New Orleans, the hurricane's howling winds stripped 15-foot sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as 10,000 evacuees took shelter.
Some of the worst damage reports came from east of New Orleans with an estimated 40,000 homes reported flooded in St. Bernard Parish. In Gulfport, the storm left three of five hospitals without working emergency rooms, beachfront homes wrecked and major stretches of the coastal highway flooded and impassable.
Joseph B. Treaster and Ralph Blumenthal reported from New Orleans for this article, and Kate Zernike from Montgomery, Ala. Reporting was contributed by Abby Goodnough in Mobile, Ala.; Michael M. Luo in New York; James Dao in Hattiesburg., Miss.; Jeremy Alford in Baton Rouge, La.; Diane Allen in Diamondhead, Miss., and Terence Neilan, Christine Hauser and Shadi Rahimi in New York. |
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