August 30, 2005
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Eric Gay/Associated Press
Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans said that the city was 80 percent under water
August 30, 2005
New Orleans Escapes Direct Hit, but Most of City Is Inundated
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER and KATE ZERNIKE
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 30 – With parts of this city under 20 feet of water and a death toll in the region that is reported at 55 and certain to climb, the Gulf Coast began today to confront the aftermath of one of the most devastating storms ever to hit the United States.
Floodwaters from a canal were sending more water into already flooded areas of New Orleans, and Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in a television interview that the city was 80 percent under water, with some of it 20 feet deep.
Hundreds of residents have been rescued from rooftops, and as dawn broke rescuers in boats and helicopters searched for more survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The death toll in just one Mississippi county could be as high as 80, Gov. Haley Barbour said. Preliminary reports on Monday put the toll at 55.
“The devastation down there is just enormous,” Mr. Barbour said on NBC’s “Today” show. “I hate to say it, but it looks like it is a very bad disaster in terms of human life,” he added, referring to Harrison County, which includes Gulfport and Biloxi.
“This is our tsunami,” Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi, Miss., told The Biloxi Sun Herald.
A survey team has been sent to inspect an overflowing canal in New Orleans that is adding to already flooded areas, Lieut. Kevin Cowan of the National Guard, who is attached to the Louisiana emergency operations office, said in a telephone interview this morning. The assumption is that the canal is “simply overflowing,” he said, but the team will also look for possible breeches in the levee system.
An on-scene coordinator for the Coast Guard in Louisiana said “well over several hundred people” had been pulled off rooftops by helicopters, and that small boats were in the water and planes in air.
In an interview with CNN, the coordinator, Capt. Terry Galbraith, said several hundred survivors still needed to be rescued in New Orleans, but he did not have an estimate for other nearby areas.
He added that the disaster and its aftermath is “going to change the face of our Coast Guard operations in New Orleans. “It’s going to be catastrophic for everyone,” he said.
Scott Adcock, public information manager with the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, said in a telephone interview that more than 790,000 people were without power. Authorities are starting damage assessment today with helicopters and people on the ground, but flooding and debris are hampering efforts in some areas, he said.
About 66 shelters are now holding 5,300 people, and four medical-needs shelters are holding 36, he said, adding “We are dealing with widespread power outages.”
“The serious flooding is in Baldwin and Mobile counties,” Mr. Adcock said. “Some people were rescued in boats, but there are no confirmed reports of casualties directly related to the hurricane.”
“We are looking at trees down, power lines down,” he said. Parts of the downtown Mobile area are under water, he said, but he did not know how many feet deep.
Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that additional medical teams were being brought in by air and that California search and rescue teams had been called in “for their expertise” in deep water and swift water rescues.
“Right now we have two priorities, saving lives and sustaining lives,” he added.
“We have literally thousands of people in shelters whose lives we have to sustain, so we have to get commodities to those people,” Mr. Brown said. “We’re just in full operational mode right now.”
He went on, “We have a disaster here that really as I can best describe it is of sobering proportions.”
Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak on Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared but inundating parts of the city and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi, where it killed dozens, ripped away roofs and left coastal roads impassable.
Preliminary reports on Monday said 55 people had died, and Jim Pollard, a spokesman for the Harrison County emergency operations center, said many of the dead were found in an apartment complex in Biloxi. Seven others were found in the Industrial Seaway.
Packing 145-mile-an-hour winds as it made landfall, the storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from its center.
The storm was potent enough to rank as one of the most punishing hurricanes ever to hit the United States. Insurance experts said that damage could exceed $9 billion, which would make it one of the costliest storms on record.
In New Orleans, floodwaters rose to rooftops in one neighborhood, and in many areas emergency workers pulled residents from roofs. The hurricane’s howling winds stripped 15-foot sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as 10,000 evacuees took shelter.
Some of the worst damage reports came from east of New Orleans with an estimated 40,000 homes reported flooded in St. Bernard Parish. In Gulfport, the storm left three of five hospitals without working emergency rooms, beachfront homes wrecked and major stretches of the coastal highway flooded and unpassable.
“It came on Mississippi like a ton of bricks,” Gov. Haley Barbour said at a midday news conference on Monday. “It’s a terrible storm.”
President Bush promised extensive assistance for hurricane victims, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency was expected to be working in the area for months, assessing damage to properties and allocating what is likely to be billions of dollars in aid to homeowners and businesses.
In Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, the governors declared search and rescue their top priority, but they said high waters and strong winds were keeping them from that task, particularly in the hardest-hit areas.
The governors sent out the police and the National Guard after reports of looting, and officials in some parts of Louisiana said they would impose a curfew.
Preliminary damage estimates from the hurricane – which raked across southern Florida last week as a Category 1 storm before reaching the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and making its run at the Gulf Coast – ranged from $9 billion to $16 billion, and could grow, experts said. Only Hurricane Andrew, which ripped through parts of Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi in August 1992, was costlier – with nearly $21 billion in insured losses.
Beyond the property damage caused by flooding and the high winds, Hurricane Katrina also dealt a blow to the oil industry and the lucrative casinos that have been the economic engine for the region. Both oil production on offshore platforms and gambling in the string of casinos that dot the Mississippi Gulf Coast shut down on Sunday as the storm approached.
Since Friday, oil output in the Gulf of Mexico has been cut by 3.1 million barrels. Closing the casinos cost Mississippi $400,000 to $500,000 a day in lost tax revenue alone, and Mr. Barbour said officials had not yet been able to determine the extent of damage to the casinos.
The storm pounded New Orleans for eight hours straight on Monday. Flooding overwhelmed levees built to protect the city from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, sending muddy water swirling into the narrow streets downtown. On the southern shore of the lake, entire neighborhoods of one-story homes were flooded to the rooflines, with nearby off-ramps for Interstate 10 looking like boat ramps amid the waves.
Along the lake were snapped telephone poles, trees blocking roads and live wires scattered over the roads. In one cabin, a family was cooking a chicken dinner over charcoal briquettes on a hibachi. They had lost power like everyone else in the area.
Windows were blown off condominiums, hotels, office buildings and Charity Hospital, sending chards of glass into the winds. Fires broke out despite torrential rain, some ignited, the authorities said, by residents who lighted candles after the electricity went out.
The storm knocked out telephone and cellular service across swaths of the gulf region, and officials in New Orleans said parts of the city could remain without power for weeks.
Two nuclear plants near the path of Hurricane Katrina appear to have weathered the storm without major damage, and a third shut down on Saturday, in anticipation of the hurricane, according to Entergy Nuclear, which owns all three. The extent of damage to the plant that shut down, Waterford, 20 miles west of New Orleans, was still unknown late Monday afternoon because the wind was blowing too hard to go out and look, said Diane Park, a spokeswoman.
The more sparsely populated parishes east of New Orleans, meanwhile, got hit much harder than anyone had expected.
Ms. Blanco said Plaquemines, Orleans, St. Bernard, Jefferson and St. Tammany Parishes had been “devastated by high winds and floodwaters.” In St. Bernard, the emergency center was submerged, and officials estimated that 40,000 homes, too, were flooded.
Joseph B. Treaster reported from New Orleans for this article, and Kate Zernike from Montgomery, Ala. Reporting was contributed by Abby Goodnough in Mobile, Ala.; Michael M. Luo in New York; James Dao in Hattiesburg., Miss.; Jeremy Alford in Baton Rouge, La.; Ralph Blumenthal in Hammond, La.; Diane Allen in Diamondhead, Miss., andChristine Hauser, Terence Neilan and Shadi Rahimi in New York.
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