New Orleans – Carrying their children, a few meager possessions and very little hope, some of Hurricane Katrina’s most desperate victims abandoned a dying city Thursday as federal officials struggled to cope with the most sweeping natural disaster in U.S. history.
For thousands upon thousands of people, time was running out.
Some who survived Katrina’s assault four days earlier died of neglect in the ruins of their homes, on city streets, and in New Orleans’ Superdome and convention center. Lawlessness was running amok.
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin issued what he called “a desperate SOS” at a place where thousands were said to be ill, hungry and thirsty, with some on the brink of death.
“Right now, we are out of resources at the convention center and don’t anticipate enough buses,” he said in a statement read on CNN. “Currently, the convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for 15,000 to 25,000 people.”
Looting began Tuesday and has continued largely unabated. Vehicles carrying refugees have been carjacked, and a hospital near the Superdome took sporadic sniper fire Thursday.
Search-and-rescue crews have been shot at. So have reporters and camera crews that have descended on the city.
Food and potable water simply disappeared. Anarchy flared, with multiple reports of helicopter crews and other rescuers coming under fire from people seeking to hijack supplies or transportation.
The scope of the calamity came into sharp focus with one statistic released by the White House: Federal disaster declarations blanketed 90,000 square miles of the United States – an area almost as large as the United Kingdom.
Military and police reinforcements poured into the ravaged region, attempting to restore order, but utter chaos engulfed the Superdome, the convention center and the flooded streets of New Orleans that surrounded them.
A seething mass of people – channeled by National Guard troops carrying automatic rifles and comforted by an Army chaplain holding a Bible – surged from the Superdome toward the few buses that arrived to carry them from a refuge transformed into a house of horrors: bodies and fires and piles of human excrement.
About 5,000 refugees made it by bus to Houston’s Astrodome, but only 2,000 cots awaited them. Once again, thousands of people were subjected to discomfort and indignity.
In New Orleans, conditions at another mass shelter, the city’s Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, aroused grave concern.
On Thursday afternoon, heavily armed Louisiana state troopers and federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents locked and loaded their weapons in a parking lot across from the Hyatt Regency hotel. They climbed aboard a tan Army troop transport, headed for the Superdome.
“We’re just trying to mobilize to bring calm to a chaotic situation,” said Lt. Col. Stanley Griffin of the Louisiana State Police. “It’s our sworn duty.”
Death estimates still ranged in the thousands, with countless people missing. Estimates of the damage reached $50 billion, by far the highest ever associated with a U.S. natural disaster.
Most people acknowledged the complexity of dealing with an event of this magnitude.
Nevertheless, criticism mounted of relief efforts by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies.
The storm’s fearsome intensity and ultimate destination were known days in advance, so why were so many National Guard troops still sidelined three days after catastrophe struck?
“This is a national disgrace,” said Terry Ebbert, the head of New Orleans’ emergency operations. “FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of New Orleans.”
Late Thursday, a team of local contractors hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began driving a set of steel pilings into the 700-foot breach in the 17th Street canal levee, the principal source of floodwaters in Katrina’s aftermath.
State officials said the breach will be closed by Saturday, enabling engineers to start draining the city – providing that the pumps can be put in working order. Corps officials apparently scrapped earlier plans to bring in sandbags and other items by barge or helicopter.
Capt. Michael Pfeiffer, 51, the chief of staff for the bureau chief for operations of the New Orleans Police Department, said that at least some of the chaos and looting there can be blamed on desperation.
“They haven’t eaten for a couple of days,” Pfeiffer said. “At first they were just desperate people. Now they’re doing desperate things.”
Pfeiffer is most worried about the death toll in the city’s lower Ninth Ward where he used to work. More than 100,000 people live in the inundated neighborhood, among them rhythm-and- blues legend Fats Domino.
Domino’s sister, Karen Domino White, who lives in New Jersey, identified her father in a picture taken Monday night by a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer. The photo showed the 77-year-old singer climbing out of a rescue boat, but White has not heard from her brother since before the hurricane, CNN’s website reported Thursday night.