New Orleans – Searchers smashed through doors in New Orleans on Wednesday, bringing their hunt for the dead to homes that had been locked and to blocks hardest hit by Katrina’s flooding. Behind those doors, officials said they expected a sharply escalating body count – among them, more children.
“There still could be quite a few, especially in the deepest flooded areas,” said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jeffrey Pettitt, who is overseeing the retrieval of bodies. “Some of the houses they haven’t been in yet.”
The death toll in Louisiana stood at 799 on Wednesday, a jump of 153 bodies since the weekend and nearly 80 percent of the 1,036 deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina across the Gulf Coast region. Pettitt and other officials would not speculate on what the final tally could be. They said the effort could last another four to six weeks.
About 500 people are involved in the search of locked homes, the third and most intense phase of the recovery effort. Initially, authorities made a hasty sweep through neighborhoods to identify the living and dead. That was followed by a door-to-door search, though locked doors were off-limits.
Previously, they had not entered unless they saw a body or heard someone inside. Now, even a high water mark on the side of a home was enough to allow them to go in.
Police officers and National Guardsmen stood by, weapons ready, as emaciated dogs circled.
“We try not to destroy the homes, but we have to get inside,” said fire department Lt. Eric Baum. “Drastic circumstances call for drastic measures.”
He said the elderly appear to make up the bulk of the dead but that searchers also are beginning to find more children. “That’s tough,” he said.
As the body retrieval from Katrina accelerated, the city prepared for a new threat from Hurricane Rita, which was barreling across the Gulf of Mexico toward Texas. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin renewed his plea for residents to get out of the city.
A mandatory evacuation order was in effect for the entire east bank of the Mississippi, and about 500 buses were standing by at the convention center, but few seemed to be taking advantage. Only one person showed up to be evacuated Wednesday morning.
The Army Corps of Engineers continued pumping the water left behind by Katrina and readying the city’s fractured levee system in case the new storm took a turn and headed for Louisiana.
Engineers warned residents that the patched-up levees can only handle up to 6 inches of rain and a storm surge of 10 to 12 feet.
Although much of New Orleans was no longer submerged, those parts reclaimed from the water were a dreadful sight. A neighborhood street below the 17th Street Canal levee that was just recently pumped of floodwaters looked like a river bed, with boulders, mud and branches mixing with the debris of destroyed homes.
On Tuesday, Pettitt’s team gave the mayor’s office a map of the areas where the more intensive phase of the search for bodies should be conducted. On Wednesday, emergency crews hacked their way into houses in the Ninth Ward, an impoverished section of the city notable for being the birthplace of Fats Domino and other black musicians.
Crews probed areas of the city that just recently have been drained enough to allow ground searches – neighborhoods that were closest to the fractured levees and bore the brunt of the floodwaters’ force.
