New Orleans – Waves of disaster cascaded into new corners of America on Friday, as torrents of Hurricane Katrina’s victims poured across the South and elsewhere, and fuel shortages and other economic shocks rippled through the nation.
More than 100,000 Americans huddled in nearly 300 shelters in nine states, according to the American Red Cross, not including the multitudes at the Superdome here and the Astrodome in Houston.
Thousands of other people still couldn’t reach shelters of any sort, and some were dying.
Reacting to blistering criticism of the relief effort, President Bush said: “The results are not acceptable.”
National Guard members delivering food, water and at least the possibility of security finally streamed into pockets of the unimaginable misery that litter the sprawling region.
They rolled through angry groups of victims, under smoke from uncontrollable fires that veiled parts of the ravaged city with an acrid haze.
At one point in what increasingly resembled a war zone, a long convoy of military trucks – accompanied by armed soldiers in Humvees – navigated deeply flooded streets to reach thousands of defeated people trapped in the city’s chaotic convention center.
At the city’s Louis Armstrong International Airport, medical workers struggled to cope with thousands of sick and frail patients who found their way to terminals there.
Some eventually were sent to distant hospitals, but hundreds remained on the floor, awaiting care and transfer.
Many died, and the airport’s Concourse D – until Monday the local home of Delta Air Lines and Continental Airlines – was converted into a makeshift morgue.
In an unprecedented move, federal officials mobilized more than a dozen airlines to deliver food to New Orleans and airlift up to 25,000 evacuees from the city to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
The displaced arrived at the airport aboard helicopters that served as airborne ferries from the swamped city.
The airlifts out of the area began at midday Friday and were expected to continue through the weekend.
“I spent the night without any sleep here at all,” said Gerry Kaigler, 82, who found a spot in front of the JetBlue ticket counter. “It was not comfortable.”
Said Michael Rieger, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency: “They’re coming in faster than we can get them out.”
Escape didn’t always mean the end of danger. A bus carrying evacuees overturned on Interstate 49 about 130 miles west of New Orleans. One man died; many people were injured.
With food and water scarce, if available at all, people across four states grew even more frantic and critics blasted the federal relief effort, calling it anemic, uncoordinated and agonizingly slow.
Four days after the Category 4 hurricane killed what likely are thousands, essentially destroyed New Orleans, bulldozed Biloxi, Gulfport and much of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, and rendered millions homeless, Bush toured the region and acknowledged the criticism.
“We have a responsibility to clean up this mess,” he said during a stop in Mobile, Ala.
The cleanup will take a long time. Engineers said they would need more than two months to drain the sweeping, muddy floods.
In Washington, Congress approved $10.5 billion in emergency hurricane relief. The development came as FEMA reported it was spending more than $500 million a day on the response.
But the words and appropriations didn’t immediately ease the situation, comfort the needy or silence the critics.
“It’s too little too late,” New Orleans Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said. “This is our 9/11. Where’s the world? C’mon, world.”
In nearby Gulfport, Miss., Red Cross and other relief workers were advised to bypass some of the hardest-hit areas because the danger was too great.
“There are gas leaks and stuff rotting all over the place,” said Lt. Col. Johnny Sellers of the Mississippi National Guard. “We’ve got to get in here and clean it up before we can let the Red Cross in. People should not be living here.”
But they were.
In Louisiana, about 7,000 National Guardsmen, many of them just back from assignments in Iraq and elsewhere overseas, rolled in. Their primary mission: Restore order in a city that has descended into anarchy, with armed thugs roaming at will.
In one microcosm of the human suffering that seemed everywhere, one man shuffled around the Superdome, shoeless, his feet covered with plastic sleeves from military Meals Ready to Eat.
In another, a woman’s body sprawled facedown in a puddle of water near the Superdome. She was wearing black shorts, a flower-patterned top and a clip in her hair. No one knew how she died.
On Friday, Tropical Storm Maria – the 13th named storm of the still-young season – formed in the distant Atlantic. It posed no immediate threat to land. The six-month season doesn’t end until Nov. 30.