New Orleans – A week after Hurricane Katrina swept through, engineers plugged the levee break that had swamped much of New Orleans and floodwaters began to recede, but along with the good news came the mayor’s direst prediction yet: as many as 10,000 dead.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it had completely closed one major gap in the levees damaged by the hurricane and was close to repairing a second major breach. Officials said they are turning their attention to pumping out the water that has engulfed an estimated 80 percent of the city.
The vast scope of the calamity triggered by the storm was still emerging. Officials estimated that more than 1 million people – many of whom fled with only the clothes on their back and a few prized possessions stuffed in a bag – have been forced from their homes, most likely for many months to come.
Amid mounting recriminations about the slow pace of the government response to the disaster, the Bush administration appointed a federal official to assume control of recovery efforts in storm-ravaged New Orleans.
Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff tapped Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen to coordinate the government’s relief efforts in the city. Allen will report to beleaguered FEMA Director Michael Brown, who will keep responsibility for the rest of the Katrina-affected Gulf Coast region.
President Bush also declared a state of emergency in eight states – including those as far away as Colorado, Utah and West Virginia – bringing to 13 the number eligible for special federal aid as a result of the hurricane. Some of the money will go to house the dispossessed.
Federal agents, troops and law enforcement officers from around the country continued to pour into New Orleans, and police officials expressed confidence the city was mostly safe from the marauding gangs that had terrorized citizens in the storm’s chaotic aftermath.
The rapidly growing scale of the effort was evident in the official statistics of federal personnel involved as of midday Monday: 38,000 National Guardsmen, 6,000 FEMA responders and 4,000 from the U.S. Coast Guard, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship, pulled into New Orleans port Monday and will assist in aid efforts.
Across the state, doctors and nurses worked feverishly to cobble together a new health care network, transforming abandoned stores, basketball arenas and other spaces into hospitals to treat the hurricane’s victims.
The relief effort even grew to include counterfeit clothes, 100,000 items of which were taken from U.S. Customs Service storehouses and distributed to evacuees in Houston’s Astrodome. Two cruise ships, anchored in Galveston, Texas, were to begin taking on evacuees as well – as many as 2,600 each.
About 990,000 customers remained without power Monday because of Hurricane Katrina, the Energy Department said, down from 1.3 million Sunday.
Allen’s appointment in New Orleans came as the president moved to reassert his leadership in the wake of withering criticism about what many local officials and residents saw as his administration’s lethargic response to the deadly storm. Bush made his second visit since Friday to the devastated region, talking to evacuees in a church-run shelter and meeting with disaster relief officials in Louisiana before speaking to emergency personnel in Poplarville, Miss.
“I understand the damage. I understand the devastation. I understand the destruction. I understand how long it’s going to take,” Bush said in Mississippi. ” And we’re with you. That’s what I want you to know.”
As Bush visited the region, rescue workers continued their search for survivors. As choppers maneuvered overhead, rescuers trolled debris-strewn city streets in flat-bottom boats, going house to house, peering in windows and knocking on doors in an effort to evacuate the estimated 10,000 New Orleans residents thought to still be in the city.
The bodies of those left dead in Katrina’s wake were to start arriving Monday in a massive warehouse outside Baton Rouge. Lifted from the fetid waters swamping this city, they will be transported in refrigerated trucks to the temporary morgue. A similar morgue has been set up in Mississippi.
New evidence of Hurricane Katrina’s horror emerged Monday night when a sheriff reported the recovery of 22 bodies lashed together around a pole – a desperate, futile attempt to survive the storm.
Sheriff Jack Stephens of St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, said rescuers found the bodies tied together with rope that had wrapped around a pole in the tiny village of Violet along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River.
As officials forged ahead with the recovery work, Bush spent the day near the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast. Some critics say the impression of a slow federal response to Katrina was only deepened by the president’s visit to the region last week, during which Bush seemed tentative in his comments and was kept away from some of the most dire misery spawned by the storm. He has not visited New Orleans.
In the face of the growing denunciations, senior administration officials have fired back by blaming local officials for the inadequate response to the hurricane.
Bush seemed intent on rising above the finger-pointing during his visit, saying that “all levels of government are doing the best they can” to restore order and address the basic needs of the storm victims.
“So long as anybody’s life is in danger, we’ve got work to do,” Bush said. “That’s why I want people to be assured we’re going to do it.”
The Associated Press and Knight Ridder Newspapers contributed to this report.
