NEW ORLEANS – The second day brought more horror, greater despair: The regional death toll exceeded 100 – and will rise. Rescuers acrobatically plucked thousands from the crests of roofs. Levees failed, and panic flared and spread.
New, terrifying floods swept through the heart of New Orleans on Tuesday. Up to 15 feet of water swamped at least 80 percent of the city. And yet fires raged, fed by leaking gas.
Medics transformed part of the Superdome into a triage center, but water lapped at the edges of the arena. Looters roamed. The governor worked on plans to shut New Orleans – a place very close to ruin – and remove everyone still there.
“We’ve lost our city,” said Marc Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans. “I fear it’s potentially like Pompeii.”
The awful panorama of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation stretched across four coastal states, and a rag-tag, numbed army of refugees searched desperately for the bare necessities of life – water, food, shelter and, to escape from it all, gasoline.
“There’s nowhere, nowhere to go,” said Robert Smith, a truck driver who fled New Orleans with his family of six and ended up stranded on Interstate 10 near Gulfport, Miss. “There’s nowhere to eat, get gas or stay.”
Water surrounded the road, and it was getting deeper. At the eastern entrance to New Orleans, over Lake Pontchartrain, the interstate lay crumbled, ruined.
More than 100 people died in the Biloxi and Gulfport areas of Mississippi, according to Jim Pollard, a Harrison County spokesman. Other county officials said twice that number likely were killed by the worst hurricane to strike the United States in memory.
“The death toll rises every time we go out,” said Joe Spraggins, the county’s emergency manager.
Overwhelmed by the number of dead, county workers marked bodies with satellite-based locator devices for later pickup. The county already had enough space on refrigerated trucks for 80 bodies. Officials ordered more trucks, but wouldn’t say how many.
“We don’t want to start a panic,” said a logistics officer who refused to disclose his name.
Other deaths were reported in Louisiana, Alabama and – late last week – in South Florida.
In Biloxi, authorities and volunteers pulled bodies from 12-foot piles of rubble while hearses and trucks cruised Howard Avenue, assigned to carry the corpses. Five bodies were recovered in five blocks in only a few hours.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said resident David McCaleb.
In Biloxi, New Orleans and across the vast expanse of disaster, Coast Guard, National Guard and other crews saved countless victims, sometimes by boat, frequently by air.
Like angels, the rescuers floated, fluttered, sailed from the clouds, embraced the needy, lifted them to safety.
The experience was electric, the vista heartbreaking.
“To be elevated and have a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood that I grew up in and love was awful,” said Gene Daymude, a New Orleans art dealer carried over floods and into a helicopter by a wire basket.
At least 1,500 people were rescued from rooftops and attics in New Orleans alone, and many more needed immediate assistance. For some, however, it will come too late.
“We know that many lives have been lost,” said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.
In California, aides said that President Bush will return to Washington to monitor post-storm assistance. “We have got a lot of work to do,” Bush said.
And the workload kept growing. Regional damage estimates ranged well beyond $26 billion.
In New Orleans, two levees failed – one with a breach as wide as a football field.
Water suddenly rose in the French Quarter and other areas of the sodden city of 485,000 people, a place that sits like a bowl between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
“The levee broke!” one woman yelled outside Johnny White’s Bar on Bourbon Street.
Workers planned to drop sandbags from helicopters into the breaches, but rescue missions took priority and no sand bags were dropped, Mayor C. Ray Nagin said, so the water kept coming.
It could take more than a month to pump it back out again, he said.
“It appears that now the bowl is beginning to fill – not rapidly but slowly,” said Walter Maestri, emergency operations manager for Jefferson Parish, a county just west of New Orleans.
Nagin told city workers to flee for their lives. Staffers at the Times-Picayune newspaper hastily evacuated their building. Canal Street became a canal.
Still, the Gulfport and Biloxi area of southern Mississippi bore much of the brunt of the storm.
Katrina’s 145-mph wind and huge storm surge shattered multimillion-dollar casinos, turned bridges into nothing but pylons, bulldozed harbors, courthouses, entire business districts in Long Beach, Pass Christian and Moss Point.
“This,” said Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway, “is our tsunami.”
Several people said they saved themselves by perching in tree tops. Huong Tran, 50, and her fiance were among them. As the water rose, they spent six hours in a live oak tree.
“I thought I was going to die,” Tran said. “The water was over the house.”
She prayed to a Buddhist goddess.
“I called to her, “Help me, help me. I think I’ll die.”‘
Many perished on Point Cadet, at the southeastern tip of Biloxi’s peninsula, officials said. A portable morgue was being brought in to handle the dead.
Authorities feared some victims may have been washed away, never to be found.
In many counties, emergency operations centers crumbled or were swamped.
In Harrison County, 35 people swam out of their emergency operations center with life jackets on. “We haven’t heard from them,” said Christopher Cirillo, the county’s emergency medical services director.
Back in New Orleans, medics converted part of the Superdome – already the steamy home of 10,000 people – into a center for scores of the injured and sick, many of them found on rooftops and street corners. Some were sent to hospitals in Baton Rouge.
The narrow, debris-filled streets of the tourist-oriented French Quarter filled with more than 2 feet of water. Terrified by what they heard on the radio, some people ran down the streets, screaming and warning others.
“Get out of town if you can,” said Ed Freytag, a city worker at a temporary City Hall.
At the Hyatt Regency Hotel, next to the Superdome, floodwaters engulfed cars and blocked passage to the rest of the city.
“People are afraid of drowning,” said Greg Reaves, 45, who tried to flee the city but turned around after confronting high water on Interstate 10. “I think that’s what’s causing the panic.”
Officials had warned that if Katrina hit New Orleans dead-on, floodwaters could rise up to 20 feet immediately. The storm wobbled slightly eastward, offering a partial reprieve that seemed like ancient history Tuesday.
“We’re damn close right now to that worst-case scenario,” said radio host Dave Cohen, whose radio station steadfastly transmitted emergency information during the storm and its aftermath.
People frantically tried to get through the water to the only exit out of town that wasn’t flooded – the Crescent City Connector, which leads westward along U.S. 90 toward Baton Rouge.
Cell phones barely worked as families tried desperately to communicate with one another.
Matthew Porche, a Pembroke Pines man interviewed by The Miami Herald on Saturday, left a frantic call on a reporter’s cell phone Tuesday.
Porche, who had fled to Atlanta, said that 12 relatives were stuck on the roof of a home in Jefferson Parish. But they could not reach anyone, not emergency officials, not neighbors, not family.
“We’re trying to get them some help,” a relative said in the voice mail. “They cannot make a 911 call.”
Police couldn’t communicate with each other, so beat cops drove where they could, on alert for looters and people in distress.
A security guard at a hotel in the French Quarter reported hearing gunshots. He wasn’t able to sleep, fearful of increasingly hungry, desperate mobs.
“The situation is untenable,” Blanco said. “It’s just heartbreaking.”
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