August 31, 2005
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Bus Convoy to Move Thousands From Superdome to Astrodome
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Bus Convoy to Move Thousands From Superdome to Astrodome
Marko Georgiev for The New York Times
Tommie Clark, 79, and his wife, Florence, 75, were in the Superdome, where sunshine was coming in through holes in the roof. Those who sought shelter in the dome are being evacuated to Houston.
August 31, 2005
Bus Convoy to Move Thousands From Superdome to Astrodome
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER and MARIA NEWMANNEW ORLEANS, Aug. 31 -With much of the city inundated and uninhabitable, state and federal officials said today that they would bus thousands of newly homeless residents to Houston, where they will be sheltered in the Astrodome.
In Washington, President Bush, who earlier glimpsed the destruction along the Gulf Coast from the air on his way back from Texas earlier in the day, declared that “we are dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation’s history.”
“This recovery will take years,” he added.
The Department of Homeland Security assumed control of the federal response to the disaster, with Secretary Michael Chertoff declaring the situation an “incident of national significance.”
The government said more than 78,000 people were now in shelters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, the three states that bore the brunt of Katrina’s onslaught.
The refugees from New Orleans, at least 10,000 of whom initially sought shelter from Hurricane Katrina in the New Orleans Superdome, will make the 350-mile trip to Houston on 475 buses provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, officials said. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said the Astrodome, which can provide living space for about 25,000 people, will be available to house them at least until December, and longer, if necessary.
The governor also said that he would open the doors to Texas’ public schools to children from out of state whose families were left homeless by the storms.
“By the grace of God, we could be the ones who have this extraordinary need,” Mr. Perry said. “We’re going to get through this together as one American family.”
With hospitals closing down, no running water or electricity in most parts of the city, health risks intensifying and looters running rampant in places, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said officials had no choice but to try to clear everyone out of New Orleans, even if that meant moving people to another state.
“The logistical problems are impossible and we have to evacuate people in shelters,” the governor said, according to The Associated Press. “It’s becoming untenable. There’s no power. It’s getting more difficult to get food and water supplies in, just basic essentials.”
One bit of positive news came from New Orleans’ emergency services overseer, Col. Terry Ebbert, who said this afternoon that the floodwaters appeared to be stabilizing. “The water isn’t going to get higher,” he said. “You’ve got six inches of variation during the day depending on the tides.”
“You can go up the street here a few blocks and it’s dry,” he added. “You can go to the lower ninth ward and it is under 15 feet of water.”
President Bush, who plans to visit the storm-ravaged areas on Friday or Saturday, met after his return to Washington today with a task force he established to coordinate the efforts of 14 federal agencies. He will ask Congress for more money to aid those affected by the storm, and he put the federal response to the disaster in the hands of the Homeland Security Department, led by Mr. Chertoff.
That designation will set in motion, for the first time, a national emergency plan devised after the 2001 terror attacks to coordinate the work of several agencies aiding recovery efforts. “We will work tirelessly to ensure that our fellow citizens have the sustained support and the necessary aid to recover and reclaim their homes, their lives, and their communities,” Mr. Chertoff said in a televised briefing.
Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, who is part of the task force, said he was declaring a public health emergency for the entire gulf region because of the threat of an outbreak of disease in areas without running water or electricity.
In addition to other assistance, President Bush said he some 11,000 National Guard troops had been assigned to help patrol the storm-stricken region. The Coast Guard was flying in relief supplies on cargo planes and the Navy was sending five ships carrying supplies, as well.
Search-and-rescue teams in helicopters and boats continued to search for survivors in the flooded and battered city of New Orleans, with hundreds already plucked from rooftops of flooded houses. Officials said that it could be months before residents would be allowed to return to their homes.
Governor Blanco flew over the devastated area today, and later, with tears in her eyes, recounted to reporters her seeing people stranded on rooftops, water taking over homes. The death toll, she said, will probably continue to rise.
“This is heartbreaking,” she said. “I think people will have to draw on their inner strength.”
Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, who accompanied the governor on her survey, said that it was difficult to view her devastated hometown from the air. “What I saw today is equivalent to what I saw flying over the tsunami area,” she said. “There are places that are no longer there.”
The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, told reporters that “we know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water” and that there were others in the attics of flood houses, leading him to believe, The A.P. reported, that the ultimate death toll could be “minimum, hundreds, most likely, thousands.”
In Mississippi, officials raised the official count of the dead to at least 100. “It looks like Hiroshima, is what it looks like,” Gov. Haley Barbour said in describing parts of Harrison County, Miss.
Some Mississippi casinos, which had been floating on barges, were swept half a mile inland. An oil platform in the gulf was transported within a hundred yards of Dauphin Island, the barrier island at the south end of Mobile County, Ala., and much of that island was underwater.
Governor Blanco of Louisiana said relief efforts had first to focus on getting people out of afflicted areas, and to bring enough food and water to help survivors and refugees. She also said a top priority for Louisiana was repairing the two breaches that opened on Tuesday in levees that were holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans.
Workers for the Army Corps of Engineers today continued to drop 3,000-pound containers to try to close one 500-foot gap in the levee. But agency officials said that they were having trouble getting needed equipment to the work sites because many bridges and roads were destroyed during the storm.
Despite the obstacles, Louisiana officials said that 250 slings were on their way, and that there were 100 additional 3,000-pound containers filled and ready to be dropped into the hole. About 250 concrete barriers have been delivered on site already.
“The challenge is an engineering nightmare,” Ms. Blanco said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
In New Orleans, it was not the water from the sky but the water that broke through the city’s protective barriers that had changed everything for the worse. With a population of nearly 500,000, New Orleans is protected from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain by levees.
When the levees gave way in some critical spots, streets that were essentially dry in the hours immediately after the hurricane passed were several feet deep in water on Tuesday morning. Even downtown areas that lie on higher ground were flooded. Mayor Nagin said both city airports were under water.
The Superdome’s roof suffered damage during the storm, and rising waters around the arena have meant that the thousands of refugees there were huddled in increasingly grim conditions as clean water and food dwindled, toilets overflowed and floodwaters threatened emergency generators. Authorities fear the conditions will give way to illnesses and infections.
Looting broke out in the city as opportunistic thieves cleaned out abandoned stores. In one incident, officials said, a police officer was shot and critically wounded.
“These are not individuals looting,” Colonel Ebbert, the city’s director of homeland security, said. “These are large groups of armed individuals.”
In some places, armed national guardsmen and law-enforcement officials carrying rifles could be seen patrolling in groups, in some cases in armored vehicles.
Hundreds of critically ill patients had to be evacuated from Charity Hospital and Tulane University Hospital because of the flooding. At Tulane, they were removed by helicopter from the roof of a parking garage.
The staff of the city’s major daily, The Times-Picayune, which was able to publish only an online version of Tuesday editions, was forced to flee the paper’s offices.
Preliminary damage estimates from insurance experts on Monday ranged from $9 billion to $16 billion, but they were pushed up past $25 billion on Tuesday, which could make Hurricane Katrina the costliest in history, surpassing Hurricane Andrew in 1992, with $21 billion in insured losses.
As the scope of the damage to oil and gas facilities in the Gulf of Mexico became more apparent, energy prices rocketed to record highs. Experts predicted that further increases were likely.
Today, the Energy Department said it would release oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep refineries supplied.
From the air, New Orleans was a shocking sight of utter demolition. Seen from the vantage point of a Jefferson Parish sheriff’s helicopter transporting FEMA officials, vast stretches of the city resembled a community of houseboats. Twenty-block neighborhoods were under water as high as the roofs of three-story houses. One large building, the Galleria, had most, if not all, of its 600 windows blown out.
Sections of Interstate 10, the principal artery through the city, had pieces missing or misaligned, as if the highway was an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Parts of the 24-mile-long Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the world’s longest overwater highway bridge, were missing as well. Fires had broken out in sundry buildings, and hundreds of thousands of people were without power.
One woman swam from her home on Monday and then walked through the night to take shelter in a 24-hour bar in the French Quarter. Another left her flooding house but could not persuade her elderly roommate to come with her. Her roommate insisted, “God will take care of me.”
Even today, two days after the storm ripped through here, people were still wading through waist-high water, looking to determine the fate of their homes. Rescue workers, who were plucking people off roofs in rescue cages, reported seeing bodies floating through the water.
Parishes east of the city were also battered. The president of Plaquemines Parish, on the southeastern tip of Louisiana, announced that the lower half of the parish had been reclaimed by the river. St. Bernard Parish, adjacent to New Orleans, was largely rooftops and water.
In South Diamondhead, Miss., on St. Louis Bay, all that remained of the entire community of 200 homes was pilings. Boats were stuck in trees.
“Yeah, we caught it,” said Randy Keel, 46. “We basically got what we’re wearing.”
Everyone was “walking around like zombies,” Mr. Keel said.
Joseph B. Treaster reported from New Orleans for this article, and Maria Newman from New York. Reporting was also contributed by Abby Goodnough, Kate Zernike and Shaila Dewan from Biloxi, Miss; Felicity Barringer from Houma, La.; Ralph Blumenthal from New Orleans; N. R. Kleinfield, Shadi Rahimi and Michael Luo from New York; Jeremy Alford from Baton Rouge, La.; and Diane Allen from South Diamondhead, Miss.
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