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.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Martha Stewart says her months in prison gave her time to think about serious things.

August 29, 2005
Martha Stewart, Unchained
By DAVID CARR

Two years after trying to scrub Martha Stewart the person out of Martha Stewart the brand, Martha Stewart the business has a new strategy: Martha Stewart every day.

“I always disagreed with the separation of the name and the brand and the person,” Ms. Stewart said, with a bit of a laugh at the fact that she is all three. “To build on that name and brand is one thing. To divorce the name and the brand from the person was not an approach that I agreed with.”

Ms. Stewart will not be free of her court-mandated monitoring bracelet until Wednesday, but she is already chopping away at the substantial list of chores that piled up for the 10 months while she was in prison and under house arrest.

She sat last week at a white conference table in an office adjacent to the television studio where she will tape her talk show, occasionally tapping at a white laptop computer. Clad in a denim jacket and navy pants, she said her five months in prison had been an undisguised blessing.

“I felt that I could go and have a ‘vacation,’ ” she said, making quote marks with her fingers in the air. “This was a time to think about the future.” She added, in a bit of unconscious self-parody, “I pretty much thought about a lot of serious good things.”

Ms. Stewart, 64, is happy, playful even, cracking wise at her own expense. She has finished taping her domestically elegant version of “The Apprentice,” which goes on the air next month, as does her new daytime lifestyle show, “Martha.” There is a new Martha Stewart cookbook in the works, the first in six years, and “The Martha Rules,” a business tutorial.

Later this fall, her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, will introduce around-the-clock Martha Stewart programming on Sirius satellite radio. And though the company will not confirm it, Ms. Stewart is working with a developer to come up with a line of branded homes designed by the company and inspired by her aesthetic.

But the end of her home confinement does not mean that she and her company are guaranteed success. Ms. Stewart will remain on probation for 18 months for her conviction on charges of lying to prosecutors about a stock sale. Moreover, her postprison appeal as an avatar of taste is untested, and the company’s share price is overvalued by the estimates of almost every analyst.

Of all the rise-and-fall American narratives, Martha Stewart’s can rightly be called operatic, encompassing hubris, humiliation and triumph, with a diva in the middle of all of it. The speed and stakes of her comeback have few rivals. And she is quietly defiant about her sudden ubiquity in the press.

“It’s totally out of desire and totally out of belief that – not that I am essential, but that I am still a vibrant, wise human being with great dreams for the future, great hopes for the future, a great team to work with and a really great company to be involved with,” Ms. Stewart said. “I mean, this is my life.”

Americans seem to be rooting for Ms. Stewart – a Gallup poll released earlier this month suggested, with a 52 percent favorable rating, that she is actually more popular than she was six years ago, before there was a hint of legal trouble.

But the public’s fickleness toward her is well established. All of her equities – gold-plate celebrity, unparalleled skills in homemaking sorcery, real business savvy – could be undone in a flash of bad judgment. It is worth noting that earlier this month, she was found to have violated the terms of her parole and had to serve an additional three weeks of home confinement. She may have learned how to bake using a prison microwave, but has she learned to live by something other than “Martha Rules”? “I think that the confusion about what was allegedly wrong or done is still so blatant, every single article I read is wrong. There are so many misconceptions,” she said, nibbling on a bit of chocolate chip cookie. “Sometimes I even scratch my head and try to think of exactly what was I charged with.”

After she was charged, her company, under the leadership of Sharon Patrick, then chief executive, sought to distance itself from its namesake. Her presence in Martha Stewart Living, the company’s flagship magazine, was diminished, as was her name on the cover.

As the company’s major shareholder, Ms. Stewart responded from prison by doing some significant redecorating. Out went Ms. Patrick and in came Susan Lyne, the former head of ABC Entertainment, as president, and Charles Koppelman, a longtime recording executive, as chairman. Beginning Sept. 21, he will be one of her co-stars on NBC’s “The Apprentice: Martha Stewart,” along with her daughter, Alexis.

Ms. Stewart stated over and over last week that her incarceration was nothing more than a stutter step. “I never stopped thinking about the revitalization that would be necessary and would be occurring as soon as I was able to come back to the company full time,” she said.

Though her title at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia is founder, she is by most estimates both the yeast and the breadwinner.

“There is no Martha Stewart empire without Martha Stewart,” said Suzanna Walters, chairwoman of the department of gender studies at Indiana University. “In another corporate scandal, the C.E.O. would be expendable, but the company’s fortunes rest on this person. She has managed to confound gender expectations, not just by building this company, but up to and including going to jail.”

Tom Wolfe, the novelist who has written often of heroic arcs and tragic falls, said that Ms. Stewart need not wear the hair shirt.

“People don’t consider what she did to be a moral crime,” he said. “I think everybody feels a little guilty about the harsh treatment she received, and I think they wonder, ‘Well, who got hurt by what she did?’ “

Shareholders certainly suffered. After she was charged with conspiracy and lying to investigators, the company’s share price, once over $49, dropped to $5.26, advertisers deserted her magazine and her television show was canceled. The share price has rebounded, closing at $30.55 last Friday, but the company lost $54 million in the six months through June.

Of all her new ventures, Ms. Stewart’s role as arbiter on “The Apprentice” would seem to be fraught. The show does not belong to the company, but could have a profound impact on corporate fortunes. When she stands and inspects the work of others for all to see, will the public be charmed by her inimitable standards or reminded anew of her famed cold-heartedness?

Ms. Lyne acknowledged the risks, but said the program would expose a whole new audience to the company’s products and founder.

“She’s tough and strong in it,” she said, “but there isn’t an iota of– “

“Nasty aggressiveness?” Ms. Stewart interrupted helpfully.

“Yeah,” said Ms. Lyne.

“I think it’s Martha the way she is in her business,” said Mr. Koppelman, “which is straightforward — “

“Assertive,” Ms. Stewart suggested. “And fair and feeling.”

Of course, straightforward and assertive have some downsides, as well.

“Her particular brand of hubris, not withstanding her apology and contrition, well, you had to understand that everybody would be watching,” said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, a firm that provides consulting advice on brand strategy. “There is great risk in putting her back in front of so many people.”

Yet Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of Cook’s Illustrated, a cooking magazine in Boston, suggested that the company had every reason to grab the back of Ms. Stewart’s nicely pressed linen shirt and hang on.

“She does not have to wander in the woods because it is not like she was found with a hooker and cocaine,” Mr. Kimball said. “She believes that she was unfairly treated and she has responded like Patton: ‘Attack, attack, attack, attack.’ That is her modus operandi. She is not the kind of person who sits around waiting for the supply lines to catch up.”

Mr. Koppelman and Ms. Lyne said waiting for the dust to settle would be imprudent. “We have a high-wire act to get from Point A to Point Z,” said Ms. Lyne.

Mr. Koppelman added: “The best way of getting there is on a dead run. We are running over the wire as opposed to walking slowly.”

Speaking of which, Ms. Stewart had a show to rehearse. As she excused herself to go to makeup, she was asked whether she ever tired of living in front of the camera.

“Not when it’s a friendly camera,” she said. “Not when I put it there.”

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

Michael “Mikey Scars” Di Leonardo

August 26, 2005
Under Cross-Examination, Gotti Witness Admits to Lying
By JULIA PRESTON

A former Gambino crime family captain who is an important government witness in the racketeering trial of John A. Gotti, a scion of the family, has described himself as a gangster, a killer and a rat.

But the turncoat witness, Michael DiLeonardo, was more reluctant yesterday as he admitted under cross-examination that he had cheated flamboyantly on his wife, lied to one of his lawyers, worn a hidden F.B.I. wire into his dying mother’s hospital room, and betrayed a fellow mobster to federal prosecutors even as he wrote the man letters saying he loved him like a brother.

The grilling of Mr. DiLeonardo by Mr. Gotti’s defense lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, seemed intended to persuade the jury that he was a particularly duplicitous serial liar and that none of his testimony could be trusted. Mr. DiLeonardo, known as Mikey Scars, was once one of the closest associates of Mr. Gotti, the son of John J. Gotti, the late Dapper Don who was the Gambino boss.

In testimony this week in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. DiLeonardo said that the younger Mr. Gotti ordered two 1992 assaults on Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder and radio talk show host. He said Mr. Gotti oversaw a string of other racketeering crimes for a decade after 1992, when he became an acting Gambino street boss, according to Mr. DiLeonardo, after his father went to prison on a life sentence for racketeering.

Simmering tension over Mr. DiLeonardo’s testimony erupted in the courtroom yesterday when Mr. Lichtman homed in on Mr. DiLeonardo’s claim that anguish over his betrayal of Mr. Gotti led him to attempt suicide in December 2002, just after he agreed to cooperate with the government. He testified that his last thoughts were of Mr. Gotti just before he tried to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills.

In a series of questions, Mr. Lichtman showed that Mr. DiLeonardo had many other reasons to be depressed at the time: his wife wanted to divorce him; his oldest son, Michael, was not speaking to him; his mistress was not taking his calls; and he was facing a possible life sentence on federal murder charges. Mr. DiLeonardo also acknowledged that he had not spoken to Mr. Gotti for five years.

Referring to Mr. Gotti, his client, Mr. Lichtman said, “You are about to swallow two bottles full of pills, and this guy’s face pops into your mind?”

Mr. DiLeonardo replied angrily, “You better believe it, brother.” Turning to look directly at Mr. Gotti, he said: “I am calling you brother. I thought about you.” Mr. DiLeonardo rose from his seat and pointed at Mr. Gotti, who glared back but remained silent, while murmurs of dismay rose from the gallery.

“Please,” Mr. Lichtman said derisively. “You weren’t on good terms with John at this time, were you?”

“I fought with my brother,” Mr. DiLeonardo admitted. “Don’t you?”

Judge Shira A. Scheindlin called an abrupt end to the exchange, but Mr. Gotti’s mother, Victoria, rushed forward to call out to her son: “John, he loves you, but he’s getting you 30 years. Imagine if he didn’t love you, he’d get you the death penalty.”

Mr. Lichtman also showed that Mr. DiLeonardo, while he was in jail after mid-2002, had sent dozens of handwritten letters to an associate, Noel Modica, asking him to take care of his estranged older son.

Mr. DiLeonardo signed one letter to Mr. Modica from “Your brother Michael, with love,” and added in a postscript: “Backstabbers, open your eyes, watch for them.” Soon after, Mr. DiLeonardo had his first meeting with federal prosecutors, where he linked Mr. Modica to crimes.

Mr. DiLeonardo also described how he had decided to have a child with a mistress, identified in court by her first name, Madelina.

Mr. DiLeonardo explained that he moved Madelina and his son Anthony, now 5, to a home on Staten Island a few miles from the mansion where his wife, Tony Marie, lived with his son Michael, now 19.

He acknowledged that he lied “every day” to his wife, denying that he was having an affair, and had invited many of their friends to a christening party for his new son, confident they feared him too much to tell his wife.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

Yoshiko Kusano/European Pressphoto Agency

A reporter for CNET News used Eric Schmidt, above, the chairman and chief executive of Google, as an example to explore the power of search engines.

Google Anything, So Long as It’s Not Google

Julian Broad for The New York Times

Through the looking glass: Lucinda Chambers finds little room for minimalism in her West London home.

August 28, 2005
Welcome to the Jumble
By IAIN R.WEBB
‘I love decoration,” says Lucinda Chambers, the fashion director of British Vogue. ”I love decoration in the home, on me, on people that I see. I’m as happy decorating Christmas trees as I am a girl in front of me.”

Making my way through her family’s rambling home in West London, it is difficult to disagree. There is little room here for minimalism or modernism. There is little room for anything, although I am sure Chambers would think otherwise.

Chambers’s residence is a ”Willy Wonka” wonderland of inspiration. Photos and paintings hang side by side by side, a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of memories on the walls, while cherished objets trouves litter every available surface. Florid clothes and fabrics make pretty piles, stacked on top of more of the same. Trinkets, treasures and bright baubles (leftovers from the Christmas tree?) dangle from the ceiling, shelves and nowhere in particular.

Chambers told me once how she spent a weekend merrily sticking postage stamps onto a lampshade, and here it is among the melee in her country-cottage-cum-yard-sale kitchen. Upstairs, in one son’s bedroom (she has three boys: Toby, 17; Theo, 12; and Twizzy, 7), she proudly shows me a standard lamp that she covered with pages torn from their comic books. It is this kind of insatiable, marvelously dotty creativity that has established Chambers as one in a small club of the most revered fashion stylists in the world. ”I think her style is truly creative,” says Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, explaining that Chambers doesn’t just take an outfit from the catwalk and use it to make a fashion picture but ”takes it into another dimension and sometimes to a degree that is difficult, because if she could, everything would be especially made.” Shulman adds with a smile, ”There wouldn’t be a single thing that you could go into a shop and buy in her dream world.”

Chambers is aware of this: ”I suppose my favorite shoots, if I am honest, are the ones that are not particularly fashionable, because they are the ones that will last, and they are the ones that you can look at a year later and not sort of cringe and think, Were we really wearing that?”

Her approach to styling is, needless to say, sui generis. ”It’s how I get dressed in the morning,” Chambers says. ”I don’t twiddle around with my clothes. You start with the necklace, and you build around a necklace, or you start with even something as random as a shoelace; you’re just in love with that ribbon in a shoe, and you build everything around that. I’m very decisive. I don’t take things off and put them back on, and if I do, I want to start again from scratch.”

The way Chambers chooses to dress — even in the more sartorially tolerant realm of fashion — is a bit odd. ”I think Lucinda’s look is a kind of art form,” Shulman says. Chambers acknowledges that her personal style, as unmade as the artist Tracey Emin’s bed, is probably the antithesis of how people might imagine a fashion director to look.

”Shabby, disheveled, boho — I know all those words. I know I don’t look smart,” she admits. ”I’ve tried. I just can’t do it. I think it’s a lot to do with hair. My hair never will behave itself, but also I never, ever want to look sexy. It sounds odd, but I never really want to be noticed. I’ve found a way of dressing that really suits me and my personality. I really like to be comfortable in my clothes. I don’t like to look after my clothes. If I’m going to wear a dress that won’t look good if it’s creased, then I’d much prefer to wash it and make it creased so I don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the day. I’m aware that I probably disappoint, but I suppose I’m just a bit too bloody-minded.”

The photographer Mario Testino has worked with Chambers for almost 25 years. ”The thing I adore about her is that it is never the outside with Lucinda; it is always the inside,” he says. ”She definitely has that British thing of the unknown surprise. She likes layering. She likes flowers, roses. She likes color, and she likes a mix of things that don’t necessarily go together: that constant search for what shouldn’t work.”

In this regard, she is the quintessential British cocktail: two parts fantasy (in the tradition of Cecil Beaton), one part punk rocker.

When Testino and Shulman recall meeting her, they remember her as a bleached-blond punk in a tutu. Later she took to wearing a Dickensian top hat.

”She is so open toward everybody who interacts with her,” says Consuelo Castiglioni, the designer of the Marni label. ”I see her as a fairy, and sometimes she really does magic.”

For the last nine years, Chambers has been moonlighting as a creative consultant at Marni — a collaboration based on mutual admiration, family values and a simple love of clothes.

”It wasn’t, ‘Let’s set out to do this label that’s going to be incredibly fashionable.’ It was so organic,” Chambers says. ”I think it’s possible not to be cold about fashion, to not set out to succeed in a very corporate way, but to grow something out of a passion and an excuse to wear clothes.” Chambers says she has no specific title within the Marni organization.

”I suppose my role is to bring things in from the outside world, to suggest and have an eye — designers can be quite isolated,” she says.

Even so, she and Castiglioni rarely, if ever, disagree, whether it’s about ”bringing up our children or designing a rug, and that’s pretty amazing.”

She adds: ”I don’t think people make it a fashion decision to buy Marni. I think it’s a totally emotional decision because you fall in love with it.”

When I ask which of her Vogue fashion stories she loves most, not surprisingly it is a dreamy fantasy shot last year by Testino called ”Road to Marrakech.” It features Daria Werbowy as a queen of the desert. In one picture she wears a print dress by Vivienne Westwood, an antique hooped crinoline skirt and petticoats, a feather cape by John Galliano for Dior (worn as a skirt), a Gaultier sweater and a Marni cape. The outfit is completed with two trilbies layered one on top of the other,

a head scarf, arms full of Plexiglas bangles, a pair of clogs, sunglasses, polka-dot tights and a floral-patterned umbrella, all tied up with string.

”I suppose it’s the one that’s most like my home.” God bless it

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

John Volkmann and his wife Kathy of Pass Christian, Miss. run for shelter as a piece of sheetmetal flies through the air during Hurricane Katrina in Gulfport.

Photo Credit: Frank Polich — Reuters Photo

washingtonpost.com
Katrina Causing Damage, Distress Across Gulf Coast Region
New Orleans and Bioloxi and Gulport, Miss. Hit Hard By Eastern Parts of Hurricane

By Peter Whoriskey and Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, August 29, 2005; 12:57 PM

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 — The monster storm Katrina raged ashore along the Gulf Coast Monday morning, ripping off roofs, shattering windows and causing widespread flooding and vast power outages before heading inland towards the northeast.

New Orleans and the Mississippi cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, as well as dozens of smaller coastal communies, were said to have been hard hit after Katrina came ashore with winds of about 140 mph, making it a category 4 storm. By 11 a.m. EDT, Katrina was category 3 with maximum wind speed of 125 mph, still dangerous.

While it was difficult to assess damage early in the day, there were numerous early reports of buildings collapsing along the coast, roofs blowing apart, windows flying out of office buildings and major flooding.

New Orleans’ Superdome, serving as a shelter for about 10,000 people, lost power and was leaking from the roof, parts of which flew off. The roof of a hospital was reported to be blowing off just outside of the city in Chalmette.

Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan told wire services that his city had suffered “a devastating hit.”

Bong Q. Mui, chief of staff at Chalmette Medical Center, located just outside of New Orleans, reported heavy rain and strong winds and reported at 10:30 a.m. EDT that the roof of the hospital was blowing off. He said he had heard that parts of Interstate 90 were under four feet of water and that the roof of the local high school was gone.

The hospital, which has about 50 patients who could not be evacuated, lost electricity and was operating on emergency back-up power.

Some windows were blown out of office buildings in New Orleans even before the brunt of the storm arrived.

The weather service stressed that Katrina, although reduced in power, remained a life-threatening force. “This is still an extremely dangerous and potentially deadly hurricane,” said a statement from the National Hurricane Center.

“There will be a tremendous amount of property damage,” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) said in an interview on CNN. “We don’t know yet. We still have a long way to go. We are watching. We are worried.”

The fate of the Superdome underscored that warning. Pieces of metal sheared off, leaving two holes that were visible from the floor, the Associated Press reported. Water dripped in and people were moved away from about five sections of those seats.

The development, around 9 a.m. EDT did not create any visible fear among the thousands who spent the night in the huge arena. Some watched as sheets of metal, flapping visibly, rumbled loudly, the AP said. From the floor, looking up more than 19 stories, it appeared to be openings of about 6 feet long.

General Manager Glenn Menard said he did not know how serious the problem was. “We have no way of getting anyone up there to look,” he said.

Gov. Blanco said “nothing has impaired the lives” of people in the Superdome and that there was no structural damage.

Katrina made landfall at 7:10 a.m. EDT at Buras, La., in Southern Plaquemines parish. It was a Category 4, down from last night, with maximum winds of 140 mph to the east of the storm center. The eye was roughly 32 miles in diameter. Hurricane force winds extended 120 miles outward from the eye with tropical storm force winds of 60 and 70 mph extending outward for 230 miles.

Richard Knabb, of the Hurricane Center, said Katrina was headed for the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Katrina’s projected route after landfall hugs a stretch of warm Gulf water from which it could suck more energy and intensify, the weather service said.

Power outages began in the New Orleans area starting about 6 a.m. In addition to the Superdome, other large structures — including schools and hotel ballrooms — had been transformed into refugee centers, all of them packed. Three thousand people took cover in the Hyatt Hotel ballroom in downtown New Orleans.

Millions of residents of New Orleans and other Gulf communities evacuated, although hundreds of thousands remained, preparing to take cover as they could.

New Orleans in particular worried about the storm surge — huge waves whipped up by the enormous force of the hurricane winds — which could very well overcome the levees of the city.

Oil companies shut down production from many of the offshore platforms that provide a quarter of U.S. oil and gas production. U.S. oil futures jumped nearly $5 a barrel in opening trade to touch a peak of $70.80. The rise in oil prices fed through to other financial markets, hurting stocks and the dollar on fears that economic growth might be curtailed but boosting safe havens such as government bonds and gold.

While Katrina was technically a Category 4 storm Monday morning at 155 mph, officials cautioned that there had not been a significant change in the storm’s intensity.

“Just because Katrina is no longer a Category 5 hurricane does not mean that extensive damage and storm surge flooding will not occur,” said a statement from the Hurricane Center.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the mandatory evacuation of the city’s 485,000 residents. Officials acknowledged that tens of thousands of residents and tourists would be unable to leave. With the airport closed, the city organized buses to transport those left behind to 10 emergency shelters and encouraged people to bring supplies and food for a three- to five-day stay. Three nursing home patients died during the evacuation, according to an Associated Press report.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Nagin said at a televised news conference Sunday evening. “The city of New Orleans has never seen a hurricane of this magnitude hit it directly. . . . We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared.”

Officials said Katrina’s wrath could easily surpass the devastation caused in 1965 by Hurricane Betsy, the most punishing storm to hit southeastern Louisiana. That storm killed 75 and caused $7 billion in damage when southern Louisiana was less populated and less exposed.

The American Red Cross said it had set up 35 kitchens in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that could serve 700,000 meals a day. Meanwhile, President Bush declared a state of emergency in Louisiana and Mississippi, making it easier for federal agencies to coordinate relief efforts with states and localities.

New Orleans is especially vulnerable to a hurricane’s fury because the city sits six to eight feet lower than the surrounding waters of the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. And it is sinking lower every year.

The levees that harnessed the Mississippi and helped make New Orleans one of the world’s busiest ports and a thriving center of the oil and gas industry also have prevented the river from spreading sediment around its delta. As a result, southern Louisiana is slowly sinking into the encroaching Gulf, losing about 24 square miles of coastal marshes and barrier islands every year. Those marshes and islands used to help slow storms as they approached New Orleans; computer simulations have suggested that their loss will increase storm surges and waves by several feet.

“If you can picture sort of a soup bowl, the city is located in the middle,” said Gregory W. Stone, director of the Coastal Studies Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “And once the levees — sort of the perimeter of the bowl– are breached or overtopped, then that water gets in there and just can’t get out . . . . It’s like filling a bucket up with water. This is probably the worst-case scenario that we’ve all been very, very worried about for quite some time.”

Nagin said Katrina’s predicted storm surge would probably overwhelm New Orleans’s levees. And the city’s pumps — capable of removing only an inch of water every hour under normal conditions — require electricity, often the first casualty in any hurricane. If Katrina does slam into New Orleans, experts say the city could be underwater for weeks or months, creating a toxic soup of chemicals, rodents, poisons and snakes.

Katrina formed Wednesday over the Bahamas as a tropical depression. By Thursday it was a Category 1 hurricane with 80-mph winds, flooding neighborhoods in South Florida and leaving more than 1 million homes and businesses without electricity. The storm then moved over the Gulf of Mexico and, nourished by warm waters, angled toward the Gulf Coast as it steadily rose in intensity.

Fred Barbash and Christopher Lee reported from Washington. Washington Post staff writer Ylan Q. Mui contributed to this story from Washington.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Victor Romero/Associated Press

Soldiers on a carefully supervised dhow cruise offered by Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar.

August 28, 2005
War Relief
By JIM LEWIS
There was a soldier playing a fly-fishing video game in a room in Building 109. Outside, there was a black flag whipping in the wind to warn that the heat was rising toward 115. Past that there were the other buildings that make up Camp As Sayliyah, then a ring of concrete bomb-blast barriers and armed guards; past that was Doha, Qatar, a little U.S.-friendly thumb of a country sticking up into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia, and then the desert, Iraq a few hours northwest, Afghanistan a few hours northeast.

But there in Building 109, it was air-conditioned and clean, and the soldier, a black kid with a shaved head and eyeglasses, was casting his fly again and again, the alpha waves in his brain slowly rolling as the electronic water rippled and little splashes came out of the speakers. To his left and his right, there were other soldiers, like him brought down to As Sayliyah for R. and R., playing combat games with names like MechAssault and Men of Valor — kids taken out of war for four days, who spend them playing war games on television. But this soldier had wandered into the Xbox room and found this fishing game, so that’s what he was doing. He didn’t want to talk to anyone; he just wanted to fish in a simulated Rocky Mountain lake.

R. and R. is different these days. It is no longer the staging ground for legendary benders, as it once was in, say, Manila or even in San Diego. As recently as Bosnia, one soldier told me wistfully, military personnel could take their leaves in Budapest. ”They dropped you off at a hotel and you were on your own,” he said. But this is a different war, a different Army and, above all, a different host country. Qatar is an anomaly in the region: relatively open and relatively progressive. Nevertheless, traditional vices are simply unavailable. There is apparently no prostitution — and no alcohol except in Western hotels, and the hotels are off limits to soldiers. Muslims generally find an excessive display of skin offensive, and soldiers are forbidden from going off base in sleeveless shirts. Moreover, security is an overwhelming concern. Trips on the town, to go shopping in one of Doha’s large Western-style malls or a little sea cruise on a dhow, are carefully planned and supervised; even so, sign-up lists fill quickly, and not every soldier gets to go.

Troops aren’t supposed to drink off base, and on base — in a loud campus-style hall called the Oasis — they’re limited to beer and wine, and only three servings of those. They aren’t so happy about that, but judging from the rowdiness at the Oasis at night, at least some find a way around the system. (Three tickets are issued per soldier; ”the Mormons are very popular around the Oasis,” a sergeant told me.) Still, it’s all very controlled, almost sanitized, and calibrated to maximize the troops’ enjoyment while minimizing offense to the host nation.


This year, about 35,000 troops will come to As Sayliyah on a four-day R.-and-R. pass, plucked out of Falluja or Bagram or wherever they may be and flown in on C-130′s. They come wearing combat fatigues and Oakley wraparounds, looking exhausted and dazed. They are issued linens and bunks, and for the first 24 hours most of them just decompress, flopping down on big couches to watch movies on TV or checking their e-mail on the banks of terminals in the main hall.

Some of them never leave the camp at all. In various buildings around As Sayliyah, the Army has built a kind of simulated Little America, with a Chili’s restaurant serving burgers to soldiers while country music plays over the sound system and a Burger King and an Orange Julius, gyms and a swimming pool, telephones for calls home and a day spa, where troops can get massages and haircuts, manicures and pedicures.

There are women in this Army, after all — not an enormous number, but about 10 percent of the soldiers who come through As Sayliyah are female. Whether they’re looking for something different from the men on their four days off is hard to say. Most of the men say the women like to shop more; most of the women say there isn’t any difference at all.

In fact, as many men use the spa as women. One afternoon, I found a pair of marines at a table outside — young, quiet, polite and unassuming: Lance Cpl. Miguel Torres from Del Rio, Tex., and Cpl. Ricorda Randall from Camilla, Ga. They both worked in information technology, but Torres wanted to be a filmmaker; he spoke admiringly of Almodovar, Wes Anderson and Gael Garcia Bernal. He was tattooed all over his torso and arms, work he had had done in Japan, but he was sweet-tempered and self-mocking. Randall was a big guy, with a twin brother in the Corps somewhere and an infant back in the States. They had just come in from Al Asad Air Base in Iraq; they’d been buddies since boot camp. I saw the two of them later in the spa, sheepishly getting manicures, their calluses buffed away, nails cleaned and cuticles cut back. ”I don’t think I like this,” Torres said.

”I think I’m losing macho points here,” Randall said.

If nothing else, R. and R. is a chance to try something new. That night, I went out on a chaperoned trip with a couple of corporals. They were 21; it was their first time in an Arab nation that they weren’t occupying; and they were wide-eyed and full of questions. What’s the difference between the veiled women and the unveiled? (It’s a choice.) Where does the emir live? (In a palace.) How many wives does he have? (Three.) In the gold souk they bought pearl necklaces to send back to their mothers. In the restaurant of the Marriott (the rules about visiting hotels are somewhat bendable), one nervously ordered sushi for the first time, the other a glass of wine.

It can take some time for troops to adjust to a land where the locals aren’t automatically under suspicion. The next day, a marine who had come down from Falluja took me aside: he had just been on a drive through town, and he was having a little trouble adjusting to the Qatari habit of tailgating — it reminded him of car bombers. ”It just sends the hairs up on the back of my neck,” he said, and then, regaining his nonchalance: ”It’s a little irritating.”

Nonetheless, he and his buddies seemed happy to be there — happy to be anywhere other than Ramadi or Kabul or Baghdad, at least for a few days, happy to be kicking back in this curious re-creation of America, with its fast-food outlets and Ping-Pong tables, its hair salon and excursions. A break is a break, and you ease your mind however you can. Three or four hours after I first happened upon him, I wandered back into the Xbox room and saw the same soldier, still sitting there playing the same electronic angling game, using the controller to cast the little fly, zoning out as the line whirred and the water rippled. Up north there was a war; down here he was gone fishin’, and nothing was going to keep him from enjoying it.

Jim Lewis is a writer who lives in Austin, Tex. His latest novel is ”The King is Dead.”

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Back to Top

E.M. Forster by Roger Fry, 1911

I believe in aristocracy, though- if that is the right
word; and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of
power; based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy
of the sensitive, the considerate and plucky. Its mem-
bers are to be found in all nations and classes, and all
through the ages; and there is a secret understanding be-
tween them when they meet. They represent the true
human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer
race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in
obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for
others as well as for themselves, they are considerate
with-
out being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the
power to endure, and they can take a joke.

E.M. Forster. Two Cheers for Democracy