The sun rose today on a brutal new fact of geography: The city of New Orleans is part of the Gulf of Mexico.
Thousands are still stranded in water chest-deep, and in some places much higher. And people are as scared as they’ve ever been in their life.
The mayor of New Orleans said Wednesday that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in his city may have died, and added that the city of nearly half a million people will have to be totally evacuated, with no one allowed back to their homes for a month or two.
It’s a disaster almost beyond comprehension.
“What I saw today is equivalent to what I saw flying over the tsunami in Indonesia,” says Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).
This battle of New Orleans is about fighting time— getting people to safe ground before flood waters get them, a battle in the hospitals to treat the sick and injured before sputtering generators die completely, a battle to keep civil order in the midst of looting and chaos — a battle of New Orleans, with an outcome not clear to the governor of Louisiana today.
Louisiana isn’t even officially counting the dead until every effort has been made to get people off rooftops and out of sweltering attics.
‘One of the worst natural disasters in our history’
Today, President Bush, aboard Air Force One, made an hastily-arranged inspection flight over the destroyed coastline. Following a conference call with his top aides on a disaster relief plan, Bush looked at one coastal community and said, “It’s totally wiped out.”
From the White House Wednesday afternoon, the president said truckloads of ice, water, meals, blankets and generators were on their way to the afflicted region. “We are dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our history,” he said. "This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years."
About 45,000 refugees are in shelters across the New Orleans area. The regional commander for the Salvation Army has never seen anything like it. “This is the worst disaster of my 32 years I’ve ever seen that’s this bad. I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes and disaster services. This is a war zone,” says Maj. Dalton Cunningham of the Salvation Army. “It is horrid. People’s lives are just — everything they’ve worked for their entire lives is absolutely gone.”
Help all around
Authorities are desperate to get the evacuees out of New Orleans altogether. More than 20,000 of them have been stuck inside the dank humid Superdome since it opened as a shelter Sunday morning. Toilets are overflowing. Water is running short inside the dome even as it’s rising threateningly outside, and there is no electricity or drinkable water in New Orleans.
Today, Louisiana and Texas struck a deal in which an armada of buses — 475 of them rounded up by FEMA, the Federal Disaster agency — are taking up to 25,000 evacuees from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome more than 300 miles away. The now mothballed-Astrodome could serve as a full-service shelter until December, according to the Texas governor.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was one of several federal officials today pledging to “work tirelessly” in a rescue and relief response as large as any the country has ever faced.
Helicopter crews continued dramatic rescues today. So far teams by air and by boat have rescued 3,000 people from grim fates. Each has a story of surviving Katrina.
And more than a few on the battered coast have stories of terrible losses. Families desperate to locate loved ones turned to the Internet to ask for any information on their whereabouts. Elsewhere on the Web, on sites like Craig’s List, the nation reached out to offer help—from lodging to free phone and fax services.
The U.S. Navy is headed to the Gulf Coast with helicopter assault ships, a hospital ship, and a team of small swift boat rescuers. But the big ships are still days away.
Meanwhile the National Guard says there are 11,000 soldiers already on site, and almost as many on the way from across the country.
Lawlessness: A growing nightmare
Maintaining order in a city with people, many impoverished and stranded without cars, food, or water, is a major concern. Looting will be remembered as part of the history of Hurricane Katrina. One of the big shopping streets downtown, Canal Street, was plundered by dozens of looters who broke through merchants steel gates and stuffed garbage bags full of merchandise, jewelry, shoes, and clothing— though some people were also grabbing necessities, food, water, and diapers.
“You are talking about people who couldn’t leave the area, couldn’t get on bus or train, maybe didn’t have vehicle transportation and was hoping that the storm wouldn’t be so bad,” said Jeffrey Robinson, a professor of urban economic studies at New York University.
“There will always be people who are going to be opportunistic when they see the situation unfolding as it has in New Orleans. And it’s unfortunate that they are getting as much press as those who need to be rescued,” Robinson adds.
Police were overwhelmed yesterday and gave up trying to secure a Wal-Mart which was stripped down to bare shelves by looters. Some people in uniform even appeared to join them.
One policeman was reported shot in the head by a looter but he’s expected to recover.
It’s all part of the growing nightmare in one of our most unique and beloved cities. Creole N’awlins with its strong drink and street jazz, served up in an irresistible, slightly wicked, gumbo.
The tourist French Quarter, on high-ish ground, has come through in reasonably good shape.
But will the good times roll in quite the same way after the horrors of Katrina?
Geography will make rebuilding a challenge
Take a look at the map and you’ll see why the city and people of New Orleans are in such peril.
Directly north of the city is Lake Pontchartrain: 40 miles wide, it's the second largest salt-water lake in America. The lake normally sits about a foot above sea level. Man-made levees help keep it in place.
But when Katrina roared in from the south with torrential rains, pushing with it a huge wall of water from the Gulf of Mexico, those levees buckled and let go in at least five places according to the U.S. Corps of Engineers.
So what’s happened now is Lake Pontchartrain is flowing into the city through two major break points: a 300-foot long rupture on the 17th street canal west of downtown, and another breach along the industrial canal just east of the familiar French Quarter.
Hundreds of thousands of gallons of lake water have been pouring into New Orleans most of the day, and so far engineers are confounded about how to stop it.
Attempts are being planned to plug the gaps by dropping 3000-lbs. sandbags into them as well as pre-cast concrete forms— but the gushing lake water so far cannot be stopped.
In the neighborhoods just beneath the lip of Lake Pontchartrain, the West End and the Ninth Ward, houses and businesses are under as much as 20 feet of water.
“When you have a storm which is a direct hit, putting water down in the quantities that hit storm Katrina dumped on New Orleans, there is nowhere for the water to go except in that basin and fill that basin up,” says Leslie Brunell, civil engineer of the Stevens Institute Of Technology.
Even after a garden-variety soaking rain storm, New Orleans relies on its 22 pumping stations to clear out the excess water. With this disaster, though, there’s no electricity to power the pumps or anything else in the city.
How long the city will be under water is anyone’s guess: the experts think weeks anyway.
“I couldn’t even imagine a time frame. It really depends when they can get water out and that’s going to be a significant time in itself,” says Brunell. “It’s not going to be days — more like weeks and months.”
The muscle and skeleton of the city— its infrastructure— has taken a punishing blow: Bridges are gone, roadways into the city washed away, utilities have been crippled, there’s no hard-wired phone service remaining, cell phones are spotty at best, and the water system is shot.
“I would say we’re talking several to many years before the city can be rebuilt,” says Brunell.
Health dangers
With the civil engineers all but overwhelmed by the magnitude of their challenge, infectious disease specialists are deeply troubled by the toxic stew of flood waters sloshing about the city streets: raw sewage, decomposing bodies, and petrochemicals from the hometown oil and gas industry.
“A very important problem is sewage,” says Dr. Martin Blaser, an infectious disease specialist. “Water supplies have been interrupted. And that’s something that can’t wait. People need water to drink. And the question is will there be clean water?”
“In a situation where the water supply isn’t clean and there is the possibility of sewer contamination either from bodies or sewage contamination or animals, there’s the possibility of diseases as severe as cholera,” adds Blaser. “That’s how epidemics spread.”
Along the Mississippi Gulf Coast
East of New Orleans, along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the scale of the devastation can only be hinted at from the air— mile after mile of flattened homes and resorts. Authorities today started digging bodies from the rubble, and those who survived are still staggered, permanently scarred by Katrina.
Houses destroyed, lives ruined... and help, for most, not coming fast enough.
Biloxi, Mississippi is looking increasingly like a refugee camp from another nation. At the few stores that did survive the hurricane, long lines formed as people scrounged desperately for medicine, food, and supplies.
Norma McMahon no longer has a home to take her meager necessities back to. “The roof is there but the all the walls were blown out and the furniture is gone. I lost everything,” says McMahon.
Hurricane Katrina is bitter history— one stretch of coastline already destroyed, and New Orleans, in slow-motion agony, a city broken and on its knees.
