New Orleans – Shortly after 10 a.m. Tuesday, Sherry Landry, the city attorney, said she and the mayor’s staff were on their way to set up a base of operations for New Orleans – upstate in Baton Rouge.
For his own safety, she urged a reporter to leave New Orleans immediately. “Get out,” Landry said. “I mean it.”
Everyone but the most essential emergency workers was urged to leave as Lake Pontchartrain flowed through a hole in a retaining wall and across much of New Orleans. No one knew for sure when they might be able to return.
Those who could not flee the city instead went right to its center, hoping to find shelter and food. Many wound up at the Superdome, the multipurpose arena that is being tested like never before.
Marshall Daranda sloshed his way there Tuesday morning in water that was ankle deep and rising, wearing a bright orange life preserver and holding his only change of clothes in a plastic shopping bag.
He went to bed Monday thinking he had weathered Hurricane Katrina just fine. He woke up Tuesday to water building up in the kitchen of his home in the Bayou St. John neighborhood.
“I knew I had to get out of there,” said Daranda, 57, who lives alone – or did until Tuesday. “Walking over here, some water was up to my neck.”
By 11 a.m., the water was nearly 3 feet deep outside the Superdome, where more than 10,000 refugees are being sheltered: Residents who went there for safety before the storm, people who sought protection after it, patients whose hospitals could no longer function and hundreds who were rescued from rooftops and attics.
Calvin Damond, 55, pushed a shopping cart through the rising waters on Poydras Street, loaded with two suitcases, cartons of Pampers and his 5-year- old grandson. As their home in the upper Ninth Ward filled with water during the storm, Damond, his daughter, Katherine, and her three children climbed into the attic.
“We stayed there all night,” Damond said. The water receded Tuesday morning, he said, and he carried the children out on his shoulders and toward the dome.
Yvonne Gaines, 64, who suffered a stroke last year, stayed with friends in a housing project after her own home flooded. Then the water threatened the housing project. Now she, too, was bound for the Superdome, shuffling there with an aluminum walker.
Authorities had said from the start that the Superdome would not be a full- service shelter and urged people to use it only as a last resort if they could not evacuate the city.
The sports arena may be evacuated today as stifling heat, overflowing toilets and a lack of enough clean water has made it uninhabitable.
“The situation is not good,” said Errol Brown, a 57-year-old merchant mariner, as he stood outside the dome. “Sometimes they run out of food. And you cannot leave because of the flooding. I got no place to go anyway.”
Brown had brought along a life preserver just in case.
Maria Patricia Cruz, a housekeeper at a hotel in New Orleans, was feeding her 18-month-old son the last of their baby formula.
She had been given two cartons by National Guardsmen, she said. Now there was no more. “I don’t know what we are going to do,” she said in Spanish.
Patricia Degruy, 46, a day-care worker, and her husband, Earl Payne, 50, a truck driver, said they were trying to find a shelter worker to volunteer to help clean up the toilets.
“The situation here is terrible,” Degruy said. “There are more people coming instead of us leaving. They’re bringing people in from the water. Food must be getting short because they’re stamping your hand now when you get a meal. The bathrooms are disgusting, even the handicapped bathrooms.”
She said that there was no TV or radio and that the shelter workers were hard to find. “We can’t get no information – nothing,” she said. “We don’t know nothing about what’s going on. … We don’t know if we still have a house.”