The Times-Picayune, by The Times-Picayune

Katrina now a category 4 hurricane, eyewall is three hours from the city

Early morning Monday, August 29, 2005

Monday at 3 a.m., the eyewall of a slightly weakened Hurricane Katrina was beginning to cross Southwest Pass at the mouth of the Mississippi River on its way due north at 15 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. Katrina now has maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, still a strong Category 4 storm. With a track that's slightly eastward of earlier forecasts, local emergency preparedness officials said early Monday that it could result in less flooding in leveed areas of the metropolitan New Orleans area later today. But it's still too soon to say how much of the area will be flooded by the combination of storm surge and waves in Lake Pontchartrain and over wetlands along both sides of the Mississippi River. Indeed, the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning for Jefferson, Lafourche, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes until 10 a.m.

The weather service cautioned motorists not to drive on roads covered by water because it's difficult to judge the depth. People in vehicles caught in rising water should abandon them immediately and seek higher ground. Winds of 100 mph have been reported on Grand Isle, and gusts of 70 have accompanied rain squalls in the New Orleans area that have dropped as much as 2 inches of rain an hour. Rain totals of 15 inches are possible in some areas today, as Katrina moves over the area.

Outside New Orleans City Hall, an emergency medical worker surveyed the scene. "That wind is strong," he said. "It just blew the light of the top of an ambulance." A tornado watch has been extended until noon for the New Orleans area, as tornadoes could be embedded in thunderstorms in rain bands surrounding Katrina's eye. The storm's eyewall is about 3 hours away from the city. With Katrina tracking ever so slightly toward the northeast, a monitoring buoy 50 miles east of Plaquemines Parish in the Gulf of Mexico recorded sustained winds of 50 knots and gusts of 63 knots at around 3 a.m., according to climatologist Luigi Romolo of the Southern Regional Climate Center. Waves there were cresting at 47 feet.

HURRICANE DAMAGE: COLLAPSED BUILDINGS, MASSIVE FLOODING

During a morning teleconference, emergency preparedness officials from across southeast Louisiana reported flooding, building collapses, power outages and fires.

Here's a run-down of what they reported:- In New Orleans, water topped a levee along the Industrial Canal. The city's 911 emergency system was out of service and Charity Hospital was on emergency power and windows had been blown out on five floors. The Police Department was operating on a backup power system. Three to four feet of water was reported on St. Claude Avenue at Jackson Barracks. And a 20-foot tidal surge knocked out four pumping stations; only one was able to get back into service.

Also in New Orleans, a bridge connecting a parking garage to Memorial Hospital collapsed. - In Jefferson Parish, there was a report of a building collapse in the 200 block of Wright Avenue in Terrytown. Parish officials could pot provide details other than to say they had been notified that people were inside the building.

- In St. Charles Parish, significant flooding was reported on the east bank.

- In Arabi, up to 8 feet of water was reported, and people are climbing into their attics to escape the flooding. "We're telling people to get into the attic and take something with them to cut through the roof if necessary," said Col. Richard Baumy of the St. Bernard Parish Sheriffs Office. "It's the same scenario as Betsy."

Baumy said 100-plus mph winds were preventing rescue efforts.

At Bayou Bienvenue, water levels were reported at 9 1/2 feet, almost twice normal levels.

- In St. John, massive power outages are reported.- In Gramercy, there was extensive damage to the town's 1 1/2-year old fire station.

- Terrebonne Parish reported a fatality from a heart attack.

DOME HAS HOLE IN ROOF

The roof of the Superdome, where thousands of New Orleans residents have sought refuge from the storm, was damaged and there are reports of water pouring into the building. Two sections of the roof were missing, about 1 foot wide by 6 feet long. Witnesses said rain was coming through; people were moved from a section of the Dome floor from the 30-yard line to the end zone, up into the concourses of the building.

People inside seemed to take it fairly calmly, witnesses said. The Superdome has no electricity, so in addition to the rain coming in, there is no air-conditioning for the thousands of New Orleanians sheltering there.

The Dome wad opened Sunday as a shelter of last resort for those who could not evacuate the city.

KATRINA UPDATE

Hurricane Katrina's eye is poised to pass to the east of downtown New Orleans at 9 a.m. with top winds of 135 mph, at the low end of a Category 4 storm, which may help reduce damage in the city, Metairie, the River Parishes and western parts of St. Tammany Parish.

According to the National Hurricane Center, Katrina is moving to the north at 15 mph, and is expected to enter southern Mississippi later today.

The storm's central pressure was 923 millibars, a significant drop from the 904 millibars reported Saturday that placed Katrina among the four most intense Atlantic hurricanes in recorded history. Further weakening is forecast as the storm interacts with land.

Earlier this morning, Belle Chasse reported gusts of 105 and 88 mph, while the Lakefront Airport reported an 86-mph gust.

CALLS TO COAST GUARD

Petty Officer Cliff Roberts from the U.S. Coast Guard command center in St. Louis said they have had about four dozen emergency electronic signals from vessels in Grand Isle, Venice and elsewhere.

"It's unbelievable."

They're also getting calls from residents in distress who can't get through on 911 lines. They've had reports of people on roof tops at Villere and Louisa streets and in the 200 block of Almonaster Drive.

The Coast Guard can't respond to these of sorts of calls at this point, so they're passing them along to local law enforcement.

Once the storm is over, the admiral plans to "flood the sky with planes to search for the vessels from which they received signals," Roberts said.

Roberts guessed that the electronic signals means the boats are being tossed around, but it doesn't necessarily mean there are people aboard or that the vessels have gone down.

ST. BERNARD RESCUE EFFORTS TO BEGIN AS SOON AS WIND SUBSIDES

St. Bernard parish officials said they are preparing efforts to rescue stranded residents, as they continue to receive reports of widespread flooding and damage across the parish.

One of the worst hit areas was Arabi, where up to 8 feet of water was being reported. But Parish Council Chairman Joey DiFatta said other parts of St. Bernard were also hit.

"Water is inundating everywhere. We have buildings and roofs collapsing. We're preparing rescue efforts and as soon as the wind subsides we'll start trying to get people out of St. Bernard," he said.

WATER RISES IN LAKEVIEW

A resident inside a camelback bungalow in the Homedale neighborhood in Lakeview on Monday at 9 a.m. watched street floodwaters rise above the porch steps as he also battled water pouring down his stairwell from a second-floor window blown out by high winds from the west. The homeowner said floodwater had not yet come inside his home but was rising. He said he planned to move with his dog to the second floor and pray.

PHONE SYSTEMS FAILING

Portions of the telephone system in metropolitan New Orleans failed about 9:30 a.m., further isolating the city as Katrina's center passed.

Remote phone switching stations and wireless phone antennas, or cell sites, switched to backup battery or generator power after losing power from electrical lines. But many of those backup power sources were temporary. By mid-morning, dialing into and out of the New Orleans area was becoming increasingly difficult.

ST. BERNARD UPDATE
Monday, 10:45 a.m.

Some people who stayed in St. Bernard Parish were forced up into their attics to escape the floodwaters, said state Sen. Walter Boasso, who heard from local officials that some houses in Chalmette had water rising beyond the second floor.

"We know people were up in the attics hollering for help," said Boasso, who evacuated to Baton Rouge and was camped out at the state Office of Emergency Preparedness. Hopefully rescue workers will be able to get to people who are trapped before the water rises too high, he said.

I The state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has 60boats ready to go out to rescue people in St. Bernard as soon as the winds subside, he said. The agency has 200 boats that can be deployed into southeast Louisiana to look for people who are stranded on top of their houses.

On the north side of Judge Perez Drive, waters had risen as high as 10 feet, he said. Boasso, who lives in Chalmette, said he has been in touch with Council Chairman Joey DiFatta.

People who sought last-minute refuge at Chalmette High School were huddling in the hallways after windows were blown out, said Boasso, who added that the building had sustained some structural damage. The roof of the Civic Auditorium was blown off, he said.

Boasso said extensive flooding in the Lower 9th Board and St. Bernard Parish could be blamed on water going over the tops of the levees.

CHALMETTE, ARABI UNDERWATER
Monday, l:30 p.m.

Hurricane Katrina hammered the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish, with residents telling tales of stranded people being plucked from their rooftops by passing boaters and flood waters as high as 12 feet well into Chalmette. Residents fled the surging water, which quickly rose as the brunt of Katrina plowed ashore near eastern St. Bernard Parish.

Arabi resident Donald Bordelon told a Times-Picayune reporter via cell phone that at 8:30 a.m. there was just wind damage the homes on his block of Schnell Drive. But 40 minutes later, floodwaters hsd risen over the stove in his kitchen, as he scrambled to ready his boat for an evacuation.

Residents reported high water flooding such institutions as Rocky and Carlo's restaurant at the corner of St. Bernard Highway and Lloyd's Avenue. Others reported that homes on Campagna Drive were nearly underwater. At Chalmette High School on Judge Perez Drive, officials had set up a shelter of last resort late Sunday. By Monday morning, the first floor of the high school was under water and the evacuees huddled in rooms on the second floor, reporting that they could only see rooftops of the surrounding homes.

The St. Bernard Parish government building, also on Judge Perez Drive, was said to have taken on 8 to 10 feet of water. The government building is in a stretch of the highway that comprises one of the parish's main economic centers, with a huge new Super WalMart nearby.

KENNER FLOODING SERIOUS
Monday 1:45 p.m.

Willliams Boulevard in Kenner is flooded north of 1-10 to just before the lake levee, officials said. Officials said the flooding appears to be more serious than seen on May 8, 1995. However, Lake Pontchartrain did not overtop levees. Throughout Williams and elsewhere in Kenner, businesses, homes and apartments are dealing with flooding and significant roof damage.

Chateau Boulevard is a zig-zag of trees and power lines blocking one of Kenner's main arteries.

CATASTROPHIC POWER FAILURE
Monday 2:10 p.m.

The region's electricity system suffered catastrophic damage Monday from Hurricane Katrina. Entergy customers should be prepared to be without power for a month or more, said Amy Stallings, Entergy spokeswoman. Severe damage apparently occurred to all elements of the power grid, from the plants that generate electricity to the big transmission lines that carry power to communities to the distribution lines that connect to homes and businesses. "This will be a very long and difficult period for our customers and our employees" Stallings said. She called the damage the worst ever seen in Entergy's four-state territory and the most devastating outage in Louisiana.

The utility had hoped to send out initial crews to begin assessing damage Monday, but Stallings said that work will hold until Tuesday. Work crews cannot go out until winds fall below 35mph, or tropical storm strength, for safety reasons. That's expected to happen Monday sometime after 8 p.m., but flooding and other dangers will prevent workers from going out after dark.

Because flooding and damage to roads could severely limit access to remote wires and substations, Entergy workers are planning to fly over the area in helicopters Tuesday to assess damage to power plants and transmission lines. Monday at midday, massive power outages crippled southeastern Louisiana. About 770,000 electricity customers were without power. Entergy Corp. alone reported 700,000 customers, or basically their entire service base in metropolitan New Orleans Stallings said.

That figure easily topped the 271,000 customers who lost power during Tropical Storm Cindy on July 6. To find another outage event in similar scale, look back to Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Cleco Corp. reported around 70,000 outages: 66,000 in St. Tammany Parish, 3,000 in Iberia and St. Mary parishes, 700 in Washington Parish and 350 in central Louisiana.

The utilities said they were hoping to send out workers to begin assessing the damage to the region's power system sometime Monday afternoon, but that work would depend on the speed of improving weather conditions.

RESCUERS CAN'T GET TO THOSE WHO ARE STRANDED
New Orleans, 9th Ward, 2 p.m.

Wes McDermott, from the office of emergency preparedness in New Orleans, said officials have fielded at least 100 calls from people in distress in the Lower 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans. People report they are waiting on roofs and clinging to trees, he said. But McDermott said the city cannot send rescue crews out until the wind drops below 50 mph.

Angela Chalk, a lieutenant with the community emergency response team in New Orleans, said her niece, Brandi Hyde, is one of those people stranded and awaiting rescue. She said her niece is stranded on a roof of a three-story apartment building on Bundy Road, along with other tenants.

Meanwhile, City Hall confirmed a breach of the levee along the 17th Street Canal at Bellaire Drive, allowing water to spill into Lakeview.

LOOTING
New Orleans, 2:15 p.m.

Returning from a fact-finding expedition from the newspaper's Howard Avenue headquarters, a group of reporters and photographers stumbled on a parade of looters streaming from Coleman's Retail Store, located at 4001 Earhart Blvd., about two blocks away from The Times-Picayuneoffices.

The looters, who were men and women who appeared to be in their early teens to mid-40s, braved a steady rain and infrequent tropical storm wind gusts to tote boxes of clothing and shoes from the store. Some had garbage bags stuffed with goods. Others lugged wardrobe-sized boxes or carried them on their heads.

The line going to and from the store along Earhart Boulevard numbered into the dozens and appeared to be growing. Some looters were seen smiling and greeting each other with pleasantries as they passed. Another group was seen riding in the back of a pickup truck, honking the horn and cheering.

The scene also attracted a handful of curious bystanders, who left the safety of their homes to watch the heist. No police were present in the area, which is flooded heavily with standing water two to four feet deep on all sides of Earhart Blvd.

DESPAIR IN THE 9TH WARD
New Orleans, 9th Ward, 2:30 p.m.

Times-Picayune photographer Ted Jackson waded into the Lower 9th Ward Monday afternoon and reported a scene of utter destruction. The wind still howled, floodwaters covered vehicles in the street and people were clinging to porches and waiting in attics for rescuers who had yet to arrive.

In one home on Claiborne Avenue near the Industrial Canal bridge, Jackson saw a man peering from a window in his attic. The man said rising water in his house had forced him, his wife and two children into the attic.

Jackson estimated the water's depth at 12 feet.

"He was very calm," Jackson said of the man in the attic window.

Jackson said he couldn't get across the street. The water was too deep and the current was too fast. Nearby, three children and three adults were clinging to a porch, trying to stay above the water, which they insisted was continuing to rise.

"They were really scared. They said they had been clinging to that porch since 8 a.m."

EBBERT EXPECTS CASUALTIES
Monday, 3:07 p.m.

Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for the city of New Orleans, said Monday afternoon he is positive there are casualties resulting from Hurricane Katrina, based on the number of calls to emergency workers from people trapped in trees and attics.

In some of those cases, authorities lost communications with those pleading for help.

"Everybody who had a way or wanted to get out of the way of this storm was able to," Ebbert said. "For some that didn't, it was their last night on this earth."

Police are currently fanning out across the city in squad cars, trucks and boats to assess the damage and rescue people where possible.

Ebbert said the city has 100 boats currently stationed at Jackson Barracks on the Orleans-St. Bernard parish line. Authorities are trying to get a good look at the situation before dark.

The hardest-hit areas of the city appear to be the Lower 9th Ward, eastern New Orleans, Treme and Lakeview near a levee breech.

Ebbert said it could be two months before electricity is restored to all of the city. He said Entergy will send 4,500 workers to the region, who will be housed in quarters barges on the Mississippi River.

Though damage is extensive, Ebbert said if the storm had passed just 10 miles west of its track, the city would have been inundated with 25 feet of water.

METAlRlE ROAD OVERPASS

At about 4 p.m., a New Orleans Fire Department truck made its way up 1-10 to just short of the railroad overpass where about 15 feet of water brought the truck to a halt. At that point, a firefighter walked to the fence on the side of the interstate, used bolt cutters to cut a hole in the fence and allowed another firefighter and a state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement officer to pass through the fence. Their destination was their homes in Metairie and they were determined to finish the rest of the trip on foot.

At about the same time, French Quarter resident Ken "Timber" Wulff walked down the center line of Interstate 10 toward the French Quarter after swimming the deluge under the railroad overpass. Wulff said he had left his car about a quarter of a mile on the other side of the flood and was planning to walk back to his house on Royal and St. Ann streets. "I tried walking on it, but I understand that's only for certain people," he said.

Wulff said he had heard the mayor had given the all-clear signal, an assumption he realized immediately was false. When Wulff swam across the flooded underpass he was greeted by a New Orleans Police Department officer who had one question for him: "Are you crazy?"

APRES LE DELUGE

Mound Street is no more. The lakefront cul de sac is now beneath 4 feet of water. Scott Radish, his wife Kyle Radish, and neighbor Brandon Gioe, sat on the porch of their raised cottage, lamenting the damage and the irony. Scott Radish said they had weathered the storm without much damage. "It was scary. Almost all the tree branches fell, but the building stood. I thought I was doing good, until I noticed my Jeep was under water."

The water in the neighborhood had risen only knee-deep during the storm. It was 2 p.m. when they noticed the water was rising rapidly, owing to a breach in the 17th Street Canal levee in Bucktown. As they sat on the porch and surveyed the scene, they could see tops of cars and a submerged boat.

RESCUE IN EAST N.O. AND ST. BERNARD
Monday, 4:45 p.m.

Twelve boats have been deployed from Jackson Barracks to search for people stranded on the upper levels of their homes in eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, state officials said at a 3:30 p.m. briefing.

The teams are responding to people who have made calls asking for help, while also looking for people who haven't been able to reach emergency officials, said Major General Bennett Landreneau, A few people have already been reached and taken to the Superdome, while a couple others were taken to Jackson Barracks, he said.

Speaking at a press conference at the state Office of Emergency Preparedness, state and federal officials said the top priority remains rescuing people who are still in physical danger. There are reports of widespread flooding in St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, as well as in Slidell and the Lower 9thWard.

"First and foremost, we need to save lives and protect property," said Mike Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As well as looking for the people who need to be rescued from flooded homes, the state is beginning to send medical teams into the areas hit by the storm, said Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Fred Cerise, head of the state Department of Health and Hospitals and a medical doctor, is heading to Charity to help formulate a plan on how to get patients out of the hospital, which has power problems and five floors of broken windows, she said. Many patients are expected to be sent to the Superdome, which has been serving as an emergency shelter, and then sent by plane to hospitals in north Louisiana.

Federal medical teams will be helping out. Brown said personnel from his agency had been trying to help out with medical assessments at the Superdome, but had been having trouble getting to the area because of the continued hurricaneforce winds. FEMA will be sending its own urban search and rescue teams into New Orleans to help look for people who need assistance.

Brown said he plans to do an aerial search of the area in the morning.

FEMA has water, ice and military meals-ready-to-eat that are ready to be shipped into any areas that need them, Brown said. He said he has "supply lines backed up" to Fort Worth and Atlanta.

Blanco also has deployed teams from the state Department of Transportation and Development to clear access clear critical roads.

The governor re-iterated her request that people from the areas struck by the storm should not try to return. The roads leading back to Orleans, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson and St. Tammany will be blocked, Blanco said. "Katrina is by no means over," Blanco said. "Wherever you live, it is still too dangerous to return home."

STUCK ON 1-10
Monday, 5:10 p.m.

At about 4 p.m. Monday Mike Williams and Don Bruce stood on 1-10 East looking down at the people stranded on their rooftops.

The two had set out that morning from Jefferson Parish trying to get to an address on Bundy, they said. But heavy flooding near the foot of the high rise had stopped them. Williams said he and Bruce had been stuck on the elevated portion of 1-10 since about 11 a.m.

MID-CITY: WATER EVERYWHERE
Monday, 4:30 p.m.

There is some roof damage to several Xavier University Buildings along Howard Avenue and on South Jefferson Davis Parkway. Aluminum panels peeled off the roof lay on the parking lots and in the street. A couple of pieces floated in high water on Jefferson Davis Parkway, where a few palms are completely uprooted and the median is almost invisible.

Jefferson Davis Parkway north of Interstate 10 and streets in that area are filled with 2 to 4 feet of water. There are downed trees and power poles and many traffic signals are bent and hanging from their poles.

Only a handful of undamaged billboards could be seen anywhere in the area. The metal structure for a billboard collapsed onto Yang's Chinese restaurant at Tulane and Broad avenues, while many billboards had only small bits of flapping material left on them.

Homes and businesses with minor to moderate roof damage were common on Tulane Avenue from Jefferson Davis Parkway to South Carrollton Avenue, along with businesses and homes flooded in water up to 5 feet deep. Despite the widespread damage, few broken windows can be seen throughout the area.

There is more flooding on side streets like South Genois and South Cortez streets. Airline Drive on other side of the interstate interchange is filled with even more water - at least 5 feet as far as the eye could see.

While parts of the interstate are clear, the Southern Railroad underpass is flooded almost all the way to the railroad trestle, while nearby, no giant crawfish could be seen on top of Semolina's Restaurant on Metairie Road and water swamped underneath that interchange.

Too many cars to count had water above their doors, some had only their roofs showing like turtle shells above the rising water. Several dogs appeared to be tied to cement posts alongside the old Robert's food store, where water also is on the rise. Several people gathered atop the grocery store's roof parking lot, which is lined with parked cars. A helpless-looking crowd gathered on the steps of the Criminal Court House, facing Tulane Avenue, where more cars are under water. Pedestrians waded through some of the floodwaters in the area, with waist deep water a common sight and a few people struggling for balance in water that is chest high.

Some businesses fared worse than others, such as the Whitney National Bank, 2650 Canal St., where curtains could be seen blowing in the wind from busted panes of tall glass.

The side of the Rentway TV Rental, 124 N. Broad was heavily damaged; severe roof damage and flooding is visible at Fact-0-Bake, 600 N. Broad and the rear of a warehouse at Carl E. Woodward LLC at Euphrosine and S Dupre streets collapsed Many, many other businesses appear to suffer minor to moderate flooding.

NOTHING BUT ROOFTOPS

Treme and the city's 8th and 9th Wards were severely flooded. Eastern New Orleans was inaccessible by car due to the high water on Interstate 10 East. The farther one drove east on Interstates 10 and 610, the deeper the water and the danger. Hurricane Katrina caused the highway to end at the first exit for Louisa Street.

For miles in the 9th Ward, there were only rooftops, with floodwaters lapping at the eves, visible from 1-10. Rows of homes were swallowed by water. Standing outside on the concrete interstate, in the whipping winds, signs could be spotted that so many of the city's residents did not evacuate.

More than 112,000 households in New Orleans don't own cars, the Mayor's Office has estimated.

One man waded up to his chest below, holding an orange water cooler as a buoy. Another single man watched him from the rooftop of a trucking business. Bursts of orange lights could be seen from another house, from the highest window, where at least two people were stranded. Their house nearly swallowed by the flooding, they blinked flashlights to attract attention. But by 4 p.m. Monday, they would have to wait, rescue officials said. Boats were coming, police officers said. Beneath the rain cloud-streaked sky, the visions of destruction were overwhelming.

There would be a yell here and there, a holler from somewhere, but no one in sight. Desperate images filled the neighborhoods:

Small children and a woman standing on their front porch as water licked the raised house's top steps. A black van completely entrenched in the flooding. A drenched dog alone on a rooftop. Household-type items strewn in the dirty flood water. In one case, rescuers used a boat to get a group of stranded people from their roof to the highway. But they left them on the overpass, presumably to make other rescues.

The interstate was a kind of eerie desert. The stranded included an elderly woman in a wheelchair and a small barefoot boy. Both were accompanied by their respective families.

TRAPPED ON N. MlRO STREET
Monday, 5:37 p.m.

From the elevated 1-10, three men could be seen below paddling a boat near the intersection of Mandeville and North Rocheblave.

The water was so high that the men looked to be dangerously near power lines that were still properly affixed to the top of the poles.

The men yelled that they had just left a house on North Miro Street between Spain and Mandeville where the residents were desperate for help.

Twelve or 13 people were trapped at that house, one of the men in the boat said. Those trapped included some elderly people and a pregnant woman.

When the information was passed on to a police officer driving past, the officer took down the information and said that rescuers were trying to get to the house.

P.H. COPS TO RESCUE
Monday, 5:55 p.m.

Monday afternoon, Councilman-at-Large Oliver Thomas and Lt. Mike Roussel of the New Orleans Police Department helped Ruby Lockhart out of a boat that had rescued her from a house on Iroquois Street.

The boat brought the elderly Lockhart to a spot a quarter mile west of the Louisa Street exit on 1-10 East. Roussel said the credit belonged to the "Uptown PH Cops," with P.H. standing for public housing. When they saw everything was quiet at their normal stations, those police officers headed east to try to rescue those who needed it.

Rousel then asked for the reporter's notebook so he could write down the name of each officer he said was deserving of praise: Lamont Domengeaux, Emile Blackburn, Jamie Freeman, Greg Hill, Jonal Abdin, Kendrick Allen, Jason Allen and Kenyon Bertrand.

Lockhart's neighbor, Debra Waker, 40, got off the boat swearing to leave the city the next time a storm approaches. She lives in the 2800 block of Powhatan Street, she said, but had joined her mother and others at the house on Iroquois. She said her family from Summerdale, Ala., had tried to come pick them up Sunday but had been turned around before they could reach the city. Summerdale, she said, is 45 miles north of Mobile.

MORE LOOTING
Monday, 6:51 p.m.

While police cruisers with flashing blue lights turned around people driving the wrong way on Interstate 10, high water on flooded surface streets nearby made law enforcement difficult. People waded through waist-deep water on the way to loot the Shell station at S. Jefferson Davis Parkway and Tulane Avenue. Three people even trudged through the water pulling a blue and white boat down Tulane, apparently to make it easier to haul goods away from the station's convenience store. And they weren't the first to get there. Minutes before, a pair of teenagers floated two rubber trash cans full of beer, hard liquor and other plunder toward the S. Jeff Davis overpass over 1-10. When they reached dry roadway on the span, they abandoned the garbage cans and carried the contents away in blue plastic bags. One of the young men even shucked a pair of wet jeans when they fell to his ankles and walked away in a red bathing suit.

CAUGHT OFF GUARD
Monday, 7 p.m.,

Inch by inch, floodwater began collecting inside Don Batiste's Perdido Street apartment around noon. Batiste, 36, lay in his bed listening to storm reports on his portable radio, but he never dreamed that his home would get as wet as it did. "I'm in a low place," he said later, "but I figured the most I'm going to get is a foot of water." But when he felt the murk settling over him at about 5 p.m., he knew he had to take action. That's when the Mid City resident headed for the S. Jeff Davis overpass over Interstate 10, where he sat on the railing munching Fritos and watching people go by.

TREME, BYWATER, GENTILLY, THE 9TH WARD HIT HARD
Monday, 8 p.m.

Even as reports of damage continued coming in Monday night, the full extent of the destruction in Katrina's wake was hard to gauge.

But one thing was clear: Gentilly, Treme, Bywater and the 9th Ward had been swallowed.

The exit from 1-10 onto to Claiborne Avenue - and then Claiborne itself - was underwater. Ditto the intersection of 1-10 and Elysian Fields, where water reached near the roof lines of homes. Homes were also inundated at the 1-10 exit at Louisa Street.

St. Claude Avenue, east of the French Quarter and into St. Bernard Parish, was almost under water.

Oddities abounded: For instance, a house on Kentucky, off St. Claude, was surrounded by floodwater - yet it had just burned to the ground.

In addition to being flooded, many of the stores along St. Claude had their windows front blown out. But some residents still managed to keep sense of irony: One homeowner had painted a sign on plywood. "Take care, \ Katrina," it read.

SEARCH TEAMS WORK INTO THE NIGHT
Monday, 8:15 p.m.

Search and rescue teams worked into the night to rescue people stranded on rooftops and from attics across metropolitan New Orleans.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said at least 100 people were rescued from a Metairie nursing home and another 100 or more were plucked from, the water or rooftops by Department of Wildlife and Fisheries boats.

Blanco did not have an estimate on the number of deaths from the Katrina.

State Wildlife Secretary Dwight Landreneau said he has unconfirmed reports of dead bodies in floodwaters but could not say how many.

Blanco said the devastation in St. Bernard Parish was widespread, but at least 1,200 survivors at a local school and the government complex told officials they were OK and to pick up more critically-stranded first. She said National Guard personnel will deliver food and water to them while rescuers pick up those stranded on roofs and attics. "People are being picked up," Blanco said. "People are swimming to our boats."

Landreneau said by dawn he will have more than 200 boars in the water, 120 more than he had Monday. He said he has a commitment from Texas for another 50 boats. He said his boats will remain out as long as possible, working throughout the night if they are equipped with lights.

He said he had about eight boats in St. Tammany Parish, but because of spotty communications could not say how many individuals had been rescued.

TIMES-PICAYUNE / HURRICANE BUNKER EMERGENCY NUMBERS
10:36 p.m.

- The Times-Picayune will soon lose current telephone service as emergency power backup fails. New emergency contact numbers for The Times-Picayune and NOLA.com - for family contacts and other necessities - are as follows:

(504) 821-7977 (504) 821-7938

These numbers will go into effect over the next couple of hours.

SCENES FROM A BROKEN CITY
Monday, 10:30 p.m.

As skies cleared and Katrina's final gusts blew across New Orleans late Monday afternoon, dead pigeons and shattered street lamps littered the empty Pontchartrain Expressway. In the shadow of the bruised Superdome, broken Mardi Gras beads laced a pile of leaves and debris. The number "44" was all that remained of a shredded Louisiana Lottery billboard along the expressway. At the Kentwood water distributorship, plastic crates were still stacked neatly in the back of open tractor-trailers; the Kentwood marquee was toppled. Winds had wrenched the Superdome/Claiborne exit sign into a fresh angle. A man wearing socks but no shoes claimed to have walked from Kenner to the Pontchartrain Expressway in front of The Times-Picayune. Firemen in a passing pick-up shooed him off the highway. Four Crescent City Connection police officers blockaded the expressway near the Dome, turning away the few civilian vehicles. They, too, wondered about the scope of the destruction. "Have you heard anything about Metairie?" one asked.

By 6 p.m. on Monday, looters had shifted to heavy lifting. Young men exited the Coleman's clothing store on Earhart Boulevard, struggling under the weight of fully laden cardboard boxes and plastic bags. When flashing lights appeared in the distance, a man in an orange jersey shouted "Police!," and dropped his box in Earhart's lake-bound lane. He splashed across the opposite lane, tripped and fell in knee-deep water, then ran toward the B.W. Cooper housing development. As the sun set, four young women slipped out of the Magnolia Discount convenience store on South Carrollton Avenue and loaded pilfered boxes into a waiting car. One woman waved at approaching vehicles.

Downed trees completely blocked both sides of South Galvez Street at the entrance to B.W. Cooper. Toppled palm trees littered the neutral ground on Earhart, which was flooded near Carrollton but mostly dry at Galvez. The smell of natural gas wafted across Thalia Street at South Claiborne. A succession of power poles stood at 45-degree angles. Many homes and businesses along South Claiborne lost roofing tiles and shingles, but otherwise appeared undamaged. Destruction was arbitrary. The sign at the Rally's franchise was destroyed; that of the nearby Burger Orleans was not. Blown off its pedestal, the oversize Frosty Top mug at Calhoun stood on its head. Much of South Claiborne had drained hours after Katrina passed. Cross-streets did not fare as well. At State Street, a newly formed creek flowed across the Claiborne neutral ground. More water gurgled from manhole covers. The intersection of Plapoleon and South Claiborne was dry, but water and downed tree limbs carpeted both Versailles and Audubon Boulevards. At Carrollton and Claiborne, the Chase bank drive-thru was inundated. Across the intersection, broad sheets of roofing paper and black tiles draped an oak tree like a shroud. Many residents of the Pigeontown neighborhood opted not to evacuate. After the rain apd wind subsided, they gathered on porches or waded through the flooded streets. A power line swung five feet abovq the water on Dublin Street. Gentle waves lapped at the sandbags guarding the entrance of Five Happiness Chinese restallrant on South Carrollton Avenue. The blue arch across the entrance of Fontainebleau Drive survived the storm. Waterflooded both sides of the street, but appeared not to have reached cars on the neutral ground, or homes. At least 10 feet of water filled Carrollton's dip under the interstate. A waist-deep lagoon swamped the intersection at Tulane. As the sun set, the faint smell of rot drifted up from the water.

Tom Roche, owner of the Elms Mansion reception hall on St. Charles Avenue, bicycled above the flooded Carrollton exchange on the interstate. He and his three sons rode out Katrina on the sixth floor of Baptist Memorial hospital, where his wife works as a( nurse. "She convinced me to stay at the hospital," he said. "I usually stay at the Elms." Earlier in the afternoon, Roche was relieved to find his business largely intact. "It was fine," he said. "We boarded it up well. There was a little roof damage, a little water in the basement, but no structural damage."

With his black suit pants tucked into a pair of wading boots, 74-year-old Charles Smith stood at the corner of Belfast Street and South Carrollton. In generally good spirits, he was on a mission: To find a pack of cigarettes. The storm had tumbled a pecan tree into his home at Apple and Dublin. "The tree messed my whole house up," he said. "I got insurance, though." He looked down the debris-strewn street. "I wonder when the lights are going to come on," he said.

TUESDAY NEWSPAPER

The Times-Picayune's electronic edition for Tuesday is now available online at:
http://www.nola.com/hurricane/katrina/

Near the center of the page, look for "PDF Images: CATASTROPHIC" and click through the pages.
Updates throughout the day at:
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/

Early morning Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005

ONLY WAY OUT OF NEW ORLEANS IS WEST

The only way people can leave the city of New Orleans is to get on Crescent City Connection, head to the West Bank and take Highway 90 to Interstate 310 or 1-10 on to Lafayette, authorities said this morning. Interstate-10 eastbound, toward Slidell and the Gulf Coast, can't be traveled. Several sections of the Twin Spans have washed away and other sections of the bridge are structurally unsound.

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway has been opened to police, fire and other emergency vehicles after an initial inspection concluded the 24-mile long bridge was sound, WWL Radio reported this morning.

No other vehicles will be allowed on the bridge; and access to St. Tammany Parish remains restricted. The condition of U.S. Highway 11 across the Lake is not known.

SEEKING ANSWERS TO RISING WATERS
Tuesday, 8:05 a.m.

"The water continues to rise," according to Walter Maestri, director of emergency management for Jefferson Parish. Maestri told WWL-Radio that parish officials have given engineers the next "three to four hours" to determine the cause of rising water.

Maestri did not specify where water continued to rise. Asked if it is possible that he and parish consultants will not be able to figure out the cause of the continued flooding, Maestri replied, "Absolutely."

However, he cautioned residents "not to deal in rumor."

"Stay with us," Maestri said. "Dealing in rumor won't help you right now."

T-P EVACUATING
Tuesday, 9:40 a.m.

The Times-Picayune is evacuating it's New Orleans building.

Water continues to rise around our building, as it is throughout the region. We:want to evacuate our employees and families while we are still able to safely leave our building.

Our plan is to head across the Mississippi River on the Pontchartrain Expressway to the west bank of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish. From therk, we'll try to head to Houma.

Our plan, obviously, is to resume providing news to our readers ASAP. Please refer back to this site for continuing information as soon as we are able to provide it.

(THE NEWSPAPER RESUMED BLOGGING IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON TUESDAY, AND PUBLISHED ONLINE PAGES TUESDAY NIGHT FROM HOUMA WITH DISPATCHES FROM OUR REPORTING TEAMS THAT STAYED BEHIND IN THE CITY AND SUBURBS)

© 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

After the disaster, chaos and lawlessness rule the streets. Local leaders call relief efforts too little, too late

By Jed Horne

New Orleans on Thursday pulled back from an almost complete collapse of public order, a near anarchy that had supplanted receding floodwaters as the gravest threat to the city's still tenuous recovery.

Evidence that authorities were beginning to get a grip on gargantuan problems varied from the successful and orderly evacuation of Baptist Mercy Hospital to a sharp reduction in the menacing bands of idle refugees, many of them intent on looting that had haunted Uptown neighborhoods in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

With thousands of National Guard troops being mustered to join the Louisiana guardsmen already deployed to the hurricane-stricken city, one of the early signs of the beefed-up military presence was a Blackhawk helicopter touching down near the Riverwalk to deliver water to some 1,000 refugees still sheltered in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

The mounting relief effort did not allay concerns from local officials that it remained too little and mighty late. And Thursday offered continuing evidence that the city's flirtation with sheer chaos was not yet over: a medivac helicopter scared off by gunfire as it attempted to airlift patients from a downtown hospital; the Oakwood Mall reduced to charred rubble after looters broke in and set fires throughout the sprawling complex; corpses floating in flooded streets; scores of police officers simply abandoning their posts to flee a city gone at least temporarily mad.

State Police Cmdr. Henry Whitehorn said some troopers had resigned rather than accept an assignment to go into New Orleans.

He was uncertain how many, "but I have heard that and I know that's a fact," Whitehorn said, noting that the officers also were coping with the impact of the storm. "They lost everything and don't feel it's worth going back and taking fire from looters."

And everywhere: the homeless, some wandering aimlessly, others massed at bridges and ferry landings waiting for boats and buses no longer in service, many of them drunk on looted liquor in a city without drinking water.

Some of the violence and lawlessness appeared to be born as much of desperation as of the more jubilant greed that marked looting shortly after the storm had passed. When the first dozen buses finally arrived Thursday at the Superdome to start transporting about 23,000 refugees to Houston, shoving and fights broke out and trash cans were set ablaze as people jockeyed to get out of the fetid, stinking stadium in which they had been captive since entering the city's shelter of last resort four days earlier.

The violence was not limited to New Orleans.

"I'm supposed to be cleaning up after a storm and I have to have sheriff's deputies walking around on the roof with AK-47s and machine guns," said Jefferson Parish Emergency Operations Director Walter Maestri. Basic cleanup operations, such as clearing downed trees, were on hold, and relief agencies, including FEMA and some private groups, had either pulled out or threatened to do so because of the dangers to their workers, Maestri said.

Ignoring pundits and politicians who question the wisdom of rebuilding a city below sea level surrounded by water, President Bush has vowed a massive relief effort after a storm that inflicted a record $20 billion-plus in damages across the Gulf south. Bush, who dipped below the clouds for a look at New Orleans on Wednesday en route to Washington, is scheduled to be on the ground in the area today.

But comments from officialdom and commoners alike, seethed with the sense that New Orleans had yet to be accorded a response adequate to the crisis at hand.

Terry Ebbert, head of the city's emergency operations, contrasted what he deemed a lackluster response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the massive outpouring of humanitarian and military aid after this past winter's tsunami in southeast Asia.

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard called the lack of federal response "a disgrace."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was equally blunt. Federal and state officials need to stop having "goddamn press conferences" and get the relief effort rolling, he said in a late-afternoon radio interview, an angry flare-up out of character for the popular, generally easy-going former cable TV executive.

Appearing in a New York studio on NBC's "Today" show, former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now national president of the Urban League, called for "an effort of 9-11 proportions."

"A great American city is fighting for its life," he said. "We must rebuild New Orleans, the city that gave us jazz and music and multiculturalism."

That effort was being waged against long odds Thursday. National Guard spokesman Jack Harrison, in Arlington, Va., said the number of active-duty guard troops in Louisiana would rise to 20,000 overnight, about a quarter of them Louisiana guardsmen, but Gov. Kathleen Blanco estimated it would take at least 40,000 troops to quell the violence.

As troop transport vehicles rumbled through downtown streets, some soldiers appeared visibly unnerved by the chaos they witnessed around them. Scores of New Orleans police had simply gone AWOL and fled, according to a ranking NOPD officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Though flood waters continued to recede, the functional remains of New Orleans had been largely reduced to the narrow strip of neighborhoods up against the Mississippi River levee from the Uptown area to the Industrial Canal, "high ground" in a low-lying city.

"We have three main concerns: Orleans Parish Prison, the Superdome and the Convention Center," said Police Capt. Kevin Anderson, commander of the Eighth District, which includes the French Quarter, the city's oldest neighborhood and most valued tourism draw.

To maintain those assets and whatever else can be restored to order, police command operations had been concentrated at the sprawling Harrah's Casino port-cochere and in the Royal Orleans Hotel. On Thursday, the block between the tony hotel and the alabaster Beaux Arts courthouse across from it was under guard by rooftop sharpshooters and a phalanx of officers brandishing pump- action shotguns, their grim presence offset by smoky barbecue grills and socializing among officers taking a break in the street below.

The focused police work had not been enough to shield all French Quarter shops from the looters who ranged more widely and aggressively in other parts of town. Early Thursday police were briefly caught up in a gun battle in front of the Convention Center and a male civilian was left dead in a puddle of blood.

Across the line in Jefferson Parish, deputies and relief workers were drawn into four shootouts with lawless elements, according to Sheriff Harry Lee. No one was killed, Lee said. Earlier in the week, a New Orleans police officer was shot to death by a looter.

National Guard casualties were limited to a soldier shot in the leg, authorities reported.

As a greater presence of Chinook and Huey military helicopters became apparent in the skies over New Orleans, the near-term tactical goal was a simple one: to rescue survivors and complete an evacuation that, while massive in the days just before the hurricane struck, still left behind somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 of the city's 480,000 residents, many of them infirm, elderly and low- income people without the means to escape.

By day's end, the massive bus-lift to Houston had reduced the Superdome's population to a few thousand refugees, authorities said. But many now homeless people continue to wait on bridges and highway ramps. And while officials remained adamant about the need to get out of a flooded city without power, water, or much prospect of these services being restored for months to come, efforts to comply were frequently mired in miscommunication.

Beside himself after failing to get through to city and state officials, the chief of trauma surgery at Charity Hospital called a news conference on Thursday to beg for help. Charity was nearly out of food and power for its generators and had been forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters prowling the hospital, Dr. Norman McSwain said.

Texas officials said they were concerned by unconfirmed reports that a group of prisoners under guard had somehow been mixed in with refugees in the bus convoy to Houston's Astrodome.

A cluster of refugees attempted to leave the city by way of the Crescent City Connection, only to be blocked on grounds that the crossing was unsafe for pedestrians. At the suggestion of officials, they retreated to the Superdome, where they learned that the bus convoy to Texas was closed to new arrivals.

Continuing evacuation of the refugee population and the less visible presence of looters had begun to make media crews the last civilian presence on downtown streets.

"It's like Iraq," one veteran war correspondent remarked. "But the difference is that we don't have the army to embed with."

Staff reporters Matt Brown, David Meeks, Mike Perlstein, Gordon Russell and Jim Varney contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Dear Mr. President: 

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we're going to make it right." 

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism. 

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It's accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718. How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel- powered trucks. 

Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies. 

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal- Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city. Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning. 

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach. 

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame. 

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher. 

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials? 

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially. In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day." 

Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President. Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job." 

That's unbelievable. 

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too. 

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued. No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn't be reached. 

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again. When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Swamp peat was poor anchor, engineer says

By John McQuaid 

WASHINGTON -- Soil tests indicate that a soft, spongy layer of swamp peat underneath the 17th Street Canal floodwall was the weak point that caused soil to move and the wall to breach during Hurricane Katrina, an engineer who has studied the data says.

"The thing that is remarkable here is the very low strength of the soils around the bottom of the sheet pile" base of the floodwall, said Robert Bea, a geotechnical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who examined the test results. Bea is a member of the National Science Foundation team that is studying the levee system's performance during Katrina.

Bea said other data shows the same peat layer also runs under the London Avenue Canal breaches and probably was instrumental in those collapses as well.

Investigators are focusing on the 17th Street and London Avenue canal levee walls because, unlike other parts of the system, they apparently were not topped by Katrina's storm surge. That could mean a design or construction flaw is to blame for the collapses, and for the flooding of much of central New Orleans.

Army Corps of Engineers officials say they must determine whether human error played a role in the breaches. If it did, they say, they may have to rebuild the canal walls immediately so they don't pose an additional risk during next year's hurricane season.

Investigators from the corps, the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Science Foundation have spent the past two weeks examining the floodwalls and other parts of the levee system. At the two drainage canal breaches, they say the culprit appears to be the layer of peat around or not far beneath the base of the walls.

Graphs show problem

The Corps of Engineers has not yet released the results of soil borings in the breached areas to the outside investigators. But the corps included some soil boring data for the 17th Street Canal breach this week in a contract for temporary repairs posted on its Web site. The Times-Picayune asked Bea to examine the results.

The canal walls consist of a concrete cap on a steel sheet pile base, driven 17 1/2 feet deep at 17th Street and 16 feet deep at London Avenue, corps design documents show. Bea said the soil boring data shows the peat layer starts about 15 feet to 30 feet beneath the surface and ranges from about 5 feet to 20 feet thick.

Signs of trouble appear in graphs in the corps' soil data showing the "shear strength" of the soil, its ability to resist deformation and lateral motion. In one boring, at 27 feet, the soil strength is near the bottom of the scale, about 0.02 tons per square foot. Eight feet deeper, the strength is 0.25 tons per square foot, more than 10 times greater. At 70 feet, the strength even greater: 0.6 tons per square foot.

The data also show the soil at the peat level has a high water concentration. Put together, those data indicate it would be very vulnerable to the stresses of a large flood, Bea said.

At 17th Street, the soil moved laterally, pushing entire wall sections with it. Bea and other engineers say that as Katrina's storm surge filled the canal, water pressure rose in the soil underneath the wall and in the peat layer . Water moved through the soil underneath the base of the wall. When the rising pressure and moving water overcame the soil's strength, it suddenly shifted, taking surrounding material -- and the wall -- with it.

"Think of a layer cake. In the middle I've got my icing. All of a sudden, I push on the top of my piece of cake, and what it's moving on is this weak, slick icing. The whole thing moves," said Thomas Zimmie, a civil engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who is on the National Science Foundation team and surveyed the levees this week.

Swampy soil

The Lakefront area used to be a swamp, and was filled over the decades as development advanced northward toward Lake Pontchartrain. But the soft swamp and river soils -- layers of mud, peat, sand and silt -- remain under the surface and can pose problems for those trying to anchor structures in them. The normal solution, engineers say, is to drill piles as deep as possible so that they go all the way through weak layers and are more firmly anchored.

The contractor who built the 17th Street Canal reported problems drilling the sheet pilings in the soil. Segments of the wall leaned slightly when the concrete was poured, according to a legal ruling in a contract dispute over the matter. An administrative law judge ruled that was because of the unusual bracing system used to build the structure rather than unexpected soil conditions.

Bea said that while the investigators have theorized the corps missed the peat layer in soil tests before the wall was built, the data they now have shows the peat would be hard to miss.

"The soil profile that we've got in front of us is showing that peat layer is large in extent, not narrow. They are mapping it between multiple borings. My suspicion, or fear, that they had missed it between two borings is not justifiable. It looks like it's about a thousand feet wide. That used to be a swamp. We built levees and cut canals in it, but never went in there and took out the peat."

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Floodwalls often ignored as officials go to lunch

By Gordon Russell

Staff Writer

Teams of engineers and officials from agencies in New Orleans and the state charged with inspecting the city's hurricane protection system at the start of the storm season usually have skipped the floodwalls along outfall canals exposed by Katrina as the system's Achilles' heel, documents and interviews show.

The inspections, conducted by officials from the Orleans Levee Board, the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Department of Transportation and Development, are cursory affairs that usually take five hours or less to assess the soundness of a levee system of more than 100 miles, according to itineraries of the reviews in 2003 and 2004 and interviews with some of the officials involved. The schedule typically ends early enough for the group to make it to a restaurant for lunch, records show.

Moreover, the agencies said the annual review is the only official inspection to measure the state of the city's hurricane protection. A Levee Board engineer said grass-cutting crews and other personnel are supposed to report problems they spot throughout the year and know "what a good levee looks like." Corps officials said agency employees conduct "informal, unscheduled" reviews and are also expected to sound alarms if problems are noted. But both agencies said the additional informal surveys are not planned in any comprehensive way and they likely keep no records of them.

They conceded that the inspections have not been as thorough as they should have been.

"I think it's a good 'lessons learned,'" said Jerry Colletti, the corps' operations manager for completed works, who added that inspections are likely to be far more thorough in the future. "We never had a problem prior to this. There are lots of things we now know that we should have done differently."

But state Sen. Walter Boasso, R-Arabi, who tried unsuccessfully in the recent legislative session to merge southeast Louisiana's various levee boards, called the inspections "a half-assed" effort. He said the events, in which Levee Board officials invite reporters to ride along, have always been more about public relations than scientific inquiry.

"What they have to decide is: Is the levee inspection to have their picture in the newspaper, or to do what it's really supposed to do?" Boasso said. "I think everyone has learned a big lesson here. If we're going to depend on a six-hour inspection, then shame on our government. The days of doing things half-assed are over."

An annual look

Breaches in the floodwalls along the London Avenue and 17th Street canals flooded much of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. But records from the 2003 and 2004 reviews indicate that officials sought only to inspect the levees along Lake Pontchartrain, generally in June at the start of hurricane season, and along the Mississippi River in the fall. Officials said the June inspection sometimes included part of the river levees.

Colletti said the annual inspections generally avoided the outfall canals for two reasons: because their floodwalls were believed to be in good shape, and because it's hard for a large convoy of observers to ride to a spot where they could view them easily. The inspectors also were trying to be sensitive to residents, he said.

"We usually have about 30 vehicles on these trips, so we don't go into the neighborhoods," he said. "The 17th Street Canal, it's a bad situation because there's no road that goes along the canal. In the interest of not going into the neighborhoods, we generally stay on the outskirts, along the lakefront and the river."

Stevan Spencer, the Levee Board's chief engineer, said it has been challenging to get inspection teams close to the levees along the canals. So they have generally tried to eyeball the floodwalls from the point where the canals meet the lake -- near the Old Hammond Highway bridge on the 17th Street Canal, for instance.

"There wasn't any lengthy up-and-down (inspection) on the canals," Spencer said. "With all the houses along there, you can't really get that close to them unless you're doing maintenance work."

Colletti added that before Katrina exposed the system's flaws, engineers had ranked the canal walls low on the list of possible failures.

"We hadn't had any reports of any problems" along the canals, he said. "Our opinion, and that of the levee district and DOTD, was that those were our strong points. There was a big, solid wall with sheet pilings. There were never any previous signs of weakness."

Independent engineering teams reviewing the floodwalls since Katrina have found that sheet pilings in some sections were not as deep as corps officials had claimed or were anchored in weak soil.

Informal inspections

Records of the annual Levee Board and corps inspections show that they are fairly hasty affairs, with dozens of officials piling onto a convoy of vehicles to drive along the levees, stopping at various points for visits of 15 to 30 minutes. They review areas between stops from the cars.

The 2003 inspection, for instance, included five stops along the lakefront, none scheduled to last more than a half-hour, according to an itinerary of the review.

But both Colletti and Spencer said there are other inspections that take place throughout the year.

"On a daily basis, our people are out in the field cutting the grass, doing work on floodgates, greasing them, that sort of thing," Spencer said. "Most of their supervisors have been here 25 or 30 years, so they know what a good levee looks like and what one with problems looks like. If there's a problem, it's looked into further."

Colletti said corps workers also look for possible problems on an ad hoc basis.

"There are lots of other nonformal inspections" of levees apart from the once-a-year official one, he said. "Our maintenance people, when they're in the area, our field folks, our construction division people -- they're keeping an eye out for certain things. There are a lot of what I would call informal, unscheduled inspections."

Because the inspections are informal, Colletti said, it's unlikely that any record of them exists.

"There's no established format for this," he said. "If you go and find a situation that needs to be corrected, then the three agencies would decide which agency has to handle the problem," referring to the Levee Board, the Corps of Engineers and the Department of Transportation and Development.

Residents' input

Colletti also said the system's safety relied in part on the faith that residents along the levees and canals would report problems they saw.

But that multiple-agency system that relied on residents failed when a problem surfaced last year along the section where the 17th Street Canal breached during Katrina. Residents of Bellaire Drive noted standing water in their yards and, suspecting a water or sewerage leak, called the Sewerage & Water Board. The board sent out a team that determined the water had seeped under the 17th Street Canal levee. But news of the problem, which Colletti said would have been a "red flag," apparently never made its way to the Levee Board or the corps. The water board, though it uses the canals to pump water to Lake Pontchartrain, has no responsibility for inspection or maintenance of floodwalls.

"For the most part, we're depending on individuals," Colletti said. "Where people had water, you'd hope they would call one of the three agencies. If we get a call on a certain case -- for instance, the issue at the 17th Street Canal, where individual residents called, had they called me or someone else at the corps, or the DOTD or the levee district, the three prime agencies, we'd immediately get the three agencies together and make an inspection."

Covering levees on foot

Colletti said it's clear that the agencies can't depend on such an informal system. In the future, he said, the corps and its partners will try to do a much more detailed inspection.

"We've decided we can't do that anymore," he said. "We've got to walk these walls. We're going to do every wall in the district on foot."

He said it will likely become an annual or biennial review, because the agency oversees hundreds of miles of hurricane protection levees.

"That's a lot of miles of levee when you talk about doing it by foot," he said. "The idea is that we will establish a program to do that on a yearly basis. But it may be you would do them only every other year."

Boasso applauded the notion of closer levee inspections. Not only should the corps walk the entire levee system, he said, but its engineers should use infrared equipment and other modern technology to get a better idea of what's lurking under the dirt.

Spencer said the Levee Board will gladly participate in any enhanced inspection system the corps devises.

"We'll be with them every step of the way," he said. "On a daily basis, our maintenance crews are going to be out there looking closer, for sure. But the corps is definitely going to be making a closer inspection of everything."

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Higher-ups raised red flag, then dropped it

By Bob Marshall 

Staff Writer

The engineering mistakes that led to the canal levee failures that flooded most of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina were found and then dismissed in the Army Corps of Engineers' design review process in 1990, an investigative team reviewing the failures says.

Documents, obtained by The Times-Picayune and provided to forensic engineers studying the levee breaches, show project engineers made a critical mistake in assessing soil strengths on the 17th Avenue Canal project, said Robert Bea, a University of California-Berkeley professor who is a member of the National Science Foundation team.

Corps documents show the mistake of overly optimistic levee strength was detected by its Vicksburg, Miss., office, which directed local engineers to make changes. But when the chief engineer in New Orleans replied that the results were based on "engineering judgment," his superiors dropped the issue.

Bea said the discussion in the 16-year-old "design memo" points to the key decision that created fatal problems on the 17th Street Canal levee and could reveal a systemic problem that will show up during investigation into the London Avenue and Industrial Canal levees, which also breached during the Aug. 29 storm.

"From all the data we have, from all the documents made available to us, that exchange highlights where the key mistake was made in the design process, and how it was allowed to stand," Bea said this week.

"The design engineers didn't account for the weak layers in that swamp, and the Vicksburg office picks that up in review. But the New Orleans office says it's our professional judgment this is OK. In our business, that's an acceptable answer. But it's an answer Vicksburg can disagree with -- but it didn't.

"And from the documents we have, the issue is never raised again. At least not until Katrina comes along."

Key questions

Investigators have long suspected engineering mistakes were at the heart of the levee and floodwall breaches. Not only did the structures fail before they reached design capacity, but documents show the designs were not appropriate for the weak soils and the depth of the canals, investigators said. Yet discovering why skilled engineers at reputable firms came up with obviously faulty designs, and how those mistakes were missed in the corps' lengthy review process, has stumped investigators.

Bea said the 1990 documents provide a two-part answer to one of the key questions in the investigation of the engineering behind work on the 17th Street canal and may hold true for failures at the London Avenue and Industrial canals as well.

The first part involves the choices engineers made to measure soil strength. A standard practice in levee design, Bea said, is to model soil strengths on the weakest layers in a project area. That allows engineers to design a structure that will withstand the most severe tests. That didn't happen on this project, Bea said.

The errors began when the crew from Eustis Engineering, the chief soil investigators for the project, decided to use an average of soil strengths taken from samples in an area that stretched over great distances, in some cases as much as 6,000 feet, Bea said. While averaging always involves some risk because it can miss inconsistencies in the subsurface, that practice is considered acceptable in areas featuring uniform layers of strong soils or rock, he said.

'A big no-no'

But Bea said his profession considers the practice "a big no-no" when dealing with levees because those structures "almost always have layers of different strength soils." And it was especially egregious at the 17th Street canal, he said, because, like most of New Orleans, the area is a former swamp with a subterranean soil profile that shows an unpredictable weave of mostly weak soils. A layer of very weak peat might be found near the surface or hidden 30 feet deep anywhere along the length of a canal.

That error was then compounded when the engineers decided to assess the horizontal soil strength at a depth that features more strong soils than weak soils, records show. The result was a rating showing the soils could withstand 380 pounds of pressure per square foot. That led the engineers to use, among other things, shorter sheet pilings and narrower levees.

Had they taken averages from shorter reaches, and at a depth just a few feet higher that featured more weak soils and was clearly visible in the soil profiles used by the engineers, the strength would have averaged just 231 pounds per square foot rather than 380, Bea said.

That result would have required the design team to call for sheet pilings that were at least twice as thick as those used and driven to 50 or 60 feet below sea level, rather than the maximum of 17 feet below sea level, which the corps has said is the deepest depth shown on final design documents.

"The way they did the soil strength analysis was the first big mistake, and it set things in motion," Bea said. "But it wasn't the last."

A second mistake

The second critical mistake was made, Bea said, when the team did the "slope stability analysis" -- a standard engineering exercise for determining if a levee will hold up at design capacity, in this case, 14 feet of storm surge. Once again, records show the engineers chose to accentuate strong soil layers and downplay weaker layers. That violated an essential element in the process, Bea said.

"You're looking for the weakest surfaces, the areas that could cause failure, and they didn't do that," Bea said. "Part of it was they had already assigned soil strengths that were too high. That showed up in this analysis."

The final mistake, Bea said, was made by the corps.

The initial soil investigations were done by Eustis, then reviewed and accepted by lead design team Modjeski and Masters, on a joint dredging project by the Sewerage & Water Board and the Orleans Levee Board. That work was accepted by the corps for the final part of the improvement project, which involved capping the steel sheet wall already embedded in the levee. Eustis did not reply to requests for comment; an attorney for Modjeski and Masters said his client declined to comment.

Engineers at the New Orleans office of the corps reviewed all of the work it received, then incorporated it in its final design plans. Corps officials have said that once they accept outside work, it becomes their own. Further, the federal agency had overall responsibility for the purpose of the project, which was to provide protection against a hurricane storm surge that might reach 14 feet in the canal.

The New Orleans office accepted the plans, but the regional office in Vicksburg had questions.

On a list of 17 problems noted, the Vicksburg office says the soil stability analysis is too optimistic.

Eugene Tickner, then chief engineer of the New Orleans district, responded only that the variables chosen in the New Orleans calculations were based on "engineering judgment." Bea said that should have raised a red flag with the regional office.

"You would prefer to have that judgment backed up with examples and numbers, but (the New Orleans office) doesn't offer very much," Bea said. "At that point, I would have asked for more information. But Vicksburg doesn't."

Instead, the issue was dropped and does not surface again in the trail of documents currently available on the project. The one clear opportunity to correct the engineering mistakes that led to the failures, Bea said, was missed.

"It's pretty clear, looking back on it with the information we have available at this point, that Vicksburg didn't like what had been done," he said. "We'll never know why they didn't pursue it."

Tickner, now living in North Carolina, could not be reached for comment. Fred Bayley, the chief engineer in the Vicksburg office at the time, retired in 1993. Now 73, he said he doesn't remember the issue or much of the details of the project. What he remembers most about New Orleans is the challenge its tortuously weak and layered soils posed for engineers.

"Even if you took borings every 5 feet, you might not get an accurate picture of what you were dealing with down there," he said. "Everything you did down there was a risk, because of those soils."

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Like ghosts populating an abandoned city, haunting messages and mystical artifacts adorn the homes of neighborhoods struggling to come back from the dead

By Chris Rose

I live on The Island, where much has the appearance of Life Goes On. Gas stations, bars, pizza joints, joggers, strollers, dogs, churches, shoppers, neighbors, even garage sales.

Sometimes trash and mail service, sometimes not.

It sets to mind a modicum of complacency that maybe everything is all right.

But I have this terrible habit of getting into my car every two or three days and driving into the Valley Down Below, that vast wasteland below sea level that was my city, and it's mind-blowing A) how vast it is and B) how wasted it is.

My wife questions the wisdom of my frequent forays into the massive expanse of blown-apart lives and property that local street maps used to call Gentilly, Lakeview, the East and the Lower 9th. She fears that it contributes to my unhappiness and general instability and I suspect she is right.

Perhaps I should just stay on the stretch of safe, dry land Uptown where we live and try to move on, focus on pleasant things, quit making myself miserable, quit reliving all those terrible things we saw on TV that first week.

That's advice I wish I could follow, but I can't. I am compelled for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. And so I drive.

I drive around and try to figure out those Byzantine markings and symbols that the cops and the National Guard spray-painted on all the houses around here, cryptic communications that tell the story of who or what was or wasn't inside the house when the floodwater rose to the ceiling.

In some cases, there's no interpretation needed. There's one I pass on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward at least once a week. It says: "1 dead in attic."

That certainly sums up the situation. No mystery there.

It's spray-painted there on the front of the house and it probably will remain spray-painted there for weeks, months, maybe years, a perpetual reminder of the untimely passing of a citizen, a resident, a New Orleanian.

One of us.

You'd think some numerical coding could have conveyed this information on this house, so that I -- we all -- wouldn't have to drive by places like this every day and be reminded: "1 dead in attic."

I have seen plenty of houses in worse shape than the one where 1 Dead in Attic used to live, houses in Gentilly and the Lower 9th that yield the most chilling visual displays in town: low-rider shotgun rooftops with holes that were hacked away from the inside with an ax, leaving small, splintered openings through which people sought escape.

Imagine if your life came to that point, and remained there, on display, all over town for us to see, day after day.

Amazingly, those rooftops are the stories with happy endings. I mean, they got out, right?

But where are they now? Do you think they have trouble sleeping at night?

The occasional rooftops still have painted messages: "HELP US." I guess they had paint cans in their attic. And an ax, like Margaret Orr and Aaron Broussard always told us we should have if we weren't going to evacuate.

Some people thought Orr and Broussard were crazy. Alarmists. Extremists. Well, maybe they are crazy. But they were right.

Perhaps 1 Dead in Attic should have heeded this advice. But judging from the ages on the state's official victims list, he or she was probably up in years. And stubborn. And unafraid. And now a statistic.

I wonder who eventually came and took 1 Dead in Attic away. Who knows? Hell, with the way things run around here -- I wonder if anyone has come to take 1 Dead in Attic away.

And who claimed him or her? Who grieved over 1 Dead in Attic and who buried 1 Dead in Attic?

Was there anyone with him or her at the end and what was the last thing they said to each other? How did 1 Dead in Attic spend the last weekend in August of the year 2005?

What were their plans? Maybe dinner at Mandich on St. Claude? Maybe a Labor Day family reunion in City Park -- one of those raucous picnics where everybody wears matching T-shirts to mark the occasion and they rent a DJ and a SpaceWalk and a couple of guys actually get there the night before to secure a good, shady spot?

I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic. Maybe in the course of my job or maybe at a Saints game or maybe we once stood next to each other at a Mardi Gras parade or maybe we once flipped each other off in a traffic jam.

1 Dead in Attic could have been my mail carrier, a waitress at my favorite restaurant or the guy who burglarized my house a couple years ago. Who knows?

My wife, she's right. I've got to quit just randomly driving around. This can't be helping anything.

But I can't stop. I return to the Valley Down Below over and over, looking for signs of progress in all that muck, some sign that things are getting better, that things are improving, that we don't all have to live in a state of abeyance forever but -- you know what?

I just don't see them there.

I mean, in the 8th Ward, tucked down there behind St. Roch Cemetery, life looks pretty much like it did when the floodwater first receded 10 weeks ago, with lots of cars pointing this way and that, kids' yard toys caked in mire, portraits of despair, desolation and loss. And hatchet holes in rooftops.

But there's something I've discovered about the 8th Ward in this strange exercise of mine: Apparently, a lot of Mardi Gras Indians are from there. Or were from there; I'm not sure what the proper terminology is.

On several desolate streets that I drive down, I see where some folks have returned to a few of the homes and they haven't bothered to put their furniture and appliances out on the curb -- what's the point, really? -- but they have retrieved their tattered and muddy Indian suits and sequins and feathers and they have nailed them to the fronts of their houses.

The colors of these displays is startling because everything else in the 8th is gray. The streets, the walls, the cars, even the trees. Just gray.

So the oranges and blues and greens of the Indian costumes are something beautiful to behold, like the first flowers to bloom after the fallout. I don't know what the significance of these displays is, but they hold a mystical fascination for me.

They haunt me, almost as much as the spray paint on the front of a house that says 1 Dead in Attic. They look like ghosts hanging there. They are reminders of something. Something very New Orleans.

Do these memorials mean these guys -- the Indians -- are coming back? I mean, they have to, don't they? Where else could they do what they do?

And -- maybe this is a strange time to ask -- but who are these guys, anyway? Why do they do what they do with all those feathers and beads that take so much time and money to make? What's with all the Big Chief and Spy Boy role-playing?

As many times as I have reveled in their rhythmic, poetic and sometimes borderline absurd revelry in the streets of our city, I now realize that if you asked me to explain the origins and meaning of the Mardi Gras Indians -- I couldn't do it.

I have no clue. And that makes me wish I'd been paying more attention for the past 20 years. I could have learned something.

I could have learned something about a people whose history is now but a sepia mist over back-of-town streets and neighborhoods that nobody's ever heard of and where nobody lives and nothing ever happens anymore; a freeze frame still life in the air, a story of what we once were.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

The federal government wrapped levees around greater New Orleans so that the rest of the country could share in our bounty.

Americans wanted the oil and gas that flow freely off our shores. They longed for the oysters and shrimp and flaky Gulf fish that live in abundance in our waters. They wanted to ship corn and soybeans and beets down the Mississippi and through our ports. They wanted coffee and steel to flow north through the mouth of the river and into the heartland.

They wanted more than that, though. They wanted to share in our spirit. They wanted to sample the joyous beauty of our jazz and our food. And we were happy to oblige them.

So the federal government built levees and convinced us that we were safe.

We weren't.

The levees, we were told, could stand up to a Category 3 hurricane.

They couldn't.

By the time Katrina surged into New Orleans, it had weakened to Category 3. Yet our levee system wasn't as strong as the Army Corps of Engineers said it was. Barely anchored in mushy soil, the floodwalls gave way.

Our homes and businesses were swamped. Hundreds of our neighbors died.

Now, this metro area is drying off and digging out. Life is going forward. Our heart is beating.

But we need the federal government -- we need our Congress -- to fulfill the promises made to us in the past. We need to be safe. We need to be able to go about our business feeding and fueling the rest of the nation. We need better protection next hurricane season than we had this year. Going forward, we need protection from the fiercest storms, the Category 5 storms that are out there waiting to strike.

Some voices in Washington are arguing against us. We were foolish, they say. We settled in a place that is lower than the sea. We should have expected to drown.

As if choosing to live in one of the nation's great cities amounted to a death wish. As if living in San Francisco or Miami or Boston is any more logical.

Great cities are made by their place and their people, their beauty and their risk. Water flows around and through most of them. And one of the greatest bodies of water in the land flows through this one: the Mississippi.

The federal government decided long ago to try to tame the river and the swampy land spreading out from it. The country needed this waterlogged land of ours to prosper, so that the nation could prosper even more.

Some people in Washington don't seem to remember that. They act as if we are a burden. They act as if we wore our skirts too short and invited trouble.

We can't put up with that. We have to stand up for ourselves. Whether you are back at home or still in exile waiting to return, let Congress know that this metro area must be made safe from future storms. Call and write the leaders who are deciding our fate. Get your family and friends in other states to do the same. Start with members of the Environment and Public Works and Appropriations committees in the Senate, and Transportation and Appropriations in the House. Flood them with mail the way we were flooded by Katrina.

Remind them that this is a singular American city and that this nation still needs what we can give it.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

How the Dutch fight to save their low-lying land

By John McQuaid 

Washington Bureau

TER HEIJDE, NETHERLANDS -- The North Sea's furious winters can kick up storm surges more than 13 feet high -- a lethal threat to a country where millions live below sea level, some as much as 22 feet down. And the Dutch have devised a peerless system of flood defenses -- one of the world's engineering marvels -- to keep that water out.

Giant barriers straddle ocean inlets, their gates poised to slam shut to repel the invading sea. Massive earthen dams run for miles, blocking off vast areas once open to the North Sea, now converted to freshwater lakes and new living space.

Those are among the master strokes. But the Dutch system is also noted for its subtlety. The only thing lying between the tiny red- roofed village of Ter Heijde and the sea, a scant 200 yards away, is a big pile of sand.

It's no ordinary dune, however. Monitored and maintained with obsessive care, it's built to absorb pounding blows from ocean waves. It may erode, requiring repair, but it won't fall down. It's engineered to fail less than once every 10,000 years, making it 50 times safer than the New Orleans levees were supposed to be before Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed them.

But authorities aren't complacent about those numbers. Concerned about projected sea level rise, the government is studying how to further fortify the dune. "It's adequate, but we do know we will need more protection for the future," said Ter Heijde native Jacqueline Voois. "Growing up here, you learn you can't trust the sea."

The Netherlands' flood defenses -- a sculpted landscape of dunes, dikes, dams, barriers, sluices and pumps designed to repel the twin threats of ocean storm surges and river flooding -- are light years ahead of the New Orleans area's busted-up levee system.

As American policymakers and the Army Corps of Engineers study how to rebuild the levees to protect against a Category 5 hurricane, Dutch engineers say they can learn a lot from the Dutch model, where all elements -- from structural engineering to long-term policymaking -- fit seamlessly together.

"Your levee system doesn't appear to have been designed as a system. It's designed in a very haphazard way. One structure built one way, one built another," said Jurjen Battjes, a professor emeritus of engineering at the Technical University of Delft and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers team investigating the New Orleans levees.

"They can move vehicles on Mars. Why should your system fail because of a wall collapsing or because an operator left the pumping station?"

State to look closely

There was a time when New Orleans led the world in flood control and the Netherlands looked west for guidance, importing the huge screw pumps designed by Albert Baldwin Wood that had drained low- lying areas and greatly expanded New Orleans' habitable turf. Today, the Dutch system offers a trove of examples, from policy ideas to engineering fixes, that could be useful to New Orleans. Indeed, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu next month will lead a delegation of Louisiana officials and congressional colleagues to the Netherlands to study them.

Like New Orleans, which built up its river levees after the 1927 flood and its hurricane levees after Betsy in 1965, the Dutch system has been forged in disaster. But the Dutch have a lot more disaster experience, and it shows.

For the past 1,000 years they have sculpted and resculpted their landscape to repel floods, only to see it repeatedly inundated -- most recently by a 1953 North Sea storm surge that killed more than 1,800 people. Each time, they have rebuilt bigger, better and with greater sophistication. Flood protection is the number one national priority, and that is reflected not only in dikes and barriers but in politics, budgets and the concerns of everyday citizens.

Their philosophy, shaped by centuries of combating floods, is to fight water -- but also to accommodate it rather than just containing it, preserving natural flows where possible. "There's one important lesson we've learned as Dutch -- we're fighting a heroic fight against nature, the sea and the rivers," said Ted Sluijter, a spokesman for the giant Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier. "But if you fight nature, nature is going to strike back. Water needs space."

The Netherlands learned such lessons by trial and error over the centuries. To a far greater extent than in the United States, citizens' lives depend on flood defenses. Studies show that without its elaborate network of flood control structures, 65 percent of the country would be underwater.

The Dutch Ministry of Water, Public Works and Transportation spends $1.5 billion a year on flood defense and water management. If the United States spent that much on a per-citizen basis, it would cost upward of $30 billion annually, seven or eight times the Corps of Engineers' annual budget of $4 billion.

Sinking and sinking

The country's most densely populated region is built on what used to be low-lying marshes. Three rivers flow out to the North Sea through the Netherlands: the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt. For millennia the western part of the country consisted of estuaries and peat bogs repeatedly reshaped by floods and tides.

But somehow the forebears of today's Dutch settled these areas, leading a precarious existence on natural or man-made ridges.

"There the ocean throws itself, two times a day, daily and nightly, in a tremendous stream over a wide country, so one doubts if the ground belongs to the land or to the sea," wrote Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, who as a soldier in the first century A.D. helped construct a canal in what would become the Netherlands. "There lives a miserable people at the highest known levels of the tide and here they have built their huts, living like sailors when the water covers their environment and as if shipwrecked when the water has gone."

Around 1000 A.D., Europe's population swelled and farming expanded. The Dutch began to use limited technologies and their own ingenuity to drain the swamps and keep them dry. Over the centuries, the tools grew more sophisticated and more and more polders -- drained areas ringed by dikes -- were created.

But draining peat bogs has one major drawback: They sink. Peat and clay soils contract when drained. The lower they get, the more susceptible they become to floods. The increased flooding in turn made people dig their drainage ditches and canals ever deeper, a vicious cycle that continues today. The problem, compounded by the loss of silting from rivers now controlled by dikes, is similar to the subsidence plaguing the New Orleans area.

Combined with gradually rising seas, the change is shocking. In 900, the Netherlands averaged more than 12 feet above sea level. By 1500, it had dropped even with the sea. Today, it averages 8 feet below sea level and is still dropping at the rate of a quarter inch each year.

Battles won by the sea

Holland's struggle with the sea has shaped its history, and every six generations or so has been marked by a terrible defeat, a catastrophic flood that has swept over swaths of the country, destroying dikes, homes, property and human lives. The Dutch landscape is dotted with reminders of past floods and the measures taken to ensure such a disaster would never happen again.

The only thing left of Koudekerke, a village overlooking an estuary of the Scheldt, is the Plompe Toren, a brick church tower that casts a lonely silhouette over nearby farms. A 16th-century flood swept away 13 villages, Koudekerke among them. The tower was all that remained. Later rebuilt, it was leveled again during World War II and permanently abandoned. A recording in the tower tells the legend of a merman who cursed fishermen from the village for catching his wife.

Visible to the east is a breached dike from the 1953 flood that was never repaired -- authorities instead opted to rebuild farther back from the water. The area behind the breach is now a marsh. Visible to the west is the enormous Eastern Scheldt storm barrier that blocks North Sea surges from the estuary.

Completed in 1986, as part of $14.7 billion in post-1953 improvements, the Eastern Scheldt barrier is a monument to the Netherlands' innovative approach to flood control and includes features the corps is looking at for New Orleans.

Shortening the defenses

For centuries, the Dutch protected themselves by ringing settled areas and farmland with dikes, essentially the same approach used in south Louisiana. But the 1953 flood revealed a big weakness in that strategy: Storm surge water could move far inland through the estuaries, which were open to the sea.

This was also a key failing of the New Orleans system, Battjes and other Dutch engineers say: The region's levee-lined canals were conduits for Katrina's storm surge to pour into the heart of the city. From the east, water flowed into the Intracoastal Waterway and Industrial Canal, where floodwalls were topped and then collapsed, flooding the Lower 9th Ward, St. Bernard Parish and eastern New Orleans. From Lake Pontchartrain, it flowed into the 17th Street and London Avenue drainage canals, which were breached, flooding central New Orleans.

In the wake of the 1953 flood, engineers and policy-makers presented the Netherlands with a choice: They could build dikes higher and stronger as they had always done in the past. Or they could take a different, more ambitious approach, building large barriers across estuaries and other open waterways.

The second option had one crucial advantage: It would effectively shorten the country's tortuously long coastline by hundreds of miles. If the length of the country's defensive barrier shrank, the thinking went, so would the chance that a dike might fail at some unnoticed weak point and lead to a larger catastrophe. Many miles of older dikes would become secondary, backup protections.

"It's much more logical to shorten your line of defense," said Battjes, the retired engineering professor, who advised the new system's designers. "To make a military analogy, the water is the enemy. You don't let the enemy, before the fight starts, penetrate your territory."

Installing surge gates

American engineers have begun looking at how to address this problem in a Category 5 design. One solution would be to put floodgates on some canals. Another would be to retool New Orleans' generations-old stormwater drainage system and move pump stations from the middle of town to the lakefront.

On a more ambitious scale, some officials suggest upgrading an old proposal to build a large levee and floodgate system across the marshes to block surges from entering the Chef Menteur and Rigolets passes into the lake. An early version of the plan was abandoned after environmentalists raised questions about impacts on marshlands.

The Netherlands example provides a template for how to go about this. Early Delta Works plans called for dams to be constructed across all the region's estuaries -- just as the government had dammed off a 20-mile opening along the northern coastline in 1933, creating a giant freshwater lake. But by the 1970s, environmentalists, commercial fishing organizations and other groups were complaining that the completed dams were ruining the region's ecology.

They sparked a national debate and eventually a compromise, one that balanced storm defenses against harm to the environment.

The largest result of the change is the enormous Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier, a massive series of 62 floodgates snaking across the water. The gates, which range from 19 to 29 feet high, depending on their position on the barrier, are left open most of the time to allow tidal flows in and out, preserving the estuary behind it. When the high-water alarm sounds -- as it has on average twice a year since it opened -- the gates are shut until the danger passes.

Thinking big from start

As a reminder of why the barrier is there, the height of the 1953 flood -- about 13 feet -- is marked by a thick red line at a point along the barrier's southern endpoint.

That reminder is also imbedded in the design DNA of every flood protection project in the country in the form of very high, legally mandated safety standards -- something New Orleans most assuredly did not have.

The biggest flaw of New Orleans' pre-Katrina levee system was that it provided a low level of safety: It was built only to withstand storm surges from some, but not all, Category 3 hurricanes and was virtually guaranteed to fail in a stronger storm. In retrospect, engineers say it didn't even live up to its Category 3 billing. In fact, no one knew precisely what level of safety it provided because of its many weak points, changes in the landscape over time and the corps' outdated assessments.

Such problems are inconceivable in the Netherlands. Urbanized areas of the country -- such as the region surrounding Ter Heijde, which includes The Hague and Rotterdam -- are engineered to withstand the kind of storm surge that comes only once in 10,000 years. More sparsely populated areas, such as those protected by the Delta Works, are safe against a 1-in-4,000-year flood. The lowest level of protection, found in rural areas, is for a 1-in-1,250-year flood. All are many times safer than New Orleans ever was.

Feeling safer

Those numbers are more than risk calculations. In a sense, they're as much the bedrock of the nation's flood security as any dike or barrier. Everybody knows those numbers. They reassure citizens, many of whom now take sound flood protection for granted.

"We feel safe -- nobody is afraid. Nobody's thinking, when is the water coming?" said Andre van der Beek, a home care worker in Nieuw-Lekkerland, who paused from riding his bike near a line of 200- year-old windmills and two pumping stations, all built to keep water levels down. "There are a lot of believers here, and they believe the story of Noah, that God promised in Genesis there would not be another flood."

But the water is still rising, and the land is sinking, and because of those changes in the landscape, Dutch officials say that some dikes and other parts of the system no longer meet the standards. So they are giving the whole thing a top-to-bottom review to identify emerging weaknesses. Vigilance, they say, must be eternal.

"We are not going to allow the level of protection to decrease," said Marion Smit, the Water and Transportation Ministry's top water policy official.

Achieving that long-term resoluteness might prove to be the single greatest challenge facing New Orleans. Flood control is a national religion in the Netherlands. In 49 U.S. states, it's Louisiana's problem.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Gretna police stand by decision to block evacuees

By Matthew Brown 

West Bank Bureau

When the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center deteriorated into anarchy and food and water ran short, many who tried to escape the flooded streets of New Orleans found their paths blocked.

Gretna police fired shots over the heads of evacuees streaming across the Crescent City Connection, as bullhorns blared for them to go back to New Orleans.

In Plaquemines Parish, dozens of sheriff's deputies raised shotguns and pistols to turn back a convoy of school buses attempting to take storm victims to safety at the Naval Air Station- Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse.

And in Westwego, arriving evacuees had two choices: Leave immediately, or go to an overcrowded shelter with few supplies where armed guards accompanied by a police dog prevented anyone from leaving.

The confrontations occurred largely along racial lines: African- American residents of poor sections of New Orleans facing off against majority white law enforcement agencies.

Elected law enforcement officials remain unapologetic over their response and say they would take the same steps if the city flooded again.

"If you are in your house and they're rioting all around to get in, are you going to let them in?" asked Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson. "We saved our city and protected our people. Our plan worked and we're going to stick with our plan. Next hurricane, we're going to secure our city the same way."

Lawson added that evacuees "actually would have been better off where they were, because we didn't have anything for them."

He said his city of 17,000 was overwhelmed with its own problems at the time: flooded neighborhoods, a barge that damaged the Mississippi River levee, and the daily task of feeding 800 city employees and other emergency personnel. Officials from Plaquemines and Westwego also said their own problems were too great for them to shoulder someone else's.

But New Orleans elected officials bristle at the suggestion they should have kept residents in the city. While acknowledging their own preparations came up far short, they say getting people out quickly after supplies ran short became the only option.

"If he (Lawson) is saying they would do the same thing over again, is he saying the same woman who died on the ramp because she couldn't get over the bridge, is he saying he would let that woman die again?" said City Council President Oliver Thomas. "I don't think he's thinking that. I think he's talking political. He's just trying to make white folks in Gretna think he's protecting them from all those poor black people from New Orleans."

Lawson insists he would have taken identical measures "if it had been any ethnic group" coming into his city.

The chief's stance has turned him into a folk hero among his constituents. Signs nailed to telephone poles and planted in highway medians proclaim "Thank you and God bless Chief Lawson" and "Balls is spelled Arthur Lawson."

Sitting on the front steps of her shotgun-style house on Monroe Street, just a few paces from where Gretna police had placed barricades to keep out New Orleans residents, city resident Ida Koenig offered a more mixed reaction.

"If they were stopping looters, God bless 'em. But maybe it was just people getting out of harm's way," said Koenig, 59. "The good suffered for the bad."

But Walter Maestri, Jefferson Parish Emergency Management director, said West Bank law enforcement was justified in its aggressive reaction, particularly given the partial burning of the Oakwood Shopping Center on Aug. 30.

The fire, attributed to arson, occurred across the street from a bus stop where thousands of displaced New Orleans residents - primarily women and children - had been cordoned off by Gretna police and Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies.

"That was the fear -- these people that came out of the Superdome, they had no food, no water. They were desperate and, let's be honest, there were some thugs among them," Maestri said.

Westwego Chief Dwayne "Poncho" Munch said at one point a call came over the police radio warning of "400 to 500 looters coming down the (West Bank) Expressway toward Westwego."

That marauding army never arrived, and most looting turned out to be homegrown.

This week, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office reported 266 looting arrests since Aug. 29. That included 110 residents of the parish's East Bank, 111 from the West Bank and three from out of state. The remaining 42 - about 16 percent of the total - were from New Orleans, said sheriff's spokesman Col. John Fortunato.

Lawson said few, if any, of the 50 people arrested for looting in Gretna came from other jurisdictions.

"We were not herding criminals, for God's sake," said New Orleans Councilwoman Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson, referring to the city's attempt to march people across the Crescent City Connection on foot after evacuation buses were delayed. "We were sending poor, honest, distressed people who should have been picked up 48 hours earlier."

But both Lawson and Munch attributed the low numbers of New Orleans looters to locking down their cities. "The sh-- got deep when all those people were coming through on that Wednesday and Thursday," Munch said. "If you wasn't here, shut your mouth, because you don't know."

In Plaquemines Parish, Sheriff Jiff Hingle said he was forced to turn back the school bus convoy headed for the Naval Air Station because the evacuees "would have become our problem."

"All they were going to do was end up destroying my community," he said. "I feel very, very sorry for them. But they would put such a burden on us that we would collapse.''

John Pine, director of the disaster science and management program at Louisiana State University, said the actions on the West Bank underscore how ill-prepared the entire region was for the disaster.

"People are raising a lot of questions about race and class discrimination," he said. "In the law, there's two forms of discrimination: One is intentional. One is unintentional. "I look at this situation and see it's not so much the intent of the decision- makers. It just worked out that way."

But Pine added that the images played out in the media - poor minorities struggling to survive in the face of floodwaters and hostility from their neighbors - have left a mark that will be hard to erase.

"Our state is embarrassed," Pine said.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

By Jarvis DeBerry

My uncle tells a story about being at his grandmother's house in the late 1950s when some white people walked into the yard.

This was Mississippi. The arrival of white people could mean trouble. For many black people it had meant death. As it turns out, though, these particular people were hungry. They asked if my great- grandmother would give them food.

My uncle was still a boy. But in 1955 a boy slightly older than he had been lynched. His name was Emmett Till. For the alleged crime of whistling at a white woman, he'd been beaten and shot in the head. His attackers then fastened his body to a large metal weight and threw it into the Tallahatchie River.

Maybe it was simmering anger over what had happened to Emmett and the understanding that he was just as vulnerable that prompted my uncle to tell his grandmother that she ought not give those "crackers" any food. Martha Ellen McEwen saw her grandson's angry outburst as a teaching opportunity. When people are hungry, she told the young Roy DeBerry Jr., feed them. She didn't care if they looked like those terrorizing her people.

There are always excuses not to help. If you want to justify letting people starve, die of thirst or fall victim to certain violence, you can create a long list of reasons. The justifications become especially easy if those needing rescue belong to a group you despise or fear. Still, there ought to be some floor to our humanity below which we refuse to descend. We ought never let our fear or our xenophobia drag us down to such a point that we're unrecognizable as humans.

At this point, though, it's difficult to recognize the Gretna Police Department and the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office as anything other than two cruelly racist and mean-spirited law enforcement agencies. After Hurricane Katrina, when New Orleans appeared destined to collapse into anarchy, officers from Gretna and Plaquemines turned away those overwhelmingly black crowds trying to flee to safety.

Gretna police fired shots over the heads of pedestrians who were walking away from New Orleans on the Crescent City Connection. Deputies from Plaquemines brandished shotguns and pistols to turn away school buses filled with people trying to flee a city that was simultaneously burning and flooding.

Apparently their consciences allow for that.

Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson and Plaquemines Parish Sheriff Jiff Hingle insist that they and their subordinates aren't heartless bigots. They were simply overwhelmed by the number of people seeking refuge. Lawson told a reporter that those leaving New Orleans the days after the storm "actually would have been better off where they were, because we didn't have anything for them."

In fact, they had plenty. They had an area that was safer than the city across the bridge. They had the opportunity to see the people on the bridge as victims, to embrace them as human beings. Yet they saw them only as potential plunderers of their town or as a drain on their meager resources. Hingle said he stopped the buses headed to the Naval Air Station for the same reason: "All they were going to end up doing was destroying my community."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency failed the entire region, so I don't doubt that the jurisdictions on the West Bank were struggling to maintain provisions for their own residents. But this isn't about limited resources. It's about racism. It's about a comment Lorrie Beth Slonsky told National Public Radio she heard from Gretna officers. "You are not crossing the bridge. We are not turning the West Bank into another Superdome," Slonsky reported.

She said she and her husband, Larry Bradshaw, both paramedics from San Francisco and both white, recognized the code language. Everyone else trying to cross the bridge with them was black.

Did Lawson, Hingle and their officers stop to consider that the people crossing the parish lines were fleeing the madness of the Superdome? No. They assumed the people were bringing the Superdome with them.

Now matter how much they defend their refusal to help as necessary to maintain law and order, the truth is they acted immorally. They saw people fleeing danger and sent them back into harm's way.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

By Jarvis DeBerry

"You had to lie to them," the police officer said. He and his partner were explaining the false promises they made to some residents of the Lafitte housing development who were waiting to be rescued. New Orleans was under water. The police officers were in boats. They'd been pulling people out of the water all day, and now that darkness was falling they wouldn't be able to do any more.

They'd already felt the slap of unseen power lines against their foreheads. And they knew that if they kept pushing it they could capsize, and they and the people they'd rescued would drown. So they were calling it quits for the night.

That's not what they told the people they were leaving behind, though. They told them they'd be right back.

To tell those residents the awful truth, that they'd have to sleep in such misery for another night, may have caused a panic, the officers said. The truly desperate may have tried to force their way onto the boat, which also could have turned the boat over.

I don't remember the names of those two officers. Our paths just happened to cross more than a week ago, and we started talking about where we were and what we were doing the day of and the days after Hurricane Katrina.

The officers said they were drawn to the housing development by children standing on a balcony screaming, "We want to leave!"

But when the officers motored over to them and offered the children a ride, they declined. "There are littler children here," one of the officers recalled a child saying. "You should take them first."

To hear the officers tell it, the selflessness those children displayed was typical. When they reached the apartment where five young women were clutching five babies, the mothers encouraged them to first take care of a young man whose paralysis left him incapable of taking care of himself.

Officers found the man, who was wearing nothing but a soiled diaper, in the care of his father. At their invitation, the father lifted his son into his arms and stepped into the boat.

Officers wrongly assumed that the son being cradled in his father's arms was a boy -- he looked so young and was so frail -- but according to an obituary that later ran in The Times-Picayune, he was 26 years old.

The young man couldn't voice his agony, the officers said, but his suffering showed on his face. One of the officers told me that he'll take the look he saw on that young man's face with him to his grave.

The fact that they had had to lie to those who had reached out to them for help seemed to be weighing on the two men.

Had they done the right thing? Did all those people they moved to safety justify their false promise to come back for more?

When they said, "You had to lie to them," I wondered if I was really the person they were trying to convince. No matter how much good one does -- and lots of people did lots of good during the days following the storm -- the fear of not having done enough can be difficult to overcome.

If those question do worry them, officers should take some solace in knowing that some of the people they found in trouble at the Lafitte were gracious enough to step back and insist that the more vulnerable among them be rescued first. Would the people who were so concerned for others be upset to learn of the officers' lie? Maybe so. But would they be so angry that they wouldn't try to understand the cops' dilemma? Would they reject their efforts to explain?

"There are littler children here." A child who would say such a thing has been taught some important lessons about humanity. Hard to imagine that those who did the teaching would do anything less than hug those officers for the lives they were able to save.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Staff Writers

"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.

For three anguished days the world's headlines blared that the Superdome and Convention Center had descended into anarchy. But the truth is that while conditions were squalid for the thousands stuck there, much of the violence NEVER HAPPENED.

After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.

That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved." Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports about the Dome and Convention Center.

"We swept both buildings several times, because we kept getting reports of more bodies there," Cataldie said. "But it just wasn't the case."

Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina - making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages.

"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."

As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: evacuees firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people killed for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.

In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members" killing and raping people inside the Dome. Unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies, "we couldn't count."

The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. Nagin told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."

Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened. Military, law enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees - about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center - overwhelmed their security personnel. The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. Security was nonexistent at the Convention Center, which was never designated as a shelter. Authorities provided no food, water or medical care until troops secured the building the Friday after the storm. While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence, as legend has it. "Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated," said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. "If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them - then that became 18."

Soldier shot - by himself

Inside the Dome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified. Even that incident, in which Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion was injured, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested a suspect.

Watt was attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, which he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as he walked through about six inches of water, Watt was attacked with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun - he accidentally shot himself in the commotion. The attacker never took his gun from him, Baldwin said. New Orleans police investigated the matter fully and sent the suspect to jail in Breaux Bridge, Baldwin said.

As for other shootings, Baldwin said, "We actively patrolled 24 hours a day, and nobody heard another shot."

Doug Thornton, regional vice president of SMG, which manages the Dome, walked the complex from before the storm until the final evacuation and kept a meticulous journal. In a Sept. 9 interview, he said he heard reports of rapes and killings, but they were unconfirmed and came from evacuees and security officials.

"We walked through the facility every day, and we didn't see all this that was being reported," said Thornton, one of about 35 Dome employees who rode out Katrina in the building and lived there in the days after the storm hit. "We never felt threatened. It's hard to determine what's real and what's not real."

No victims

Inside the Convention Center, the rumors of widespread violence have proved hard to substantiate, as well, though the masses of evacuees endured terrifying and inhumane conditions.

Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the Convention Center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Sept. 1, the Thursday after Katrina. He was appalled by what he saw. Thugs hotwired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze from every room in the building, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, and neither did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on at about six occasions.

NOPD Capt. Jeff Winn's 20-member SWAT team responded on about 10 occasions to calls from the Convention Center, usually after reports of shots being fired. The group found people huddled in the fetal position, lying flat on the ground to avoid bullets or running for the exits. They also heard stories of gang rapes, armed robberies and other violent crimes, but no victims ever came forward while his officers were in the building, he said.

"What's true and what's not, we don't really know," he said.

Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center Sept. 2 at about noon.

It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. What the soldiers found - elderly people and infants near death without food, water and medicine; crowds living in filth - shocked them more than anything they'd seen in combat zones overseas. But they found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any killings, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.

Another commander at the scene, Lt. Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, said the crowd welcomed the soldiers. "It reminded me of the liberation of France in World War II. There were people cheering; one boy even saluted," he said. "We never - never once - encountered any hostility."

One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, said Edwards, who conducted the review.

It's possible more than four people died at the Convention Center. Fore, the center's vice president, said he saw another body outside the building early in the first week after the storm, covered in a shroud on the pavement along Julia Street, near the back of the Convention Center. It's unclear whether that body ended up in the nearby food service entrance, where the four confirmed bodies were found later.

Also, several news organizations reported the body of 91-year- old Booker T. Harris, which sat covered in a chair on Convention Center Boulevard for several days after he died on the back of a truck while being evacuated.

Just one of the dead appeared to be the victim of foul play, said Winn, one of few law enforcement officers who spent any time patrolling the Convention Center before it was secured. Winn, who did the final sweep of the building, said one body appeared to have stab wounds, but he could not be sure. Baldwin also said only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, apparently referring to the same body as Winn described. Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals, also confirmed just one suspected homicide at the Convention Center, though he said the victim had been shot, not stabbed.

A Washington Post report quoted another soldier who concluded that three of the four people appeared to have been beaten to death, including an older woman in a wheelchair.

But Spc. Mikel Brooks, an Arkansas Guardsman who said he wheeled the woman's dead body into the food service entrance, said she appeared to have died of natural causes. Brooks went on to say that the woman had expired sitting next to her husband, who shocked him by asking him to bring the wheelchair back.

The Post also cited evacuee Tony Cash and three other unnamed sources saying a young boy died of an asthma attack, but multiple officials could not confirm that death.

One attack thwarted

Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities - many allegedly involving small children - may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, would be nearly impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites.

Numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes, in particular attacks on two young girls in the Superdome ladies room and the killing of one of them, but police and military officials said they know nothing of such an incident. Soldiers and police did confirm at least one attempted rape of a child. Riley said a man tried to sexually assault a young girl, but was "beaten up" by civilians and apprehended by police. It was unclear if that incident was the one that gained wide currency among evacuees.

Baldwin, the National Guard commander of a special reaction team patrolling the Dome, also said he knew of only one attempted sexual assault of a child - but the details of his story, while similar, differed somewhat from that of Riley. It was unclear last week whether the two men spoke about the same incident.

Soldiers apprehended the assailant after a "commotion" in the bathroom exposed him, Baldwin said, but he knew nothing about the man being beaten. Furthermore, in a detail that raises questions about whether officials have full knowledge of any sex crimes, Baldwin said his men turned over one alleged child molester to New Orleans police - only to find him again inside the Dome two days later, reportedly attempting to molest other children. "We ran into the same guy a couple days later," he said. "The crowd came to us and said, 'You better do something with this guy or we're going to do something with him.' ... That kind of re-confirmed (the first allegation), when the crowd came to us saying he was putting his hands on kids."

But other accusations that have gained wide currency are more demonstrably false. For instance, no one found the body of a girl - whose age was estimated at anywhere from 7 to 13 - who, according to multiple reports, was raped and killed with a knife to the throat at the Convention Center.

Many evacuees at the Convention Center the morning of Sept. 3 treated the story as gospel, and ticked off further atrocities: a baby trampled to death, multiple child rapes.

Salvatore Hall, standing on the corner of Julia Street and Convention Center Boulevard that day, just before the evacuation, said, "They raped and killed a 10-year-old in the bathroom."

Neither he nor the many people around him who corroborated the killing had seen it themselves.

Talk of rape and killing inside the Dome was so pervasive that it prompted a steady stream of evacuees to begin leaving Aug. 31, braving thigh-high foul waters on Poydras Street. Many said they were headed back to homes in flooded neighborhoods.

"There's people getting raped and killed in there," said Lisa Washington of Algiers, who had come to the Dome with about 25 relatives and friends. "People are getting diseases. It's like we're in Afghanistan. We're fighting for our lives right now."

One of her relatives nodded. "They've had about 14 rapes in there," he said.

The official word

In many cases, authorities gave credibility to portraits of violence broadcast around the world.

Compass told Winfrey on Sept. 6 that "some of the little babies (are) getting raped" in the Dome. Nagin backed it with his own tale of horrors: ''They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.''

But both men have since pulled back to a degree.

"The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," Compass said, conceding his earlier statements were false. Asked for the source of the information, Compass said he didn't remember.

Nagin frankly acknowledged that he doesn't know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Dome and the Convention Center - and may never.

"I'm having a hard time getting a good body count," he said.

Compass said rumors had often crippled authorities' response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to respond to situations that turned out not to exist. He offered his own intensely personal example: The day after the storm, he heard "some civilians" talking about how a band of armed thugs had invaded the Ritz-Carlton hotel and started raping women - including his 24-year- old daughter, who stayed there through the storm. He rushed to the scene only to find that although a group of men had tried to enter the hotel, they weren't armed and were easily turned back by police.

Compass, however, promulgated some of the unfounded rumors himself, in interviews in which he characterized himself and his officers as outgunned warriors taking out armed bands of thugs at every turn.

"People would be shooting at us, and we couldn't shoot back because of the families," Compass told a reporter from the (Bridgeport)Connecticut Post who interviewed him at the Saints' Monday Night Football game in New York, where he was the guest of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. "All we could do is rush toward the flash."

Compass added that he and his officers succeeded in wrestling 30 weapons from criminals using the follow-the-muzzle-flash technique, the story said.

"We got 30 that way," Compass was quoted as saying.

Asked about the muzzle-flash story last week, Compass said, "That really happened" to Winn's SWAT team at the Convention Center.

But Winn, when asked about alleged shootouts in a separate interview, said his unit saw muzzle flashes and heard gunshots only one time. Despite aggressively frisking a number of suspects, the team recovered no weapons. His unit never found anyone who had been shot.

Many soldiers and humanitarian workers now agree that although a number of bad actors committed violent or criminal acts, the evacuees responded well considering the hell they endured.

"These people - our people - did nothing wrong," said Sherry Watters of the state Department of Social Services, who was working with the medical unit at the Dome and noted the crowd's mounting frustration. "No human should have to live like that for even a minute."

Crowds pitch in

As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.

"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.

But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.

"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them saying. "We're all family here."

About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.

"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.

As the Dome cleared out Sept. 3, Beron, the National Guard commander, fashioned a plan to deal with the dead. He knew of the six bodies in the freezer, but expected far more. He and an Ohio National Guard commander sent 450 Ohio troops to search every nook of the Dome, top to bottom. They told them to mark locations of bodies on a map of the Dome, to rope off suspected crime scenes, and leave a chemical light sticks next to each one so they could be retrieved later.

"I fully expected to find more bodies, both homicides and natural causes," he said.

They found nothing. 

Staff writers Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Times Picayune

911 operators confront grim task, ghastly calls

By Brian Thevenot 

Staff Writer

As she took that first call from a woman trapped in her 9th Ward attic, 911 operator Lechia Allen ached with the grim realization that the next call would be the same. And the next. And the next. She couldn't do a thing for any of them. 

Working in the downtown 911 center at Broad and Gravier streets, next to the Falstaff antenna, Allen knew police wouldn't respond to calls while the winds of Hurricane Katrina roared. She knew the rescue operation wouldn't start for hours and, in many cases, days. Laboring under the heavy weight of helplessness, all Allen and her 120 fellow operators could do was listen to the terrifying tales of rising waters, raging fires and parents holding their children toward the skies, above the floodwaters. 

"They heard people taking their last breaths. They heard people holding children up in the peak of the attics, and dropping children in the water and watching them drown," said New Orleans Police Capt. Steve Gordon, chief of the 911 center. 

Some of the nearly all-female staff working with Allen, 44, took calls from the same neighborhoods where they knew their families had stayed to ride out the storm, she said. Some lost loved ones. Others haven't been found. 

"Seek higher ground" - that was all that Allen could tell them, in the calmest voice she could muster. 

"I'm already on my roof," so many of them would respond. 

After that first call, the one that still sticks in Allen's head, they all blended together. 

"It was a lot of hollering and screaming and, 'Help me, please don't let me die,' and 'The water's coming up' and 'We're all going to die' ... 'I have a baby' ... 'Where do you go? What do you do? What time are you coming?'" Allen said after working another 12- hour shift one day last week. 

Such moments are captured in wrenching clarity in a sampling of 911 tapes released by the New Orleans Police Department. 

In one, an operator identified only as "operator 16" calmly and politely advises just-as-polite resident from "1623 Rampart, between Tupelo and Gordon'' that help would not arrive anytime soon. 

"I'm stuck in the attic, me and my sister and them, and my mama, and we got water in the whole house," the caller says.

"How many people are in this location with you?"

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine people."

"OK, ma'am, we're going to try to get somebody out there to 1623, OK.?''

"OK, thank you."

"You're welcome."

Another woman called from eastern New Orleans, reporting a spreading fire across the street.

"I'm calling to report a fire, at 6131 Bundy Road."

"What type?"

"There's a whole apartment complex on fire ... ''

"Do you know how long ... ,'' the operator interrupts.

"No, ma'am.''

" Do you know if anybody's inside the house?"

"I know there's people over there, that's what I'm trying to say ... "

"... OK, we'll get somebody out there."

"Ok. Thanks."

Another woman called from 1428 Gallier St. in the 9th Ward.

"How many inside the location with you, ma'am?" the operator asks.

"I got a handicapped girl and I got a baby that's on a pump machine ... we're in the bed ... But the water is coming up."

"He's an infant?"

"Yeah, the baby's 8 months ..."

"OK, what you need to do - we're trying our best - but you need to get to higher ground, until we're able to get to you."

As Hurricane Katrina sent water rushing into the 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans the day of the storm, Allen listened for a full hour to the callers before taking a break. Many of the operators around her couldn't take it for more than 15 minutes before breaking into sobs and handing the chair over to a revolving cast of replacements. When they recovered their composure, they stepped back in line to relieve those who just had relieved them.

In between such stunted shifts, the women gathered in the hallways, weeping and hugging, watching for which of their colleagues would be the next to break down.

"It's a given that they handle life-and-death emergency calls," said Joe Narcisse, second in command at the call center. "But they don't handle calls where somebody's going to die call after call after call. It was a kind of doomsday, sum-of-all-fears atmosphere."

Yet the women processed the calls like they always do, knowing that for so many of the people they had tried to soothe, it wouldn't matter. At times they couldn't get clear answers even on the most basic information from distressed callers.

In one call that drove home the deadly power of the storm, Narcisse said, an operator asked for an address the caller couldn't possibly give.

"His house had floated down the street," Narcisse said.

Even as they continued to get frantic calls from east of the Industrial Canal, nearest the storm, the passing of the storm gave way to a brief sense of relief, an end in sight.

Then the floodwall at the 17th Street Canal burst, sending water raging into the city all night and generating a whole new round of frantic calls. The new wave of destruction swamped Allen's house in Gentilly.

As the city continued to flood late Aug. 29 and into Aug. 30, the difference between day and night blurred as the operators continued to struggle through short shifts, replacing one another as each reached the limit of horrors.

Meanwhile, the water crept closer to the call center, already damaged by wind. Gordon roamed the center that night, trying to determine whether to move the operation to a safer room.

By daybreak, the water came in around the operators' ankles, then to their knees. Gordon had little choice: The operators loaded onto boats that would take them to the Broad Street overpass, where they would bake in the heat for several hours before spending several uncomfortable days at downtown hotels.

Even as the water had come into their building, the operators' phones never stopped working. They were ringing as the boats pulled away.

Now, more than two weeks after the storm, almost all of the operators have left town, in many cases joining their evacuated families out of state. Only about 15 operators, including Allen, remained in the city and working this week. State Police operators have stepped in to fill the gap, 911 officials said.

Allen has yet to take a day off. She hasn't seen her house, her boyfriend or her two sons, who all evacuated. She doesn't know when she'll be able to see them, and her cell phone rarely works. She's also waiting for calls from FEMA and her insurance company.

But she said she plans to keep her $9-an-hour job, and to stay in New Orleans.

"I'm not leaving New Orleans," she said. "If I have to rebuild, I'll rebuild."

© 2005 The Times Picayune

The life stories behind the storm victims

By Barri Bronston

Staff Writer

Susie Joseph Sparks, 1959- 2005 
Edward Sparks Jr., 1992-2005 
Marjorie Edwards, 1920-2005

But Sparks, 54, was more likely to use vacation days from his job as a Regional Transit Authority bus driver to take care of his elderly aunt, Marjorie Edwards, a former nurse who suffered from diabetes.

"He never took a week for himself," said Sparks' younger sister, Gwendolyn Sparks, a Gentilly resident now living with 13 other family members in a Shreveport Holiday Inn. "He'd take days here and there. He'd use them to take our aunt to the doctor, to the bank and to the grocery store."

His kindness helped him win the hearts of the many passengers he befriended along his St. Claude Avenue route. And as a bus driver for 29 years, it was not unusual for a rider to bring him sweets and snacks as an expression of gratitude.

"He loved his job," said Joseph Dorsey of the RTA. "He worked daily and never received any complaints. He was pleasant to be around. He enjoyed helping people, and being a transit operator gave him that opportunity."

But nothing mattered more to Edward than his wife Susie Joseph Sparks, 46, and 13-year-old son Edward Jr., an eighth-grader at Thurgood Marshall Middle School.

His Aunt Marjorie, a native of Morgan City who spent much of her adult life in New York, was like a mother to him and his six siblings.

"She was so good to us," said Gwendolyn Sparks. "She sent four of my mother's kids to Catholic schools and would send us clothes. When she came for Christmas, she would buy us anything we wanted. The sky was the limit."

Like most boys his age, Edward Jr. was a computer enthusiast and sports fan. To celebrate his 13th birthday, his father gave him a cell phone, which he enjoyed using to send text messages to friends and relatives.

But Edward Jr. didn't spend every waking moment with electronics. "He loved basketball," Gwendolyn said. "He was in the church choir. He was very studious and well-mannered."

Edward Jr. was a member of the Carver-Desire Baptist Church along with his mother, who served as president of the Junior Deaconess Board. "She would visit the sick, fix the communion table on Saturdays," Gwendolyn said. "She did a lot of speaking in the church."

The elder Edward was deeply religious as well, but he was a member of St. Luke's Episcopal Church, where he attended services the Sunday before Katrina. From there, he picked up his Aunt Marjorie on Dumaine Street and headed to his sister's house for dinner.

That night, Gwendolyn prepared a feast of smothered pork chops, french fries and green peas. As her brother sipped on his favorite beer, Bud Lite, the table conversation revolved around the approaching storm.

"My brother wanted to ride it out at home," she said. "My aunt kept saying she wanted to be with someone who had a car. I didn't have transportation, but my brother did, so she went home with him."

As the floodwater rose in and around her Derby Place home, Gwendolyn and her family were rescued by boat. With no attic to escape through at his Lower 9th Ward house on Egania Street, Edward Sparks and his family -- his wife, son and aunt -- had no chance. All four bodies were found on Sept. 27.

Gwendolyn says the cruel irony is that her aunt's house on Dumaine Street was high and dry.

"She didn't have any water," she said. "Zero water. None."

© 2005 The Times Picayune

Top-tier contractors say it's the only way to get the work done

By Gordon Russell and James Varney

Staff Writers

Staff Writers The blue-tarp roof, a symbol of hurricane damage in south Louisiana and Mississippi as recognizable as curbside debris, may wind up as a post-Katrina emblem of government waste reminiscent of the Pentagon's fabled $435 hammers and $640 toilet seats.

Depending on the extent of damage and the size of the roof, the federal government is paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 to install a typical tarp. The cost to taxpayers to tack up a covering of blue vinyl is roughly the same, on a per-square-foot basis, as what a homeowner would pay to install a basic asphalt- shingle roof.

Yet the laborer putting nail to tarp typically earns only a fraction of that. The cost is driven up by layers of subcontractors, an expensive flowchart that sometimes produces the sub-sub-sub-sub- subcontractor, known in post-Katrina parlance as a "fifth-tier sub."

The arrangement isn't unique to roofing. On almost any contract let by either the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Army Corps of Engineers, who together control most of the more than $60 billion earmarked by Congress for hurricane aid, a similar system of tiering exists. Nor are such contractual layers indigenous to a universe shattered by Katrina and Rita. Those involved in the work say similar arrangements are commonplace after natural disasters throughout the United States.

Temporary housing, for example, provides another area in which contract nesting proliferates. FEMA buys trailers from brokers, who bump up the price per unit by thousands of dollars. And on New Orleans' housing inspection contract, the federal government paid The Shaw Group nearly $80 an hour, city officials said, for building inspectors who earn about a quarter of that amount, according to city inspectors.

In other words, the guy spinning a Bobcat choked with tree limbs on a residential street may be earning as little as $1 per cubic yard of debris, although the prime contractor may be billing 20 times that amount for the service.

Federal regulators and prime contractors defend the arrangements, saying the big companies that land mammoth contracts furnish resources and oversight smaller companies couldn't possibly match. It simply wouldn't work, they say, for the government to try to cut out the middleman and hire building inspectors or roofers directly. Moreover, the emergency nature of the work -- the need to bring in thousands of workers and truckloads of provisions in a hurry -- also drives up costs.

"This is not what most people think of as a typical contract, with sealed bids for a very specific job and a one-time, specific amount of money," said Jim Pogue, a corps spokesman. "These are task- order contracts. What we basically are awarding the big contracts for is someone's ability to do a lot of different kinds of tasks."

What's more, federal contracts often require huge insurance requirements and credit lines, business costs that can only be handled promptly by bigger companies. Those companies are fewer in number, and thus are, in many cases, already known to FEMA and other federal agencies for their work on previous disasters.

For example, contractor Paul Loupe has worked with Ceres Environmental Services, one of the major contractors the corps hired to collect storm debris, and became Ceres' top subcontractor in Jefferson Parish debris-removal contracts. Loupe said his company's experience and size made it an obvious choice for the work.

"In order to do what we're doing you have to have an insurance policy that costs $7,000 to $8,000 up front, plus the premiums, and most of the small guys just can't carry that," he said.

Critics acknowledge some administration is needed, and that the sheer scale of the various jobs leads to increased overhead costs. Still, the difference between the price of the contract and the money collected by those doing the work appalls them, they say.

"When you have this nesting, or tiering, you're losing a lot of money to friction as it goes from sub to sub down to the worker bee who's actually turning a wrench or putting on a blue tarp," said Steve Ellis, vice president of programs at the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Keith Ashdown, a colleague of Ellis', decried the "blank-check mentality" that he said often results in overspending in the wake of disasters. "I guarantee we're going to come back to this after everything has been reviewed and find we paid (upscale retailer) Nordstrom prices when we should have been paying Wal-Mart costs," he said.

Not everyone collecting federal dollars turns a huge profit. While vast sums of money are being dumped into the recovery, because of the number of hands the money must pass, the subcontractors at the bottom say they struggle to earn a living. Some have decided to head home, or to go to Florida, where some say they've heard there is less layering and thus more money for the man on the ground.

Prices unknown

Billions of American taxpayer dollars are being spent on the various emergency relief efforts, but the government has declined, at the request of the companies receiving the most money, to detail the spending. The corps has refused to provide breakdowns on tarping and debris removal requested by The Times-Picayune through various public-records requests, citing contractor objections that releasing the information could cause them "competitive harm."

"The only thing I can address is what we are paying our primes," said Jean Todd, a contracting officer for the corps. "From there, there are contractual agreements between the primes and the subs."

But, Todd conceded, "I can't release (verbally) how much we're paying our primes because that is subject to (requests under the) Freedom of Information" Act, or FOIA. Such requests have been filed by The Times-Picayune and others, but have yet to be honored. The corps recently posted online a list of its tarping and debris- removal contracts, but the prices were omitted.

Local government officials have been similarly frustrated in efforts to find out what contractors are being paid, particularly for debris collection. A succession of local figures -- including Plaquemines Parish President Benny Rousselle and officials from New Orleans and Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes -- complained at a recent legislative hearing that they had filed FOIA requests and gotten no response.

The information could affect local governments because FEMA has told local officials that they'll be responsible for 10 percent of the cost of debris removal after June 30, and perhaps a larger share in the future. The work is not expected to be completed until December 2006.

Despite the feds' unwillingness to disclose costs, ballpark figures -- and even some specific ones -- have leaked out. For example, The Shaw Group of Baton Rouge, one of three companies in charge of the tarping program dubbed "Operation Blue Roof," earns $175 per "square" for each tarping job, according to a report by the Knight-Ridder news service that neither the government nor the contractors have challenged. A roofing "square" is equal to 100 square feet.

Two other prime contractors, Simon Roofing of Ohio and LJC Construction Co. of Alabama, take home $172 and $149 per "square" respectively, according to the same report. The report did not include a per-square-foot price for the fourth prime contractor doing work in Louisiana, Ystueta Inc. of Alabama. Those figures omit the cost of the tarps and other materials, which are provided by the federal government. Prime contractors do supply other materials, including furring strips and fasteners.

Todd Woods, owner of A-1 Construction and Roofing, a subcontractor to Shaw, said Shaw pays him $75 for each square laid by subcontractors who report to him. Further down the chain, Erik Larsen, whose Wescon Construction is a subcontractor to A-1, said he gets $30 a square for tarps that he and his subcontractors lay.

But Larsen said his subcontractors also have subs, who in some cases have subs themselves. Those at the bottom sometimes earn as little as $2 per square, Larsen said.

Craig Stone, a salesman with Ace Roofing, which has been doing business in southern Louisiana for 40 years, was shocked to hear the costs associated with the government programs compared with replacing the roof. Ace, which is not involved in any FEMA contracts, generally charges between $170 and $180 a square for a basic, "three-tab" asphalt-shingle roof, he said -- about the same as what Shaw collects for a tarp job.

Charging that price for a tarp, Stone said, amounts to "gouging, pure and simple."

While government and company officials defend the arrangements, saying they were competitively bid, the corps' own contracts reveal the government doesn't always pay the same rate for a service . . For example, the feds are paying Shaw 17 percent more for precisely the same work provided by LJC, according to the Knight-Ridder report.

Hauling in the basics

Shaw officials declined to address specific questions about their prices or what services they provide to justify them. Stephanie Dixon, a spokeswoman for the firm, said some of the information that has been published regarding Shaw's contract terms was "grossly inaccurate," but she declined to specify the inaccuracies.

She added that Shaw officials are "confident that we follow all rules and guidelines" and that the company is "committed to the rebuilding of our home state and to upholding the highest level of integrity in all of our business activities."

Allan Buchanan, vice president of operations for LJC, one of the other prime blue roof contractors, agreed that under ideal conditions, tarps could be installed for less. But he said conditions are anything but ideal in southeast Louisiana.

He said his firm has had to bring in food, water, ice, fuel and housing, and that hundreds of crews under LJC's supervision have worked 18-hour days during "weeks of chaos." In addition, he said the workmanship on corps-supervised tarp jobs is "far superior to that of the private contractor."

Buchanan said his firm is profiting, but added that the government, insurers, homeowners and taxpayers are saving far more than he's earning.

"How much is too much when this service is essentially preserving, in some cases, the only thing (homeowners) have left after such an event?" he said in an e-mail. "Also, how much in additional insurance claims have been saved through this service? Let's say hundreds of millions perhaps."

Officials from Simon Roofing and Ystueta Inc. did not return phone calls.

The contracts posted online lay out a multitude of services the prime contractors must provide and regulations they must follow.

Todd of the corps described the primes' role thus: "The prime is responsible for overall management of the program," she said. "They manage a multitude of subs. They're ultimately responsible for quality control, and they're responsible for settling any claims that citizens may have because of damage to property."

Corps keeps it mum

Prices for debris removal, handled by the corps, are even harder to get a handle on. The government has refused to release the proposals it received before it awarded open-ended contracts to four large prime contractors -- Ashbritt, Phillips and Jordan, ECC and Ceres. Only the latter three are working in Louisiana. In addition, the proposals do not necessarily reflect the actual prices being paid.

Rather, each time a job is assigned -- say, the removal of debris from a defined neighborhood -- the corps negotiates a price for the specific task, using the original proposal as a starting point, Pogue said. The corps has refused to make the resulting task orders public.

"We might say, 'We've got a task for you to remove 100 million pounds of rotten chicken.' And we negotiate the price for them to do that," Pogue said. "And then there's 50 blocks of city debris for you to remove. That's kind of what we're dealing with here."

Pogue said the corps believes the government is getting a fair price and would have no objection to sharing the information with the public. But he said the companies have reason to keep the numbers private.

"When prime contractors submit their bids, it's a very competitive thing, in accordance with federal acquisition regulations," he said. "But they have an expectation because of competition that their bid is going to be confidential. That is their call."

Layers of padding

Many of those involved in the work, as well as outside observers, believe the layering is unnecessary and drives prices up.

"You're preaching to the choir there, I've been hollering about that," said state Rep. Troy Hebert, D-New Iberia. "The layers rip off the taxpayer."

Hebert, somewhat uniquely, wears two hats. In addition to his lawmaker duties, he has been a debris-removal contractor with the corps. He and fellow contractor Sean McGee joined forces because neither could afford the required $1 million liability insurance policy individually, Hebert said.

How much he was able to earn, he said, depended on what parish he worked in: roughly $9 or $10 per cubic yard in Jefferson, $7 in St. Tammany and just $6 in Calcasieu. "You see, they've got another layer in there in Calcasieu," Hebert said.

The situation was flawed from the start, Hebert believes, because the corps and FEMA essentially forced parishes to work through them. The feds pay the entire debris-removal bill only if they are allowed to handle the contracting; cities and parishes in general must pay a 10 percent share if they do it themselves and seek federal reimbursement later.

"You see, that's where the blackmail comes in," Hebert said.

The mammoth federal agencies tend to be unfamiliar with smaller, local firms, he said, making it hard for such companies to get a big piece of the action.

"FEMA went to the corps because FEMA doesn't know anything about debris cleanup," Hebert said. "But the corps doesn't know a thing about debris cleanup, either. So they turned to the big, major corporations they already know, the guys that follow the corps around all the time.

"Ceres, all they do is get the connection with the corps," Hebert said. "Why not just hire the guys who are actually doing the work and save the taxpayers all this money?"

Rousselle of Plaquemines Parish made a similar point this month in a tirade against the corps' system of contracting.

"They say they don't want to send money to Louisiana because of our reputation or whatever," he said. "I would ask them to look in the mirror. If they think this is a legitimate expense of federal money, they ought to be ashamed of themselves."

Rousselle claimed that if the corps turned oversight of the work over to local governments, unnecessary overhead could be cut dramatically, saving taxpayers 30 to 40 percent.

The legislators running the hearing seemed to agree with Rousselle.

"The bigger disaster (than Katrina) may be the rip-off," said state Rep. Ernest Wooton, R-Belle Chasse.

In the middle

Precisely what the various middle layers of subcontractors do -- in Hebert's case, the "top-tier subs" between big-firm Ceres and workers on the ground like McGee -- is unclear.

Some of the high-level subs are well-established haulers with trucks on the streets. But Hebert claims some of them are mere fronts, companies that got into the mix but don't have the assets to perform the job themselves. For example, he claimed Loupe Construction would pay him $9 or $10 and simply pocket $2 or $3.

"Loupe? They don't even have a dump truck," he said. "Loupe is totally a front guy, he don't have nothing."

Paul Loupe confirmed he does not have a truck on the streets in Jefferson Parish but said the company is using trucks and heavy equipment in other areas. He disputed the notion his outfit doesn't play an important role. In addition, Loupe said he pushed for the higher pay in Jefferson Parish that Hebert found attractive -- indeed, the two companies have had a profitable relationship, Loupe said.

"We decided to give the small guy a chance at the big money, the $10 a yard, out here," Loupe said, noting the smaller payments made by other parishes. "And I police my subs a lot and make sure my guys are getting paid."

Loupe noted that, as part of his duties, he handles payrolls, the quality-control teams, the towers and other operations within the command center and dumping grounds at Lafreniere Park in Metairie. It's there, he said, that his trucks are on the job.

"When you look at how much we get, once you add up all we do it's not that huge a thing," he said. While Loupe declined to specify what he gets paid, he said the company enjoys a profit margin of between 15 and 20 percent on the debris-removal contracts.

That said, Hebert and some subcontractors beneath him in the Metairie pecking order concede they are still making good money. Hebert estimated he sometimes earns more than $1,000 a day.

At the end of the chain, like the tiny figurine in the middle of a Russian Matryoshka doll, are those working for even less.

"One dollar a cubic yard," said Timmy Guidry, a Bobcat operator in Metairie, when asked how much he is paid.

Guidry, a subcontractor to McGee, was working with a group on Martin Behrman Walk on a recent morning.

"I got this job because I got in touch with Troy Hebert and he's my state rep," Guidry said.

Guidry, working seven days a week and sleeping in a tent, said he is making as much money as he ever has, but when asked if taxpayers could save a bundle by simply paying him $2 and cutting out the other layers, he said, "Of course."

Chad Tulp, owner of a debris-hauling company from Minnesota, said he's been having trouble making ends meet because of his place on the subcontractor food chain.

He's a bit higher on the tier system than Guidry. Tulp's per- cubic-yard take ranges from $5.50 to $6.50, he said, about one- third of what the top firms are making. But given the cost of his equipment -- he said he brought in trucks and other items worth $300,000 -- the pay is not enough, he said.

"It's impossible for a guy like me to actually make a profit," Tulp said.

Similar complaints were lodged by a group of African-American contractors who recently held a news conference on the steps of City Hall to complain that they've been offered only low-level debris contracts.

"I'm looking to be a first-tier sub," said Adam Irvin of Commander Corp., who said he's been asked to haul debris for $6 per cubic yard as a fourth-tier sub. "By the time you get down there, it's nothing but crumbs."

Most of those doing the heavy lifting think the debris program is full of lard.

"I'm a taxpayer; you're a taxpayer," Tulp said. "Every one of us is flipping the bill for this. They're wasting the people's money."

Other subcontractors, speaking on condition of anonymity, were even more explicit about what they considered unnecessary middlemen.

"The amount of money that is totally wasted is astronomical," said a fourth-tier sub from Alabama. The subcontractor said that many of the companies above him in the pecking order do little for the money they get for the work of others.

"If I dump 5,000 cubic yards a week, they might need to enter 100 'skid tickets' (dumping receipts) for me," he said. "So it may cost them an hour of labor to do it. Say it costs them $25 an hour. Well, they just made $50,000. It's nothing. It's all clear profit."

But officials from the federal government and prime contracting firms say those who make such allegations don't understand the amount of oversight such firms provide. Asked to explain what ECC - - one of the four prime debris haulers -- does for its money, company spokesman Allan Katz offered a list of 22 services, ranging from truck inspection to mapping to community relations to "waste segregation."

Officials from Ceres, and Phillips and Jordan, did not return phone calls.

Cutting into relief

Local residents might not squawk about high costs because most of the work is being paid for by the federal government. But experts note that, in the long run, the fat edges of contracts will hurt the region more than it hurts the average American.

"The more money that's lost to seepage or friction is less money that's going to actually rebuild the area," said Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "There's less bang for the taxpayer's buck. People have talked about putting $200 billion into the relief effort. If we lose 5 percent to waste, fraud and abuse, that's about $10 billion we're losing."

Reducing the number of layers would be an easy way to save a colossal wad of cash, the nonprofit group said.

"Pyramid schemes may be OK on TV commercials, but they're not good when we're trying to rebuild a significant portion of our country," said Keith Ashdown, another member of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

"I don't think you should go beyond one subcontractor. There's no way we should be paying this."

SUBPAR RETURN ON THE DOLLAR?

The tiered system of sub-contracting prevalent in post-Katrina recovery tasks means that the cost to the taxpayer is far more than the company doing the work is actually paid.

$175 PER SQUARE = Amount Shaw Group of Baton Rouge is paid per square (100 square feet) of tarp laid on homes with roof damage in the Operation Blue Roof program.

$75 PER SQUARE -- Paid to Shaw subcontractor such as A-1 Construction.

$30 PER SQUARE - Paid to A-1 subcontractors such as Wescon Construction.

$2 PER SQUARE - Wescon, in turn has subcontractors, some of which also have subcontractors, who earn as little as $2 per square.

© 2005 The Times Picayune