New Orleans – A day after New Orleans thought it had narrowly escaped the worst of Hurricane Katrina’s wrath, water broke through two levees Tuesday and virtually submerged and isolated the city, causing incalculable destruction and rendering it uninhabitable for weeks to come.
With bridges washed out, highways converted into canals and power and communications lines left inoperable, government officials ordered everyone still remaining out of the city and began planning for the evacuation of the Superdome. There, thousands of refugees huddled in increasingly grim conditions, running out of water and food and with rising waters threatening the generators.
With the rising waters and widespread devastation hobbling rescue and recovery efforts, authorities could only guess at the death toll in the city and across the Gulf Coast. In Mississippi alone, officials raised the official count of the dead to at least 110.
“It looks like Hiroshima is what it looks like,” Gov. Haley Barbour said, describing portions of Mississippi’s Harrison County.
Across the region, rescue workers were not even trying to gather up and count the dead, officials said, but were pushing them aside for the time being as they struggled to find the living.
So dire was the situation that the Pentagon late in the day ordered six Navy ships and eight Navy maritime rescue teams to the Gulf Coast to bolster relief operations.
It also planned to fly in Swift boat rescue teams.
President Bush cut short his month-long summer vacation and returned on Tuesday to Washington, where he will meet today with a task force established to coordinate the efforts of 14 federal agencies that will be involved in responding to the disaster.
The scope of the catastrophe caught New Orleans by surprise. A certain sense of relief that was felt on Monday afternoon, after the eye of the storm swept east of New Orleans, proved cruelly illusory. Mayor C. Ray Nagin lamented that the city had dodged the worst-case scenario on Monday when Katrina made landfall east of the city, but that Tuesday “is the second-worst-case scenario.”
The city, with a population of nearly 500,000, is protected from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain by levees. North of downtown, breaches in the levees sent the muddy waters of Lake Pontchartrain pouring into the city.
Streets that were essentially dry in the hours immediately after the hurricane were several feet deep in water Tuesday morning. Even downtown areas on higher ground were flooded.
Nagin said that one breach was two to three blocks long and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was dropping 3,000-pound sandbags into the opening from helicopters, as well as sea-land shipping containers filled with sand, to try to halt the water.
Officials had said they thought they could buttress the levees and stop the water fairly quickly. But Tuesday night, Col. Terry Ebbert, the city’s director of domestic security, said the rushing waters had widened one of the breaches, making the work more difficult.
The mayor estimated that 80 percent of the city, which is below sea level, was submerged, with the waters running as deep as 20 feet. The city government regrouped in Baton Rouge.
“The magnitude of the situation is untenable,” said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. “It’s just heartbreaking.”
Officials at the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security confirmed that officials in Plaque mines and Jefferson counties had tried to call for martial law, which is not authorized by the state constitution.
Offering up howling winds of as much as 145 mph, Katrina hit land in eastern Louisiana just after 6 a.m. Monday as a Category 4 storm, the second-worst rating.
As the scope of the damage to oil and gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico became more apparent, energy prices rocketed to record highs. Further increases were likely.
Floodwaters were still rising as much as 3 inches an hour in parts of New Orleans late Tuesday. In other areas, they were beginning to subside.
The mayor estimated that it would be one to two weeks before the water could be pumped out, and two to four weeks before evacuees could be permitted back into the city. Another city official said it would be two months before the schools reopened.
Tens of thousands of people are expected to need temporary homes for uncertain durations. Authorities were looking at everything from renting apartments to putting people up in trailers to establishing floating dormitories.
In Mississippi, Gulfport was virtually gone and Biloxi was severely damaged.
Some of the Mississippi casinos, which had been floating on barges, were swept half a mile inland by the storm. An oil platform that was in the gulf was transported within a hundred yards of Dauphin Island, the barrier island at the south end of Mobile County in Alabama. Much of that island was under water.
In Biloxi, saucepans, cars, a sewing machine and bits of furniture poked out from huge piles of debris. The historic home of Jefferson Davis, the onetime president of the Confederacy, was destroyed.
In Gulfport, a banana truck had been tossed into a hotel. A seal flapped helplessly in a parking lot.
Along the entire Mississippi coastline, nearly every structure between the beach and the railroad tracks a half-mile inland was destroyed.
“They’re not severely damaged. They’re simply not there,” Barbour said.
“We would see 10- and 20- block areas where there was nothing. Not one house standing,” he added. “There were so many places where a home had been and there was nothing left but slab. It looked like it had been swept off with a broom.”
Peter Teahen, the national spokesman for the American Red Cross, said, “We are looking now at a disaster above any magnitude that we’ve seen in the United States.”
The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.
Storm Briefs
NEW YORK
Insurers say tab likely to top that of Andrew
Hurricane Katrina could cost the insurance industry up to $25 billion in claims, which would make it the costliest storm in the nation’s history, according to updated reports Tuesday from risk-assessment firms.
That means Katrina could prove more costly than record- setting Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which caused some $15.5 billion in insured losses. Adjusted for inflation, Andrew’s cost would be nearly $21 billion today.
CORONADO, Calif.
Bush trims vacation to monitor storm aid
As the devastation from Hurricane Katrina grew clearer Tuesday, President Bush decided to cut short his month-long vacation and return to Washington to oversee the response to what the White House called “one of the most devastating storms in our nation’s history.”
After attending ceremonies near San Diego to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, Bush flew back to his ranch near Crawford, Texas, and prepared to leave for Washington this morning, moving up his return by two days. Aides said he would lead a task force to coordinate federal relief efforts.