Hurricance Katrina

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Katrina Charges Toward New Orleans

By ADAM NOSSITER

Associated Press Writer

NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore early Monday and charged toward this below-sea-level city with 145-mph winds and the threat of a catastrophic storm surge.

Katrina edged slightly to the east shortly before making landfall near Grand Isle, providing some hope that the worst of the storm's wrath might not be directed at the vulnerable city.

Martin Nelson, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, said the northern part of the eyewall came ashore at Grand Isle, about 60 miles south of New Orleans, at about 5 a.m. It was moving northward at 15 mph.

Katrina's fury was soon felt at the Louisiana Superdome, normally home of professional football's Saints, which became the shelter of last resort Sunday for about 9,000 of the area's poor, homeless and frail.

Electrical power at the Superdome failed at 5:02 a.m., triggering groans from the crowd. Emergency generators kicked in, but the backup power runs only reduced lighting and is not strong enough to run the air conditioning.

Chenel Lagarde, spokesman for Entergy Corp., the main energy power company in the region, said that 370,000 customers in southeast Louisiana were estimated to be without power.

Even though the storm was hours away from New Orleans, Karina's advance winds were already blowing slate tiles off the old roofs of the French Quarter.

The wind was blowing the rain sideways, and debris was carried up more than 100 feet. Power was on and off in sections of the city, and emergency vehicles patrolled the main streets, their blue and red lights flashing.

"I'd rather watch this than watch a movie," said Steven Grades, 22, one of the Superdome evacuees as he looked out through the windows at the gathering storm.

Katrina, which weakened slightly overnight to a strong Category 4 storm, turned slightly eastward before hitting land, which would put the western eyewall - the weaker side of the strongest winds - over New Orleans.

"It's not as bad as the eastern side. It'll be plenty bad enough," said Eric Blake of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Mayor Ray Nagin said he believed 80 percent of the city's 480,000 residents had heeded an unprecedented mandatory evacuation as Katrina threatened to become the most powerful storm ever to slam the city.

"It's capable of causing catastrophic damage," said National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield. "Even well-built structures will have tremendous damage. Of course, what we're really worried about is the loss of lives.

"New Orleans may never be the same."

Crude oil futures spiked to more than $70 a barrel in Singapore for the first time Monday as Katrina targeted an area crucial to the country's energy infrastructure, but the price had slipped back to $68.95 by midday in Europe. The storm already forced the shutdown of an estimated 1 million barrels of refining capacity.

Terry Ebbert, New Orleans director of homeland security, said more than 4,000 National Guardsmen were mobilizing in Memphis and will help police New Orleans streets.

The head of Jefferson Parish, which includes major suburbs and juts all the way to the storm-vulnerable coast, said some residents who stayed would be fortunate to survive.

"I'm expecting that some people who are die-hards will die hard," said parish council President Aaron Broussard.

The evacuation itself claimed lives. Three New Orleans nursing home residents died Sunday after being taken by bus to a Baton Rouge church. Don Moreau, of the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner's Office, said the cause was likely dehydration.

Katrina, which cut across Florida last week, had intensified into a colossal Category 5 over the warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, reaching top winds of 175 mph before weakening as it neared the coast.

The storm held a potential surge of 18 to 28 feet that would easily top New Orleans' hurricane protection levees, as well as bigger waves and as much as 15 inches of rain.

A hurricane warning was in effect for the north-central Gulf Coast from Morgan City, La., to the Alabama-Florida line. Tornado warnings were posted for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

For years, forecasters have warned of the nightmare scenario a big storm could bring to New Orleans, a bowl of a city that's up to 10 feet below sea level in spots and dependent on a network of levees, canals and pumps to keep dry from the Mississippi River on one side, Lake Pontchartrain on the other.

The fear is that flooding could overrun the levees and turn New Orleans into a toxic lake filled with chemicals and petroleum from refineries, as well as waste from ruined septic systems.

Nagin said he expected the pumping system to fail during the height of the storm. The mayor said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was standing by to get the system running, but water levels must fall first.

"We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared," he said. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event."

Major highways in New Orleans cleared out late Sunday after more than 24 hours of jammed traffic as people headed inland. At the peak of the evacuation, 18,000 people an hour were streaming out of southeastern Louisiana, state police said.

On inland highways in Louisiana and Mississippi, heavy traffic remained the rule into the night as the last evacuees tried to reach safety. In Orange, Texas, Janie Johnson of the American Red Cross described it as a "river of headlights."

In Washington, D.C., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it has been advised that the Waterford nuclear plant about 20 miles west of New Orleans has been shut down as a precautionary measure.

New Orleans has not taken a direct hit from a hurricane since Betsy in 1965, when an 8- to 10-foot storm surge submerged parts of the city in seven feet of water. Betsy, a Category 3 storm, was blamed for 74 deaths in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.

Evacuation orders also were posted all along the Mississippi coast, and the area's casinos, built on barges, were closed early Saturday. Bands of wind-whipped rain increased Sunday night and roads in some low areas were beginning to flood.

"Hopefully it will take a turn and we'll be spared the brunt of it, but it just don't look like that," said James Bosco, who was packing up a final few items from his beachfront apartment in Gulfport. "I just hope everybody makes it all right. We can always rebuild."

Alabama officials issued mandatory evacuation orders for low-lying coastal areas. Mobile Mayor Michael C. Dow said flooding could be worse than the 9-foot surge that soaked downtown during Hurricane Georges in 1998. Residents of several barrier islands in the western Florida Panhandle were also urged to evacuate.

Katrina hit the southern tip of Florida as a much weaker storm Thursday and was blamed for nine deaths. It left miles of streets and homes flooded and knocked out power to about 1.45 million customers. It was the sixth hurricane to hit Florida in just over a year.

[Lerkot]

Hurricanes are extremely cool to watch, I guess, but not so nice to fight with. Anyway its kind of scary that humans still doesnt know how to stop things like hurricanes and other dangers created by the nature.

[Frenetic]

It's so sad cause New Orleans is in my eye one of the moste beautiful places in the U.S, still not ruined entirely by the new culture, but is alot still founded on it's african, french foundation. It's a cultural landmark that disappears if the storm is "successful"

[fresh_from_sofia]

man this is so bad, I just heard it on the news and why some ppl are still there :nhawong: i just dont know what's wrong with this ppl ?!?

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man this is so bad, I just heard it on the news and why some ppl are still there  :nhawong:  i just dont know what's wrong with this ppl ?!?

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:word: That doesn't make sense, I hope the storm doesn't hit as bad as rumored or else they'll all be dead.

[rcpbball30]

The hurricane ripped off the ceiling of the Louisiana Superdome, that is crazy, that is one nasty hurricane.

[MissAshley]

I've been watching the news constantly for the past few days and to say this is devastating, is an understatement, it's almost depressing just looking at some of the images of the "aftermath of Katrina" i've never seen anything like this, as far as storms, i have relatives from both sides of my family in the south and i was blessed in the sense that they weren't affected by it, but it's def. been on my mind non stop, it's almost as if prayer isn't enough, and sadly it's times like this that help me more as a writer, when i vent or express myself through words, i just hope that those people get the help that they so desperately need

Edited September 1, 2005 by willjadafan

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Here's more details:

Eric Gay/AP Photo

National Guard Troops Land in New Orleans

By ALLEN G. BREED

Associated Press Writer

NEW ORLEANS - Ragtag armies of the desperate and hungry begged for help, corpses rotted along flooded sidewalks and bands of armed thugs thwarted fitful rescue efforts as Americans watched the Big Easy dissolve before their eyes.

Despite the promise of 1,400 National Guardsmen a day to stop the looting, a $10.5 billion recovery bill in Congress and a relief effort President Bush called the biggest in U.S. history, the chaos spred.

"This is a national disgrace," said New Orleans' emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert. "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

At the hot and stinking Superdome, where tens of thousands were being evacuated by bus to Houston, fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething sea of tense, suffering people who waited in a lines that stretched a half-mile to board yellow school buses.

After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the scramble to get on to the buses that finally did show up, with a group of refugees breaking through a line of heavily armed National Guardsmen.

Nearby, about 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New Orleans Convention Center grew ever more hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead.

Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad of 88 officers that they retreated when they went in to check out reports of assaults.

"We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten," Compass said. "Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco called people who committed such crimes "hoodlums" and issued a warning to lawbreakers: Hundreds of National Guard troops hardened on the battlefield in Iraq have landed in New Orleans.

"They have M-16s and they're locked and loaded," she said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will."

Bush was to tour the devastated Gulf Coast region Friday and has asked his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former President Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign.

By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn. Evacuees from across the city swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town.

Some of those among the mostly poor crowd had been in the dome for four days without air conditioning, working toilets or a place to bathe. One military policeman was shot in the leg as he and a man scuffled for the MP's rifle. The man was arrested.

By late Thursday, the flow of refugees to the Houston Astrodome was temporarily halted with a population of 11,325, less than half the estimated 23,000 people expected.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced that Dallas would host 25,000 more refugees at Reunion Arena and 25,000 others would relocate to a San Antonio warehouse at KellyUSA, a city-owned complex that once was home to an Air Force base. Houston estimated as many as 55,000 people who fled the hurricane were staying in area hotels

While floodwaters in New Orleans appeared to stabilize, efforts continued to plug three breaches that had opened up in the levee system that protects this below-sea-level city.

Helicopters dropped sandbags into the breach and pilings were being pounded into the mouth of the canal Thursday to close its connection to Lake Pontchartrain.

At least seven bodies were scattered outside the convention center, a makeshift staging area for those rescued from rooftops, attics and highways. The sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.

A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.

"There's a lot of very sick people - elderly ones, infirm ones - who can't stand this heat, and there's a lot of children who don't have water and basic necessities to survive on," said Daniel Edwards outside the center. "We need to eat, or drink water at the very least."

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.

"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people."

FEMA director Michael Brown said the agency just learned about the situation at the convention center Thursday and quickly scrambled to provide food, water and medical care and remove the corpses.

In hopes of defusing the situation at the convention center, Mayor Ray Nagin gave the evacuees permission to march across a bridge to the city's unflooded west bank for whatever relief they could find.

A day after Nagin took 1,500 police officers off search-and-rescue duty to try to restore order in the streets, there were continued reports of looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings.

Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, "'Go to hell - it's every man for himself.'"

FEMA officials said some operations had to be suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, but are working overtime to feed people and restore order.

Outside a looted Rite-Aid drugstore, some people were anxious to show they needed what they were taking. A gray-haired man who would not give his name pulled up his T-shirt to show a surgery scar and explained that he needs pads for incontinence.

"I'm a Christian," he said. "I feel bad going in there."

Hospitals struggled to evacuate critically ill patients who were dying for lack of oxygen, insulin or intravenous fluids. But when some hospitals try to airlift patients, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan said, "there are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, `You better come get my family.'"

To make matters worse, the chief of the Louisiana State Police said he heard of numerous instances of New Orleans police officers - many of whom from flooded areas - turning in their badges.

"They indicated that they had lost everything and didn't feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives," Col. Henry Whitehorn said.

Mississippi's confirmed death toll from Katrina rose to 126 on Thursday as more rescue teams spread out into a sea of rubble to search for the living, their efforts complicated at one point by the threat of a thunderstorm.

All along the 90-mile coast, other emergency workers performed the grisly task of retrieving corpses, some of them lying on streets and amid the ruins of obliterated homes that stretch back blocks from the beach.

Adding to the misery were tons of rotting shrimp and chicken, blown from their containers at a shipping dock and dumped into the water and onto the tattered landscape.

Gov. Haley Barbour said he knows people are tired, hungry, dirty and scared - particularly in areas hardest hit by Katrina. He said the state faces a long and expensive recovery process.

"I will say, sometimes I'm scared, too," Barbour said during a briefing in Jackson, Miss. "But we are going to hitch up our britches. We're going to get this done."

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Associated Press reporters Adam Nossiter, Brett Martel, Emily Wagster Pettus, Robert Tanner and Mary Foster contributed to this report.