The Times-Picayune, by Staff

Storm surge swamps 9th ward, St. Bernard

By Bruce Nolan

Staff Writer

Lakeview levee breach threatens to inundate city

Hurricane Katrina struck metropolitan New Orleans on Monday with a staggering blow, far surpassing Hurricane Betsy, the landmark disaster of an earlier generation. The storm flooded huge swaths of the city, as well as Slidell on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, in a process that appeared to be spreading even as night fell.

A powerful storm surge pushed huge waves ahead of the hurricane, flooding much of St. Bernard Parish and New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, just as Betsy 40 years ago. But this time the flooding was more extensive, spreading upriver as well to cover parts of the Bywater, Marigny and Treme neighborhoods.

As with Betsy, people scrambled into their attics or atop their roofs, pleading for help from the few passers-by.

The powerful Category 4 storm crossed the coast near the mouth of the Pearl River shortly after daybreak with winds of 135 mph. Naval Air Station-Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse reported an early morning gust of 105 mph.

With the power out throughout the area and fierce winds raging throughout the day, officials barely began Monday to assess the full damage of the monstrous storm, which was expected to leave thousands homeless and many more coping with damage from the wind and water.

Meantime, 6 miles to the west, engineers worked. to close a breach along the New Orleans side of the 17th Street Canal.

Huge drainage pumps ordinarily can drive millions of gallons of rainwater uphill through the canal, as it takes water from the low- lying city into Lake Pontchartrain. But the breach turned the canal into a major threat. Lake water flowed back through the breach, hemorrhaging into Lakeview and beyond.

Across Lake Pontchartrain and closer to the site of Katrina's landfall, thousands of homes in Slidell flooded.

From the Interstate 10 overpass at Slidell's Old Spanish Trail, the only visible structure from the dense commercial intersection was a boat bobbing on the waves.

"This is Lake Pontchartrain," said St. Tammany Sheriff Deputy Kenny A Kreeger.

Sections of the I-10 twin bridges linking St. Tammany and Orleans parishes over Lake Pontchartrain have been "severely damaged" in both directions, Louisiana's transportation chief said. Some are probably knocked out, he said.

There were no confirmed reports of fatalities in New Orleans, although officials, including Gov. Kathleen Blanco, said they expected to find bodies in rescue efforts today.

St. Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis said there was one storm- related fatality on I-10, although he declined to give details. Earlier, three elderly residents of a nursing home died during their evacuation to Baton Rouge on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Margaret O'Brien- Molina, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross' southwest service area office in Houston, said national Red Cross executives earlier today described Katrina as "the largest recovery operation the Red Cross has ever attempted."

'The Red Cross response to this event is the equivalent Hurricane Andrew, Sept. 11 and more," said American Red Cross Executive Rick Scofield.

The huge storm also flooded cities along the Mississippi and Alabama coasts.

Katrina pushed Mobile Bay into the city's downtown district. A 22- foot storm surge devastated parts of Gulfport and Pascagoula, officials said.

Mayor Ray Nagin called the storm "pretty awesome."

He noted the city's strategic importance as a port and a domestic oil refiner as reasons the federal government should assist in the rebuilding. "I think this is a wake-up call for the city and country," he said.

President Bush promised swift federal relief for New Orleans and other devastated communities.

"FEMA said give us a list of your needs," said Nagin, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "And let me tell you, we're giving them a helluva list."

As night gathered over a city without lights, it appeared that at least 150 people - perhaps many more - were marooned on rooftops, sometimes with their children.

State Wildlife Secretary Dwight Landreneau said that by dawn he would have more than 200 boats in the water, about 120 more than he had on Monday. He said he also has a commitment from Texas for another 50 boats.

City officials said they might open the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center as a temporary refuge to shelter an estimated 50,000 people made homeless by the storm.

Police Chief Eddie Compass said officials were desperately trying to make conditions a little more comfortable for the more than 25,000 refugees housed in the sweltering Superdome. Saying that the Dome was filthy and smelled bad, Compass said he was going to allow people to go outside.

Travel about the city on the east bank of the Mississippi River to assess damage was limited, but certain reference points emerged: 

Floodwaters blocked entry to the Lower 9th Ward along St. Claude Avenue.

"Look, look man, it's gone. It's gone," said City Council President Oliver Thomas, who grew up in the 9th Ward and teared up while discussing the devastation. "This is crazy. Nothing like this ever happened before."

Jackson Barracks near Arabi was beneath 12 feet of water. Chalmette High School and the St. Bernard Civic Center, both on St. Bernard's main commercial artery, were both under an estimated 12 feet of water.

Along I-10 between Treme and Gentilly, only housetops were visible in a sea of floodwater. People waiting for rescue shined lights or called out to the rare motorist on the interstate.

At 3:30 p.m., National Guard trucks started bringing dozens of people trapped in their houses to the Superdome. Many were barefoot and wrapped in sheets.

In many neighborhoods, people waded through more than water waist, sometimes carrying food. Late Monday, a party of five adults waded along Tulane Avenue between Canal and Broad Streets, towing five toddlers in a large plastic tub.

In Kenner, Williams Boulevard flooded from 1-10 to a point near Lake Pontchartrain. Officials said it appeared worse than a memorable flood on May 8,1995.

The Southern Yacht Club burned to the ground.

Meanwhile, Katrina's winds split homes, collapsed buildings and uprooted trees across a vast area.

The famous oaks along St. Charles Avenue and its Uptown side streets were shattered. The avenue was made impassable by thickets of downed trees, many entangled with downed utility poles and criss- crossing power lines. Parked cars were smashed; many trees fell onto houses they once shaded.

Winds of more than 100 mph tore open a large part of the Superdome's distinctive white roof. Rain poured in, forcing officials to move some refugees, who were using the building as a refuge of last resort.

Windows blew out of high-rise hotels in downtown New Orleans. Thousands of curtains waved like tattered handkerchiefs out the empty windows of the Hyatt Regency Hotel next to the Superdome.

Charity Hospital lost windows on five floors. Nagin said doctors and nurses there were ventilating patients manually.

Glass shards and other lethal debris whipped down deserted streets. In some hotels, elderly or infirm guests were carried down flights of stairs to the safety of windowless ballrooms.

In Marrero, nurses at West Jefferson General Hospital moved sick patients from their rooms into hallways to protect them as windows shattered, said Jennifer Steel, hospital spokeswoman.

Remarkably, the French Quarter seemed largely untouched.

The neighborhood was among the last to lose power as the storm strengthened shortly after dawn. After its passage, pedestrians bought beer through walk-up windows and guests loitered on second- floor balconies.

Among the only obvious signs of damaged: a portion of a wall collapsed exposing part of the third floor interior of Antoine's Restaurant, and the U.S. Mint appeared to suffer heavy roof damage.

Jefferson Parish's Chief Administrative Assistant Tim Whitmer said the damage from Katrina was almost equally split between the east bank and the West Bank. "We have widespread devastation in the parish," he said.

Whitmer said officials were not able to assess all areas of the parish because of flooding and downed trees and power lines, which were scattered everywhere, as well as a shortage of workers, who had evacuated to escape the storm.

Based on reports officials had received, Whitmer said Westwego was particularly hard hit, with about 90 percent of the homes on the south side of the West Bank Expressway sustaining some kind of damage. Avondale also was hard hit.

Widespread flooding also was reported in Kenner in East Jefferson, particularly north of the interstate. Power remained out and water pressure was lost, but not because pumping stations were not working, he said.

"We had trees that came down and pulled up our (water) distribution lines, which caused breaks and we lost pressure," he said.

By nightfall, the storm left behind a cluster of soaked, blacked- out coastal communities. Power failed. Telephone service was spotty or nonexistent.

Jefferson Parish authorities told residents to boil their drinking water.

Sporadic looting broke out in some locations in New Orleans.

Katrina cut power service to an estimated 770,000 people, including 700,000 who form Entergy's entire customer base, said utility spokeswoman Amy Stallings.

Stallings warned 700,000 electrical customers to be prepared to go without power for a month or more.

The storm damaged every element of the power grid, from big generating plants to transmission lines to smaller feeder lines connecting to homes and businesses, she said.

She called the damage the worst ever seen in Entergy's four- state territory.

Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for New Orleans, said it could be two months - twice Entergy's estimate - before electricity is restored to all of the city.

He said Entergy will send 4,500 workers to the region and house them on barges on the Mississippi River.

Katrina struck a nearly empty city. Given the gift of a full weekend to evacuate. Hundreds of thousands fled as far as Dallas, Little Rock and Memphis.

Officials urged them to stay away until further notice.

Blanco said people who attempt return to the city will be stopped.

"You will be turned back. Only official emergency personnel will be allowed in," Blanco said at an early afternoon news conference at the state Office of Emergency Preparedness.

State Adj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau said that it is too early to say when people will be allowed to return to the city. He said civil authorities haven't even begun to make initial assessments of the damage.

O'Brien-Molina, the Red Cross spokeswoman, said state officials shut off interstate highways re-entering Louisiana to keep people from returning to flooded areas.

"1-10 is completely closed down," she said. "No one can go back in and we have to find a place for them to stay."

Officials are telling the public to expect no one will be allowed to go home for at least two days, O'Brien-Molina said.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

By Brian Thevenot and Manuel Torres

Staff Writers

As Jerry Rayes piloted his boat down St. Claude Avenue, just past the Industrial Canal, the eerie screams that could barely be heard from the roadway grew louder as, one by one, faces of desperate families appeared on rooftops, on balconies and in windows, some of them waving white flags.

The scene wouldn't change for the next three hours, as Rayes and his son and nephew boated down St. Claude Avenue and deep into St. Bernard Parish, where water smothered two-story houses, people and animals. The men had to duck to miss streetlights that towered over Judge Perez Drive, the parish's main thoroughfare.The people Rayes rescued all told the same story, already written on their stunned and shivering faces: The water, it just came up so fast. Waist-deep in five minutes and neck-deep in 10.

"I was talking to my mother on the phone at 8 in the morning, telling her everything was fine," said Joan Hanson, 52, minutes after Rayes pulled her from a boat sitting at rooftop-level at a relative's house, where she and her son had to swim to survive. "Then, next thing you know, it's just gushing, gushing, gushing, and we can't open the door, and then the water was up to my neck."

As Rayes surveyed the area hardest hit by one of the most destructive hurricanes in the nation's history, he could only guess what rescuers would find when the water receded. The devastation of property appeared total, all the way from the Industrial Canel to well past Paris Road in Chalmette. The storm surge appeared to have wiped out the entire parish, given that most areas east of Chalmette are lower and closer to the Gulf of Mexico.

The cause of the flooding remained unclear, and city officials could not immediately be reached. But American Red Cross officials said water from the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MR-GO, topped the levees.

As he passed second-story windows that had been boarded up before the storm, Rayes wondered aloud if the boards had served to trap people inside rather than keep the storm out.

"There are going to be tons of dead people," Rayes said as he passed through the 9th Ward, where officials estimated that hundreds of people remained trapped late Monday. "They're going to start finding them in their attics tomorrow. I would have never thought of anything like this. This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life."

Other areas were nearly as hard hit. The storm surge approached the rooflines of homes across Treme and Gentilly Ridge. Eastern New Orleans also endured heavy flooding, though the extent was not immediately clear.

In the Bywater neighborhood, more than 90 percent of homes flooded and waters rose above 4 feet, particularly north of St. Claude Avenue, the main thoroughfare. Only a small area between the Mississippi River levee and Burgundy Street was spared the flooding.

Dozens of residents sought refuge at Bywater Hospital, said a New Orleans police officer who, along with National Guard personnel, were trying to siphon gasoline from a nearby vehicle for the hospital's generators, which ran respirators and other medical equipment for critically ill and elderly patients.

We're getting gas so they can keep on ticking, you know," said the officer, who did not give his name.

Many stores along St. Claude were flooded, their windows shattered. Signs littered the road, and telephone lines fell or dangled. At a neighborhood grocery store near the intersection of St. Claude and Elysian Fields avenues, a man could he seen through the store's front windows sleeping on top of the counter.

Rayes, who rode out the storm uneventfully in the La Quinta Inn on Camp Street, started his day by putting his boat in the high water along Elysian Fields Avenue. "We were the first boat out; the police wouldn't even go out," said the 48- year-old locksmith. 'We went down Elysian Fields and picked up about 50 people on their roofs."

Then he brought his boat to the Industrial Canal, where a small SWAT team had put two boats in the water, not nearly enough to retrieve what some estimated as hundreds of stranded people in the neighborhood.

Rayes had a mission: to pick up a friend on top of a roof in Chalmette. He passed 20 or 30 screaming people in the 9th Ward along the way.

A woman screamed as Rayes boated by: "Hey! Damn! Hey"

"You can't save everybody," he said, as he passed street signs barely visible above the water along with scores of felled trees and downed power lines. "That's all we heard for hours this morning."

As he motored toward St. Claude Avenue, which looked like a bayou rather than a thoroughfare, his boat passed Fats Domino's pink-and- yellow-trimmed house on Caffin Avenue. About a half a dozen men screamed from the balcony, flailing their hands for help. He passed them by.

"What am I going to do? I got to go to the parish," he said. "There's way too many people out there and to few boats."

A boat pulled alongside Rayes, driven by Wayne Landry, also of St. Bernard Parish and also on a private rescue mission. "I just dropped some off at the sugar mill, and I'm going to get more," he yelled from his boat. "The guy cut himself out with an ax. It's sad."

Some people used cruder methods. Hanson's 20-year-old son, Chris, had cuts all over his shaking hands when Rayes picked him up, from breaking the window so he and his mother could swim to safety. On their way to climb into a nearby relative's boat, they swam during the peak of the hurricane, dodging felled branches and pieces of their destroyed fence.

In the Lower 9th Ward, Felton Bercy and his wife, Marie, stood in the darkness of their attic for hours only to have the water rise to their one-story ceiling in less than an hour - then threaten to take over the attic. Bercy had no ax, only an 18-inch hunting knife. It took him an hour and a half to claw through his roof.

"I had to have some daylight," Bercy said hours later, shivering after rescuers carried him and his wife to safety.

Back at the Industrial Canal, where St. Claude Avenue served as a boat launch, SWAT teams offloaded several boatloads of people with similar woeful tales: They hadn't had money to leave; they had no car; they didn't think it could possibly be as bad as they said on TV. Others said they had been abandoned by friends or family members.

"It's not like we disregarded the warning Darlene Wilson said. "We had people we depended on, and they abandoned us. I can't believe they left us behind. The neighbors tried to help us out. We went to the attic. I thought I was going to die with my kids."

Timothy Jones emerged from the water after a long stay at St. Paul's Church of God in Christ. He helped carry a beaten and soaked elderly couple from the boat, their feet dragging, their bodies limp.

Sitting in the bed of a National Guard truck, peeking over the rails, Jones' wife Isabella Vinnett was thankful her many prayers that day were answered, but also angry at a relative.

"I was abandoned by my family," she said, resisting her husband's attempts to quiet her. "I got hold of my auntie, but she still abandoned me."

Another family the police boats pulled from the water emerged without its matriarch. Allison Berryhill, 30, said she had been talking to her mother on the phone right before a tree fell on their house and the water started rising fast.

"She said water was above their house and getting into their attic," Berryhill said. "I wasn't able to reach her after that."

Rayes had gone to St. Bernard to pick up a friend, but discovered he had already found another boat out by the time Rayes arrived. But he would come back with a full boat anyway, picking up several stranded strangers.

Some waved him on, saying others needed his help more.

"You all right?" asked Ian Reyes, 20, to one man in a yellow two- story house nearly filled with water. "Yeah," the man said. "I'm just here with the dogs. The family's out."

A while later, the men passed a brick two-story house. A man waved a white flag on a stick out the window. "I got my old lady here and a chow, that all right?" asked James Waringen, 48.

Rayes had been trying to avoid pets to make room for people, but he allowed it. After all, he's got a dog, too.

Inside the second-story apartment, Waringen's companion, Ann Griffin, starting shoving her cats into a duffel bag, as if to hide them. "Get your little whiskers in there," she said, zipping up the bag. She didn't tell Rayes what was in the bag as she loaded it onto the boat.

Asked why she hadn't evacuated, Griffin said, "I wasn't going to leave my babies," motioning to the squirming duffel bag. "Plus, I'm just more comfortable staying at home than going somewhere where I don't know anybody."

Even as she was surrounded by submerged buildings along Judge Perez Drive, Griffin predicted that, ultimately, little would change in the parish because of the storm.

"Same thing that happened after Betsy: nothing," she said. "We'll just rebuild. But I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to buy a new car because his car doesn't run. Hopefully, we won't be in Louisiana."

Then she reconsidered.

"But everybody always comes back. I had three brothers and a sister get out, and they all came back."

Rayes dropped off Griffin, along with several other passengers, at the Regions Bank building, where an ad hoc shelter operated out of a broken mirrored window.

At first, the shelter turned her away because of her pets, but Rayes plied the men at the window with food and drinks, of which they had little.

They willingly took the Chow. They unknowingly took the bag full of cats, which Griffin handed up gingerly to the window. "Be careful," she said.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

By Doug MacCash and James O'Byrne

Staff Writers

A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new 'hurricane proof' Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina's fiercest winds were well north. The breach sent a churning sea of water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing across Lakeview and into Mid- City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park and neighborhoods farther south and east.

As night fell on a devastated region, the water was still rising in the city, and nobody was willing to predict when it would stop. After the destruction already apparent in the wake of Katrina, the American Red Cross was mobilizing for what regional officials were calling the largest recovery operation in the organization's history.

Police officers, firefighters and private citizens, hampered by a lack of even rudimentary communication capabilities, continued a desperate and impromptu boat-borne rescue operation across Lakeview well after dark. Coast Guard helicopters with searchlights criss- crossed the skies.

Officers working on the scene said virtually every home and business between the 17th Street Canal and the Marconi Canal, and between Robert E. Lee Boulevard and City Park Avenue, had water in it. Nobody had confirmed any fatalities as a result of the levee breach, but they conceded that hundreds of homes had not been checked.

As the sun set over a still-roiling Lake Pontchartrain, the smoldering ruins of the Southern Yacht Club were still burning, and smoke streamed out over the lake. Nobody knew the cause of the fire because nobody could get anywhere near it to find out what happened.

Dozens of residents evacuated to the dry land of the Filmore Street bridge over the Marconi Canal were stranded between the flooded neighborhood on their right, and the flooded City Park on their left, hours after they had been plucked from rooftops or second-story windows.

Firefighters who saved them tried to request an RTA bus to come for the refugees, but realized was no working communications to do so.

Ed Gruber, who lives in the 6300 block of Canal Boulevard, said he became desperate when the rising water chased him, his wife, Helen, and their neighbor Mildred K. Harrison to the second floor of their home. When Gruber saw a boat pass by, he flagged it down with a light, and the three of them escaped from a second-story window.

On the lakefront, pleasure boats were stacked on top of each other like cordwood in the municipal marina and yacht harbor. The Robert E. Lee shopping center was under 7 feet of water. Plantation Coffeehouse on Canal Boulevard was the same. Hynes Elementary School had 8 feet of water inside.

Indeed, the entire business district along Harrison Avenue had water to the rooflines in many places.

Joshua Bruce, 19, was watching the tide rise from his home on Pontalba Street when he heard a woman crying for help. The woman had apparently tried to wade the surging waters on Canal Boulevard when she was swept beneath the railroad trestle just south of Interstate 610. Bruce said he plunged into the water to pull her to safety. He and friends Gregory Sontag and Joey LaFrance found dry clothes for the woman and she went on her way in search of a second-story refuge downtown.

The effect of the breach was instantly devastating to residents who had survived the fiercest of Katrina's winds and storm surge intact, only to be taken by surprise by the sudden deluge. And it added a vast swath of central New Orleans to those already flooded in eastern New Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes.

Beginning at midday, Lakeview residents watched in horror as the water began to rise, pushed through the levee breach by still- strong residual winds from Katrina.

They struggled to elevate furniture and eventually found themselves forced to the refuge of second floors just when most in the neighborhood thought they had been spared.

"It would have been fine," refugee Pat O'Brien said. "The eye passed over."

But his relief was short-lived.

"It's like what you see on TV and never thought would happen to us. We lost everything: cars, art, furniture, everything."

Scott Radish, his wife Kyle and neighbor Brandon Gioe stood forlornly on their Mound Street porch, where they had ridden out Katrina, only to face a second, more insidious threat.

"The hurricane was scary," Scott said. "All the tree branches fell, but the building stood. I thought I was doing good. Then I noticed my Jeep was under water."

The water had risen knee-deep during the storm, but despite the clearing skies, it had continued to rise one brick every 20 minutes, according to Kyle Scott, continuing its ascent well into the night.

"We were good until the canal busted," Sontag said. "First there was water on the street, then the sidewalk, then water in the house."

Officials of the Army Corps of Engineers have contingencies for levee breaches such as the one that happened Monday, but it will take time and effort to get the heavy equipment into place to make the repair. Breach repair is part of the corps' planning for recovery from catastrophic storms, but nobody Monday was able to say how long it would take to plug the hole, or how much water would get through it before that happened.

In Lakeview, the scene was surreal. A woman yelled to reporters from a rooftop, asking them to call her father and tell hi she was OK - although fleeing to the roof of a two-story home hardly seemed to qualify.

About 5 p.m., almost as if on cue, the battery power of all the house alarms in the neighborhood seemed to reach a critical level, and they all went off, making it sound as if the area was under an air-raid warning.

Two men surviving on generator power in the Lake Terrace neighborhood near the Lake Pontchartrain levee still had a dry house, but they were watching the rising water in the yard nervously. They were planning to head out to retrieve a vast stash of beer, champagne and hard liquor they found washed onto the levee.

As night fell, the sirens of house alarms finally fell silent, and the air filled with a different, deafening and unfamiliar sound: the extraordinary din of thousands of croaking frogs.

Still wondering if he would spend the night on the Filmore Street bridge over the Marconi Canal, Gruber tried to be philosophical.

"I never thought I would see any devastation like this, and I've lived here more than 30 years," Gruber said. "But at least we have our lives. And that's something." 

Staff writer Mark Schleifstein contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

By Mark Schleifstein

Staff Writer

The catastrophic flooding that filled the bowl that is New Orleans on Monday and Tuesday will only get worse over the next few days because rainfall from Hurricane Katrina continues to flow into Lake Pontchartrain from north shore rivers and streams, and east winds and a 17.5-foot storm crest on the Pearl River block the outflow water through the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass.

The lake is normally 1 foot above sea level, while the city of New Orleans is an average of 6 feet below sea level. But a combination of storm surge and rainfall from Katrina have raised the lake's surface to 6 feet above sea level, or more.

All of that water moving from the lake has found several holes in the lake's banks - all pouring into New Orleans. Water that crossed St. Charles Parish in an area where the lakefront levee has not yet been completed, and that backed up from the lake in Jefferson Parish canals, is funneling into Kenner and Metairie.

A 500-yard and growing breach in the eastern wall of the 17th Street Canal separating New Orleans from Metairie is pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of lake water per second into the New Orleans area. Water also is flowing through two more levee breaches along the Industrial Canal, which created a Hurricane Betsy- on-steroids flood in the Lower 9th Ward on Monday that is now spreading south into the French Quarter and other parts of the city.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned Tuesday evening that an attempt to plug the holes in the 17th Street Canal had failed, and the floodwaters were expected to continue to rise rapidly throughout the night. Eventually, Nagin said, the water could reach as high as 3 feet above sea level, meaning it could rise to 12 to 15 feet high in some parts of the city.

Louisiana State University Hurricane Center researcher Ivor van Heerden warned that Nagin's estimates could be too low because the lake water won't fall quickly during the next few days.

"We don't have the weather conditions to drive the water out of Lake Pontchartrain, and at the same time, all the rivers on the north shore are in flood," he said. "That water is just going to keep rising in the city until it's equal to the level of the lake.

"Unless they can use sandbags to compartmentalize the flooded areas, the water in the city will rise everywhere to the same level as the lake."

This isn't the first time that the 17th Street Canal has proved to be a hurricane-flooding Achilles heel.

Following a 1947 hurricane that made a direct hit on New Orleans and Metairie, officials were unable to clear floodwaters from Metairie through the canal for two weeks.

Sewage from a treatment plant that stagnated in the canal created enough sulfuric acid fumes that nearby homes in Lakeview painted with lead-based paint turned black.

The slow-motion flooding of the south shore mirrors a similar flooding event during Tropical Storm Isidore, when weather conditions blocked water from leaving the lake as heavy rainfall pushed its surface higher and higher, causing extensive flooding in low-lying areas of Slidell a day after the storm had passed by.

Van Heerden said water flowing through New Orleans' back door used a weakness that he and many others have been concerned about for years: a V-shaped funnel formed by the joining of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and the Inner Harbor Navigation Channel. Storm surge as high as 18 feet pushed through the funnel, into the Industrial Canal and on to the lake. It's that surge water that is thought to have caused breaks in the Industrial Canal levees breaks that lake water is now flowing through into the 9th Ward.

Water entering that funnel also is thought to have topped levees surrounding Chalmette and eastern New Orleans, causing extensive flooding in both places.

Van Heerden said that if there's a silver lining to this disastrous event, it's that the eye of Katrina didn't go directly over or to the west of the city. If that had happened, the storm surge could have been much higher and would have directly topped levees all along the lake and much more rapidly filled the bowl, which would have meant an even higher death toll than is anticipated from this slow-moving event, he said.

This flood event contains many of the features used by federal, state and local planners early this year to begin shaping what was supposed to be a catastrophe recovery plan for New Orleans: failed pumping stations, breached levees, rooftop rescues, makeshift medical triage zones.

In drawing the plan, officials assumed that it would take several days to a week before enough manpower and equipment could be staged to deal with many of the problems they're facing now, such as how to close the breach in the 17th Street Canal.

There, the problem is how to close the hole quickly. Strategies suggested during tabletop exercises indicated it could take several days to position barges and cranes in place to more permanently fill such a gap, assuming it was part of the worst-case, storm-surge- driven flooding scenario.

The slow-motion reality of the collapsing canal wall has the state Department of Transportation and Development and the Army Corps of Engineers working into the night to plug the breach and try to stem the flooding in Lakeview, West End, Bucktown and large swaths of East Jefferson.

A convoy of trucks carrying 108 15,000-pound concrete barriers - like those used as highway construction dividers - was en route to the site Tuesday night, said Mark Lambert, chief spokesman for the agency.

Helicopters will lift the barriers above the hole and drop them in place, even as another 50 sandbags, each weighing 3,000 pounds, are also being maneuvered into place.

"That's 800 tons of concrete," Lambert said. "What we are trying to do is just stop the water from going into the city."

More difficult will be the overtopping of levees along the Industrial Canal caused by the high lake water flowing in. Lambert didn't say how the state would address that problem.

The problems caused by floodwaters will only get worse, according to van Heerden and the earlier tabletop exercises.

For one, if the water in the city does rise to the height of levees along the lakefront, it may be difficult to open floodgates designed to keep the lake out that would now be needed to allow the lake to leave.

Van Heerden said the rising floodwaters also would cause major pollution problems in coming days, as they float dozens of fuel and chemical storage tanks off their fittings, severing pipelines and allowing the material to seep into the floodwaters.

"In our surveys of the parish, a lot of the storage tanks we looked at weren't bolted down with big bolts," he said. "They rely on gravity to hold them down. If an industrial property is 5 feet below sea level and the water gets to 5 feet above sea level, that's 10 feet of water, and I'm certain many we looked at will float free.

"You'll see a lot of highly volatile stuff on the surface, and one spark and we'll have a major fire," he said.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Police officers seen joining in on free-for-all

By Mike Perlstein and Brian Thevenot 

Staff Writers

Law enforcement efforts to contain the emergency left by Katrina slipped into chaos in parts of New Orleans Tuesday -- with some police officers and firefighters even joining looters in picking stores clean.

At the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street, an initial effort to hand out provisions to stranded citizens quickly disintegrated into mass looting. Authorities at the scene said bedlam erupted after the giveaway was announced over the radio.

While many people carried out food and essential supplies, others cleared out jewelry racks and carted out computers, TVs and appliances on handtrucks.

Some officers joined in taking whatever they could, including one New Orleans cop who loaded a shopping cart with a compact computer and a 27-inch flat screen television.

Officers claimed there was nothing they could do to contain the anarchy, saying their radio communications had broken down and they had no direction from commanders.

"We don't have enough cops to stop it," an officer said. "A mass riot would break out if you tried."

Inside the store, the scene alternated between celebration and frightening bedlam. A shirtless man straddled a broken jewelry case, yelling, "Free samples, free samples over here."

Another man rolled a mechanized pallet, stacked six feet high with cases of vodka and whiskey. Perched atop the stack was a bewildered toddler.

Throughout the store and parking lot, looters pushed carts and loaded trucks and vans alongside officers. One man said police directed him to Wal-Mart from Robert's Grocery, where a similar scene was taking place.

A crowd in the electronics section said one officer broke the glass DVD case so people wouldn't cut themselves.

"The police got all the best stuff. They're crookeder than us," one man said.

Most officers, though, simply stood by powerless against the tide of law breakers.

One veteran officer said, "It's like this everywhere in the city. This tiny number of cops can't do anything about this. It's wide open."

At least one officer tried futilely to control a looter through shame.

"When they say take what you need, that doesn't mean an f-ing TV," the officer shouted to a looter. "This is a hurricane, not a free-for-all."

Sandra Smith of Baton Rouge walked through the parking lot with a 12-pack of beer under each arm.

"I came down here to get my daughters," she said, "but I can't find them."

The scene turned so chaotic at times that entrances were blocked by the press of people, shopping carts and traffic jams that sprouted on surrounding streets.

Some groups organized themselves into assembly lines to more efficiently cart off goods.

Toni Williams, 25, packed her trunk with essential supplies, such as food and water, but said mass looting disgusted and frightened her.

"I didn't feel safe. Some people are going overboard," she said.

Inside the store, one woman was stocking up on make-up. She said she took comfort in watching police load up their own carts.

"It must be legal," she said. "The police are here taking stuff, too." 

Staff writers Doug MacCash and Keith Spera assisted in this story.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Death, violence, lawlessness put cities under martial law

By Brian Thevenot, Keith Spera and Doug MacCash

Staff Writers

Sitting on a black barrel amid the muck and stench near the St. Claude Avenue bridge, 52-year-old Daniel Weber broke into a sob, his voice cracking as he recounted how he had watched his wife drown and spent the next 14 hours floating in the polluted flood waters, his only life line a piece of driftwood.

"My hands were all cut up from breaking through the window, and I was standing on the fence. I said, 'I'll get on the roof and pull you up,'" he said. "And then we just went under."

Weber sat among hundreds of refugees rescued Tuesday from rooftops, attics and floating debris in the 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish by an armada of more than 100 boats. Officials from the Coast Guard estimated they pulled thousands of people off of rooftops and attics, many with stories as grim as Weber's. Officials believed hundreds and maybe thousands more remained in peril. They declined to estimate the number of dead. That will come later.

"We've got cadaver dogs, but we're only looking for the live people at this point," said Rachel Zechnelli of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which deployed all available boats to the Industrial Canal Monday night. "We're dealing only with live voices and heartbeats."

While the 9th Ward remained the focus of the search and rescue effort, refugees from other neighborhoods flooded by the massive breach of Lake Pontchartrain streamed to the Superdome and CBD, trudging through deep waters to get there.

Then, in an evening press conference, Mayor Ray Nagin announced that the already crippled city would take yet another blow: Another surge of water from the failed 17th Street Canal levee could push an additional 10 feet of water into already waterlogged neighborhoods, flooding the remaining dry sections of Uptown.

The expected surge stems from a failure to execute a plan to dump sandbags via helicopter into the 200-meter wide breach. Nagin offered up no culprit but promised to investigate the matter.

"I thought everyone understood this morning that that was the highest priority," the mayor said. "It didn't get done. Now there's nothing to slow down the pace of the water."

That was enough to prompt some of the city's few remaining residents to start packing.

Uptown resident Margeaux Gonzalez rode out Katrina at the Queen and Crescent Hotel, then returned to find her Laurel Street home dry. As she and her neighbors watched Nagin on Tuesday night on a TV rigged to a car battery, they reluctantly made plans to evacuate to Baton Rouge.

"We were feeling really positive three hours ago," Gonzales said. "The storm is long gone, we suffered through the wind and the rain and survived the flood. It's ridiculous that we can't get the help we need from the government to keep the city intact. That's sad."

Earlier in the day, as floodwaters rose to knee-deep levels along Poydras Street, the city's top brass evacuated to Baton Rouge via the Crescent City Connection, the only clear route out of town. They recommended others follow.

"Get out," said City Attorney Sherry Landry from the window of the SUV she would use to evacuate. "I'm serious."

For many, that wasn't an option. In the impoverished 9th Ward, many didn't flee the storm in the first place because of lack of money and transportation, as well as a belief the storm wouldn't be nearly as bad. On Tuesday, they remained the focus of efforts to evacuate the homeless to the already crowded Superdome.

That left thousands of people in other neighborhoods close to the lake, whose homes had not flooded until late Monday when the canal gave way, with no option other than to walk to the few dry areas of the city. Interstate 10 remained largely devoid of cars, but a steady stream of pedestrians seeking food, water and shelter walked along the highway.

More than 100 New Orleans police officers riding out the storm in the LSU Medical Center were still trapped by high water on Tuesday. Assumption Parish deputies in boats rescued them.

Some who left their flooded homes faced heart-rending dilemmas. Bethaney Waith of Mid-City, who walked in chest high water with a neighbor to the Superdome, had to leave her disabled housemate behind. The woman suffered from epidemia and can't walk.

Those trapped in the city faced an increasingly lawless environment, as law enforcement agencies found themselves overwhelmed with widespread looting. Looters swarmed the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street, often bypassing the food and drink section to steal wide-screen TVs, jewelry, bicycles and computers. Watching the sordid display and shaking his head in disgust, one firefighter said of the scene: "It's a hurricane, what are you do with a basketball goal?"

Police regained control at about 3 p.m., after clearing the store with armed patrol. One shotgun-toting Third District detective described the looting as "ferocious."

"And it's going to get worse as the days progress," he said.

In Uptown, one the few areas that remained dry, a bearded man patrolled Oak Street near the boarded-up Maple Leaf Bar, a sawed- off shotgun slung over his shoulder. The owners of a hardware store sat in folding chairs, pistols at the ready.

Uptown resident Keith Williams started his own security patrol, driving around in his Ford pickup with his newly purchased handgun. Earlier in the day, Williams said he had seen the body of a gunshot victim near the corner of Leonidas and Hickory streets.

"What I want to know is why we don't have paratroopers with machine guns on every street," Williams said.

Like-minded Art Depodesta sat on the edge of a picnic table outside Cooter Brown's Bar, a chrome shotgun at his side loaded with red shells.

"They broke into the Shell station across the street," he said. "I walked over with my 12-gauge and shot a couple into the air."

The looters scattered, but soon after, another man appeared outside the bar in a pickup truck armed with a pistol and threatened Depodesta.

"I told him, 'Listen, I was in the Army and I will blow your ass off,'" Depodesta said. "We've got enough trouble with the flood."

The man sped away.

"You know what sucks," Depodesta said. "The whole U.S. is looking at this city right now, and this is what they see."

In the Bywater, a supply store sported spray-painted signs reading "You Loot, I Shoot" and "You Bein Watched." A man seated nearby with a rifle in his lap suggested it was no idle threat. At the Bywater studio of Dr. Bob, the artist known for handpainted "Be Nice or Leave" signs, a less fanciful sentiment was painted on the wall: "Looters Will Be Shot. Dr. Bob."

As the afternoon faded, aggression filled the air on the neutral ground of Poland Avenue as well, as people grew increasingly frustrated with the rescue effort. Having already survived one nightmare, a woman with five children feared going to go to the Dome, saying that some of the men preparing to board transport vehicles had smuggled razor blades with them.

On the other side of the bridge, rescue boats continued to offload as many as 15 people at a time late into the afternoon, with no end in sight. Some said they had seen dead bodies floating by their boats.

Many stumbled from dehydration as they made their way onto dry land. Several rescue workers said some of the people trapped were so shell-shocked or stubborn they refused to leave their houses. "If you can figure that one out, let me know," said Oscar Dupree, a volunteer who had been trapped on a roof himself and returned to help save others.

The scene called to mind a refugee camp in a Third World nation.

Liquor flowed freely and tempers flared amid complaints about the pace of the relief effort, which seemed to overwhelm the agencies involved and the city's inability to contain floodwaters.

As they emerged from rescue boats, at times wobbling and speaking incoherently, many of the rescued seem stunned they had not died. Johnell Johnson of Marais street said she had been trapped on her roof " with a handicapped man with one damn leg."

Gerald Wimberly wept as he recounted his unsuccessful effort to help a young girl, who rescuers ultimately saved.

Dupree said he had seen a young man he knew drown. "I just couldn't get to him," he said. "I had to tell his people."

Weber, the man who lost his wife, seemed at the breaking point as he waited, surrounded by anger and filth, for a National Guard truck to ferry him to the Dome. After 14 hours of floating on a piece of wood, volunteers who knew him had fished him out.

"Another hour, I would have just let myself drown," he said.

A moment later, staring ahead to a bleak future without his wife, he said he almost wished he had.

"I'm not going to make it. I know I'm not."

© 2005 The Times Picayune

By Trymaine D. Lee

Staff Writer

Lucrece Phillips' sleepless nights are filled with the images of dead babies and women, and young and old men with tattered T-shirts or graying temples, all of whom she saw floating along the streets of the Lower 9th Ward.

The deaths of many of her neighbors who chose to brave the hurricane from behind the walls of their Painter Street homes shook tears from Phillips' bloodshot eyes Tuesday, as a harrowing tale of death and survival tumbled from her lips.

"The rescuers in the boats that picked us up had to push the bodies back with sticks," Phillips said sobbing. "And there was this little baby. She looked so perfect and so beautiful. I just wanted to scoop her up and breathe life back into her little lungs. She wasn't bloated or anything, just perfect."

A few hours after Phillips, 42, and five members of her family and a friend had been rescued from the attic of her second-story home in the 2700 block of Painter Street, she broke down with a range of emotions. Joy, for surviving the killer floods; pain, for the loss of so many lives; and uncertainty, about the well-being of her family missing in the city's most ravaged quarters.

In a darkened lobby of the downtown Hyatt hotel turned refuge, she hugged an emergency worker closely; a handful of his sweaty blue T-shirt rippling from each of her fists.

She had barely gotten out a fifth thank you when the emergency worker whispered into her ear that "it was going to be OK," and that "it was our job to save lives."

Phillips' downstairs neighbor, Terrilyn Foy, 41, and her 5- yearold son, Trevor, were unable to escape, Phillips said. By late Monday the surging waters of Lake Pontchartrain had swallowed the neighborhood. The water crept, then rushed, under the front door, Phillips said, then knocked it from its hinges. In less than 30 minutes, Phillips said, the water had topped her neighbors' 12-foot ceiling and was gulping at hers.

"I can still hear them banging on the ceiling for help," Phillips said, shaking. "I heard them banging and banging, but the water kept rising." Then the pleas for help were silenced by the sway of the current, she said.

Phillips and her family -- her daughter and niece, 20 and 18; an uncle, 40, and his wife, 35, along with their 2-year-old daughter and a friend, 45 -- rushed to the attic for safety. The water was rising and death seemed near, she said. Her back was hurting from the two bones she'd recently had fused during surgery for a car wreck she had in 2003. The group had been up there for hours, and they were growing more frantic as each moment passed. The water kept rising. They saw it inching up.

Phillips said they didn't want to die like little Trevor or his mother or the others who couldn't or wouldn't leave the neighborhood in the face of Katrina. So they pounded, kicked and pulled at the wooden boards in the roof till something gave way. The boards around a vent near a trestle gave way. When the din of boat propellers seemed near, they screamed and waved shirts from the roof. Finally the din got closer and they could see from the broken- out vent men in a boat. A few got in, and then another boat arrived and picked up the others.

Officials early Tuesday said 1,200 stranded residents had been rescued in the city. Later in the day that estimate rose to more than 3,000.

Parents, siblings missing

The seven of them were safe, but Phillips had still not heard from her mother or father out in east New Orleans. Both were 62 years old and both refused to evacuate. Her mother and father's 13 siblings from across the city also chose the four walls of home over evacuating out of town or trekking to the Superdome. For Phillips, evacuation seemed too costly. She and her family evacuated for Hurricane Dennis earlier in the summer. The few days in Houston cost her $1,200.

Phillips had not heard from any of them by late Tuesday, as nearly 90 percent of the city was underwater.

Several other family members, most from outside Louisiana and in town since Aug. 21 for a family reunion, had also not been accounted for. After spending money for weeks, eating out, buying gifts and enjoying the Crescent City, "they figured they would stay until after Labor Day."

"I know this storm killed so many people," Phillips said. "There is no 9th Ward no more. No 8th or 7th ward or east New Orleans. All those people, all them black people, drowned."

She hadn't slept for days. The faces of the dead haunted her waking moments, badgering her not to forget them.

'No respect'

Like so many other survivors, Phillips and family were picked from the flood and dropped off downtown, which was slogged with thigh-high waters, but had the Superdome and some hotels giving solace to refugees.

By early Tuesday evening, officials estimated that about 20,000 people were packed inside the Superdome. Most were hopeless, hungry and increasingly desperate, witnesses and officials agreed. Rumors of murder, rape and deplorable conditions were circulating.

"After all we had been through, those damn guards at the Dome treated us like criminals," Phillips said. "We went to that zoo and they gave us no respect."

The family slogged down Poydras Street to the Hyatt. The hotel didn't have electricity or water, and nearly every glass window on the Poydras side had been blown out by the hurricane, but it was secure. Ranking officials from City Hall across the street had been evacuated there, including Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Chief Eddie Compass.

But there was no real solace for the weary woman or her family. Phillips said she had to contend with not knowing whether her mother or father or extended family had survived. And she's still haunted by the deaths she saw with her own eyes.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

As city drowns in chaos, death gets little notice

By Keith Spera

Staff Writer

At 91, Booker Harris ended his days propped on a lawn chair, covered by a yellow quilt and abandoned, dead, in front of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Mr. Harris died in the back of a Ryder panel truck Wednesday afternoon, as he and his 93-year-old wife, Allie, were evacuated from eastern New Orleans. The truck's driver deposited Mrs. Harris and her husband's body on the Convention Center Boulevard neutral ground.

And there it remained.

With 3,000 or more evacuees stranded at the Convention Center - and with no apparent plan to deal with them - collecting a body was no one's priority. It was just another casualty in Hurricane Katrina's wake.

A steady stream of often angry or despondent people, many from the flooded Central City neighborhood, trickled first toward Lee Circle and then to the Convention Center, hoping to be saved from increasingly desperate straits.

Food, water and options had dwindled across Uptown and Central City, where looters seemed to rage almost at will, clearing out boutique clothing shops and drugstores alike. Hospitals no longer would accept emergencies, as staffers prepared to evacuate with patients.

"If you get shot," said a security guard at Touro Infirmary, "you've got to go somewhere else." As a blazing sun and stifling humidity took their toll, 65 year-old Faye Taplin rested alone on the steps of the Christ Cathedral in the 2900 block of St. Charles Avenue. Rising water had finally chased her from her Central City home. She clutched two plastic bags containing bedding, a little food and water and insulin to treat her diabetes.

She needed help but was unsure where to find it. She wanted to walk more than 15 blocks to a rumored evacuation pickup point beneath the Pontchartrain Expressway, but she doubted that was possible.

"I'm tired," she said. "My feet have swollen up on me. I can't walk that far."

The church custodian, Ken Elder, hoped to free his car from the parking lot behind the church as soon as the water went down.

He rode out Katrina on the Episcopal church's altar steps and was well stocked with food. But he feared the marauding looters who roamed St. Charles Avenue after dark.

"I lived in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots," Elder said.

"That was a piece of cake compared to this."

Clara Wallace pushed her brother in a wheelchair down St. Charles from Fourth Street to the Pontchartrain Expressway. Suffering from diabetes and the aftereffects of a stroke, he wore only a hospital robe and endured part of the journey through standing water.

"Nobody has a bathroom he can use," Wallace, 59, said of her brother.

"Nobody would even stop to tell us if we were at the right place. What are we supposed to do?" A man in a passing pickup truck from the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries finally directed Wallace and the 50 other evacuees under the overpass to the convention center.

But they would find little relief there.

New evacuees were being dropped off after being pulled from inundated eastern New Orleans and Carrollton, pooling with those who arrived on foot. Some had been at the convention center since Tuesday morning but had received no food, water or instructions. They waited both inside and outside the cavernous building.

The influx overwhelmed the few staffers and Louisiana National.

With so much need and so few resources, the weakest and frailest were bound to suffer the most.

Seated next to her husband's body on the neutral ground beneath the St. Joseph Street sign, Allie Harris munched on crackers, seemingly unaware of the tragedy unfolding around her.

Eventually, guardsmen loaded her into a truck and hauled her off with other elderly evacuees.

Mr. Harris' body was left behind.

Such a breakdown did not bode well for other evacuees. As the afternoon wore on, hope faded, replaced by anger.

"This is 2005," John Murray shouted, standing in the street near Mr. Harris' body. "It should not be like this for no catastrophe. This is pathetic."

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Those who tried to stay join rabbis, single moms, others in Houston

By Josh Peter

HOUSTON - A married couple and their 16-month-old son escaped the rising waters of New Orleans in a pirogue.

Two Orthodox rabbis shared their last supplies of kosher food with out-of-town Jews before evacuating the city.

A single mother of four young children saw two dead bodies float by as she moved three of her children to safety and worried about the fourth left behind with his grandfather. A young father was separated from his fiancée and 3-day-old child before boarding a bus headed out of New Orleans.

And a 28-year-old man who stayed to test his inner strength despite a mandatory evacuation order waded through hip-deep water and found a charter bus after food and hope started running low. They were among the thousands of evacuees at the Astrodome - the indoor stadium converted into a temporary shelter in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that left about 80 percent of New Orleans flooded - and they arrived with meager belongings and tales of survival.

TAKING ON KATRINA

Damon Evans sat on a shaded picnic bench outside the Astrodome waiting to reunite with 15 family members who piled into three cars and a truck Sunday and, taking heed from the mandatory evacuations orders, drove to Houston. They left only after pleading with Evans to join them.

Even as his family prepared to leave, Evans, 28, said he never even started to pack.

"My family got upset," he said. "They kept asking, 'Why do you want to stay?'"

He still wondered about the answer Thursday as he sat under the shade of a tree in his blue adidas jersey, blue jeans, shower sandals and a black do-rag.

An arrest for marijuana possession in 2004 cost Evans his job as a cook at a restaurant in the French Quarter, said Evans, who added that after serving four months in jail he's gotten work through a temporary agency for everything from construction to loading frozen chicken with a forklift. Mostly, he said, the jobs pay $5.15 per hour - and his financial struggles may have contributed to his desire to ride out the hurricane that left about 80 percent of New Orleans under water.

"It was like something was drawing me to stay," he said. "And I was like, 'If something's drawing me to stay, it's for a reason."

"When you struggle for money every day but you're dealing and making ends meet, you want to test your inner being. You know, I watch 'Survivor' and those kinds of thing on TV. "The ones that stayed, we go through so much, you want to test your strength during something that's out of your hands ....When it's out of your hands, you don't know how far you can go. But I made it through the hurricane. I did. I got that experience."

Braving gale-force winds, Evans said he spent much of the time outside and watched the water creep up to the top step of the porch at his aunt's house. He eventually moved across the street to a two-story apartment that was housing about two dozen others who's stayed behind.

He and the others in the apartment began to run out of food Tuesday and held their last barbecue that night. Evans said he stood in ankle-deep water and barbecued dozens of chicken wings.

"I couldn't live on peanut butter and jelly for three months, and my people kept telling me, 'Come on, D. Come on.' "

By the following afternoon, hearing that buses were picking up evacuees near Lee Circle, Evans and four others waded through waist-deep water for eight blocks and climbed aboard a bus that took them and about 40 other evacuees to Houston.

They arrived at the Astrodome on Thursday at about 7 a.m., and Evans said he was looking forward to seeing his family members, who were supposed to meet him on the north side of the Astrodome. He also was thinking about the 10 people who stayed behind at the two-floor apartment complex in New Orleans.

While Evans waited for his relatives, he contemplated his future - one that might not include a return trip to his hometown. He needs to find a job soon, he said as he smoked a Camel, jingled the loose change in his pocket -- $1.46 that included 101 pennies - and sifted through a backpack duffel bag whose contents held a disposable camera and undeveloped photos he took of the disaster, two pair of shoes and a few other items.

"I always heard any other place besides New Orleans, there's more to offer," he said. "In New Orleans, it seemed like their main attraction was partying and Mardi Gras and events. When it comes down to jobs, you're lucky, you're blessed. And if you lose a job at a certain time of year, especially summertime, it's hard

"I'm going to use this for an advantage to break away and really see what the rest of the world's got to offer. It's a beginning.

"The worst part was over when I stepped off that bus," he said, referring to his ride to Houston. "Now everything else is in my hands.''

SHALOM Y'ALL

The three men clad in black fedoras, black suit pans and bushy beards were unmistakable: Orthodox rabbis. As they searched inside the Astrodome and circled the outdoor perimeter of the building, they were on a mission.

"Are you from New Orleans?'' one of the asked.

They were looking for evacuees - Jews and non-Jews alike in need of help.

Zelig Rivkin and his son, Mendel, serve as rabbis at the Chabad House, the synagogue on Freret Street that during Hanukah lights the oversized Menorah.

Zelig Rivkin, who 30 years ago started the synagogue with a congregation up to 150 Tulane students and 35 local families, said he and his son remained in New Orleans as long as possible to help others who stayed behind.

"We didn't' take it seriously enough," Zelig Rivkin said. "And we figured there may be a lot of people staying behind and they may need some help along the way." One of the requests came via phone Sunday night, when a Jewish couple visiting New Orleans called the Rivkins in search of kosher food. "We just emptied out our fridge and split half for us and half for them," Mendel Rivkin said.

But by Tuesday, when their land lines and cell phones went out, they realized it was time to leave. The Rivkins loaded their 13 family members into three cars and local firefighters helped them navigate around the downed power lines and fallen trees on Broadway Avenue as the rabbis and their family made their way to Houston. Instead of seeking shelter at the Superdome, they called Chaim Lazaroff, the rabbi who oversees the Chabad community in Houston, and moved into his house.

"We always preach, 'Love your fellow as yourself,' " Mendel Rivkin said. "But here we see it in practice. These people have opened up there homes and given up an office." While reaching out to the Jewish community, the Rivkins said they were reaching out to evacuees regardless of faith. In fact, they spent a couple of hours inside and outside the Superdome speaking mostly to non-Jews.

"I mean these people are glad to see somebody else," adding that a Palestinian woman approached him and struck up a friendly conversation. Lazaroff said a special service was planned for Thursday night during which Zelig Rivkin would give a talk.

"A plea for help," Zelig corrected with a grin.

Lazaroff said New Orleans Jews would be welcome at Shabbat services at 8 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. Saturday at the Chabad synagogue 10900 Fondren Road. And that offer came with a promise. "We've got great kosher food," he said.

THE SINGLE MOTHER

With a stuffed hefty bag over her left shoulder, Robin Ventris used her right arm to push the stroller and her 1-year-old daughter, her hair in short braids and ears pierced with small gold earrings. Ventris, 19, was returning from a site across the street from the Astrodome, where she loaded up on free supplies such as diapers, clothes and hygiene products.

A film of sweat covered Ventris' face as the mother of four between 2 months and 4 years old trudged back to the Astrodome. But her look of fatigue stemmed only in part from the physical burden of simultaneously pushing a stroller and hauling an overstuffed Hefty bag. She wore a bright yellow short-sleeve shirt, blue jeans and open-toe sandals - the same clothes she'd been wearing for two days.

She said her mother, Janice, rescued her and three of her children from their house in Harvey in the nick of time as flooding water rapidly rose. When Janice's car failed to start, Robin Ventris, her mother, the three children and several others waded through waste-deep water to get to busses on the Causeway.

With the power out, it wasn't long before the pot of beans and rice Ventris' mother had made for the family ran out. They also had no milk for the babies.

"Everybody was drinking hot sodas, hot juices, eating potato chips,'' she said of the days preceding the family's evacuation. "Don't got no grill to fix no meat on. Everybody was eating potato chips and candy trying to make it...That's all we had.''

Along with Ventris and her family, hundreds of others trudged through the floodwaters to the busses that would take them to Houston - and that's what bothered Ventris most about a fight that broke out between two men in the Astrodome on Wednesday night.

"Everybody lost their home and everybody's going through the same thing," she said. "But people have like nasty attitudes.

"I feel like all of us should stick together because all of us struggled together. They weren't walking through water by themselves. Everybody's babies were in dirty water. "Not that you wanted to have you children in dirty water, but there was no other way."

During that walk through foul water, Ventris said, the vandalism and destruction she saw reinforced the idea that New Orleans residents must band together if they hope to rebuild the city.

"Everybody had broken into stores and tore up and vandalized. Every store we saw, the windows were broken. It's going to take them a long time to fix the city up and get it back in order.''

But her biggest concern was the whereabouts of her 4-year-old. When Ventris and other family members left, her 4-year-old son was with his grandfather. She had spoken to him by cell phone every day until Thursday.

"I'm worried about him,'' she said, her eyes welling up with tears.

© 2005 The Times Picayune