Post by Shadow on Sept 5, 2005 6:25:57 GMT -5
*Please note now, Some of the following articles and images will either break your
heart or make you blood boil. Don't continue unless you are sure you want to.
Yahoo pictures (original)
*hosted on my photobuckets account
An aerial view of flooded school buses in a lot, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, in New Orleans, LA. The flood is a result of Hurricane Katrina that passed through the area last Monday.(AP Photo/Phil Coale)
*Why weren't these used in the evacuation?
New Orleans Left to the Dead and Dying
AP News
By ALLEN G. BREED
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - As the last weary refugees from the Superdome and convention center headed to shelters, New Orleans drew closer to dealing with its dead, a gruesome landscape of corpses expected to number in the thousands.
No one knows how many people were killed by Hurricane Katrina and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating in the ruined city, crumpled in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.
Echoing the mayor's prediction, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Saturday she expected the death toll to reach the thousands. And Craig Vanderwagen, rear admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service, said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.
Touring an airport triage center, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a physician, said "a lot more than eight to 10 people are dying a day."
Most were those too sick or weak to survive. But not all.
Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death and another commit suicide at the Superdome. Womack was beaten with a pipe and treated at the airport center, where bodies were kept in a refrigerated truck.
Chertoff: Feds in Control of New Orleans
Breitbart
WASHINGTON
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Sunday the federal government is in control of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans after days in which authorities failed to reach stranded refugees and evacuate the city.
Chertoff declined to estimate the death toll from the hurricane and its aftermath, but conceded that untold numbers of people could be found dead in swamped homes, floating in the water and in the facilities used as shelters.
"We need to prepare the country for what's coming ... we are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods, it is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine," Chertoff said on "Fox News Sunday."
Kanye West's Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC
Washington Post
By Lisa de Moraes
Saturday, September 3, 2005; C01
Why We Love Live Television, Reason No. 137:
NBC's levee broke and Kanye West flooded through with a tear about the federal response in New Orleans during the network's live concert fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina last night.
The rapper was among the celebs and singers participating in the one-hour special, produced by NBC News and run on the NBC broadcast network, as well as MSNBC and CNBC, because, hey, the numbers couldn't be any worse than usual on a Friday night and hopefully they'd raise a chunk of change for a good cause, the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.
Among the performers, Faith Hill sang "There Will Come a Time," which included the lyrics, "The darkness will be gone, the weak shall be strong. Hold on to your faith." Aaron Neville performed Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" with its chorus: "They're trying to wash us away, they're trying to wash us away."
West was not scheduled to perform; he was one of the blah, blah, blahers, who would read from scripts prepared by the network about the impact of Katrina on southern Louisiana and Mississippi.
West and Mike Myers had been paired up to appear about halfway through the show. Their assignment: Take turns reading a script describing the breach in the levees around New Orleans.
*Related
The Show Didn't Benefit by Censors
LA Times
By Robert Hilburn, Times Staff Writer
AS we enter the celebrity telethon phase of the Katrina tragedy, NBC's "A Concert for Hurricane Relief" stands as a blueprint for its own kind of institutional failure.
By censoring Grammy-winning rapper Kanye West's remarks critical of President Bush during its West Coast feed of the program Friday night, the network violated the most moving and essential moment in an otherwise sterile, self-serving corporate broadcast.
"It would be most unfortunate," the network said in a statement defending its action, "if the efforts of the artists who participated tonight and the generosity of millions of Americans who are helping those in need are overshadowed by one person's opinion."
Excuse me, but whose tragedy is this: NBC's or America's?
NBC may have been nervous about West's comments, including the notion that America and its president are unresponsive to the needs of the poor. But you can be sure those remarks would have been cheered more than anything else in the program by the black parents and children still trapped in the New Orleans Convention Center and the Superdome if they had been able to hear them.
The line NBC stopped us from hearing on the West Coast: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
The puzzling thing is why NBC axed that, but allowed another provocation, potentially more disturbing, to stay in: "We already realized a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us."
As White House Anxiety Grows, Bush Tries to Quell Political Crisis
New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 - Faced with one of the worst political crises of his administration, President Bush abruptly overhauled his September schedule on Saturday as the White House scrambled to gain control of a situation that Republicans said threatened to undermine Mr. Bush's second-term agenda and the party's long-term ambitions.
In a sign of the mounting anxiety at the White House, Mr. Bush made a rare Saturday appearance in the Rose Garden before live television cameras to announce that he was dispatching additional active-duty troops to the Gulf Coast. He struck a more somber tone than he had at times on Friday during a daylong tour of the disaster region, when he had joked at the airport in New Orleans about the fun he had had in his younger days in Houston. His demeanor on Saturday was similar to that of his most somber speeches after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," said Mr. Bush, slightly exaggerating the stricken land area. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."
The president was flanked by his high military and emergency command: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As Mr. Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser, listened on the sidelines, as did Dan Bartlett, the counselor to the president and Mr. Bush's overseer of communications strategy. Their presence underscored how seriously the White House is reacting to the political crisis it faces.
The Bursting Point
New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS
As Ross Douthat observed on his blog, The American Scene, Katrina was the anti-9/11.
On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.
Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.
The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.
And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.
Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.
Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans
Army Times
By Joseph R. Chenelly
Times staff writer
NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
Jones said the military first needs to establish security throughout the city. Military and police officials have said there are several large areas of the city are in a full state of anarchy.
Dozens of military trucks and up-armored Humvees left the staging area just after 11 a.m. Friday, while hundreds more troops arrived at the same staging area in the city via Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.
“We’re here to do whatever they need us to do,” Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon, of the Oklahoma National Guard’s 1345th Transportation Company. “We packed to stay as long as it takes.”
Guardsmen 'played cards' amid New Orleans chaos: police official
Yahoo
NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - A top New Orleans police officer said that National Guard troops sat around playing cards while people died in the stricken city after Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans deputy police commander W.S. Riley launched a bitter attack on the federal response to the disaster though he praised the way the evacuation was eventually handled.
His remarks fuelled controversy over the government's handling of events during five days when New Orleans succumbed to lawlessness after Katrina swamped the city's flood defenses.
The National Guard commander, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, said the reservist force was slow to move troops into New Orleans because it did not anticipate the collapse of the city's police force.
Law Officers, Overwhelmed, Are Quitting the Force
New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 - Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said on Saturday.
Some officers told their superiors they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm.
The absences come during a period of extraordinary stress for the New Orleans Police Department. For nearly a week, many of its 1,500 members have had to work around the clock, trying to cope with flooding, an overwhelming crush of refugees, looters and occasional snipers.
P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police, said most of his officers were staying at their posts. But in an unusual note of sympathy for a top police official, he said it was understandable that many were frustrated. He said morale was "not very good."
"If I put you out on the street and made you get into gun battles all day with no place to urinate and no place to defecate, I don't think you would be too happy either," Mr. Compass said in an interview. "Our vehicles can't get any gas. The water in the street is contaminated. My officers are walking around in wet shoes."
Fire Department officials said they did not know of any firefighters who had quit. But they, too, were sympathetic to struggling emergency workers.
W. J. Riley, the assistant superintendent of police, said there were about 1,200 o
Mississippians' Suffering Overshadowed
Breitbart
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Associated Press Writer
JACKSON, Miss.
Mississippi hurricane survivors looked around Saturday and wondered just how long it would take to get food, clean water and shelter. And they were more than angry at the federal government and the national news media.
Richard Gibbs was disgusted by reports of looting in New Orleans and upset at the lack of attention hurricane victims in his state were getting.
"I say burn the bridges and let 'em all rot there," he said. "We're suffering over here too, but we're not killing each other. We've got to help each other. We need gas and food and water and medical supplies."
Gibbs and his wife, Holly, have been stuck at their flooded home in Gulfport just off the Biloxi River. Water comes up to the second floor, they are out of gasoline, and food supplies are running perilously low.
Until recently, they also had Holly's 75-year-old father, who has a pacemaker and severe diabetes, with them. Finally they got an ambulance to take him to the airport so he could be airlifted to Lafayette, La., for medical help.
Doctors fear tainted water gave shelter residents dysentery
Nola
The Associated Press
BILOXI, Miss. (AP) — About 40 people have been treated for vomiting and diarrhea and doctors believe the patients may have contracted dysentery because of tainted water. Officials closed a shelter Saturday because more than 20 people there fell ill.
The shelter at Mary L. Michel 7th Grade School in Biloxi had been without water and power since the storm hit Monday. About 400 people had been staying there, and doctors said some may have ignored warnings to stay away from water.
Some water came back on late Friday, but it was not safe to drink or even to use to brush teeth or clean up, said Dr. Jason Dees, a volunteer working at the emergency room of Biloxi Regional Medical Center.
Dees said patients started coming in around 2 a.m. Saturday, with vomiting and diarrhea, many of them from the shelter. It appeared to be dysentery, but that could not be confirmed until samples were tested in Jackson.
Health officials were trying to get the word out about the water.
"Don't even bathe in the stuff for now," Dees said. "We don't know what might be in it."
Sen. Frist Becomes Medical Volunteer
Breitbart
By JONATHAN M. KATZ
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON
Bill Frist took off his senator's coat on Saturday and flew for New Orleans as a medical volunteer. But what he found among the thousands needing treatment from Hurricane Katrina was a rescue effort in chaos: patients sleeping on luggage conveyors, teams of nurses who didn't know each other's names and a total communication breakdown.
"In the airport right now there is no communication between one unit and another," said Frist, R-Tenn., the Senate's majority leader and a surgeon.
"No coordination with how many people will be coming in the door 10 minutes later," he told The Associated Press. "That's sort of the most disappointing thing. It's probably the greatest failure."
Frist left Washington around 4:30 a.m. Saturday on his private plane. He spent most of the day helping to treat thousands of victims at Louis Armstrong International Airport and the New Orleans Convention Center.
He spoke by phone from a helicopter shuttling him between the two, taking a 45-minute tour above the flooded streets of downtown.
Frist also said the federal government had acted too slowly in dealing with the hurricane's aftermath.
The Two Americas
Truthout.org
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 03 September 2005
Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."
"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."
"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."
They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.
After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."
New Orleans a 'ghost town' for 9 months
The Independent
By Geoffrey Lean and Andrew Gumbel
Published: 04 September 2005
New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US government believes.
The bleak assessment will deepen the biggest crisis faced by President George Bush, who last week called the devastation of Hurricane Katrina a " temporary disruption".
As the relief effort finally got under way yesterday for the tens of thousands of people left without food, water, medicines or the rule of law for five days, the federal official in charge of disaster recovery told foreign diplomats that reconstruction cannot begin until next summer.
The President is now facing a political hurricane of his own, with gathering criticism, even from inside his own party, for failing to heed warnings of the city's vulnerability, cutting spending on its defences to pay for the wars on terror and in Iraq, and responding sluggishly to the worst natural catastrophe ever to hit his country.
Phones, Computers Coming To Astrodome Survivors
Rense
By Matt Slagle
9-3-5
Thousands of Hurricane Katrina refugees packing into Houston's Astrodome are getting electronic access to the outside world.
Corporations, volunteers and nonprofit agencies continued working Friday to install telephones and Internet-enabled computers inside the sprawling former sports stadium in one of many efforts aimed at bringing communications technologies to hurricane victims.
Astrodome refugees, displaced from the Superdome in New Orleans, were getting 10 minutes blocks of time to make free local and long distance calls.
Many of them haven't heard from friends or family _ nor have they been able to let loved ones know they're safe _ since Katrina ravaged their hometown on Monday.
Audree Lee, 37, said she was relieved after hearing her teenage daughter's voice. Lee had relatives take her daughter to Alabama so she would be safe.
"I just cried. She cried. We cried together," Lee said Thursday after using one of the free lines at the Astrodome. "She asked me about her dog. They wouldn't let me take her dog with me. ... I know the dog is gone now."
Technology For All, a Houston nonprofit, was coordinating with authorities to set up a center in the Astrodome with 40 desktop computers loaded with Internet connections and office productivity software.
heart or make you blood boil. Don't continue unless you are sure you want to.
Yahoo pictures (original)
*hosted on my photobuckets account
An aerial view of flooded school buses in a lot, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, in New Orleans, LA. The flood is a result of Hurricane Katrina that passed through the area last Monday.(AP Photo/Phil Coale)
*Why weren't these used in the evacuation?
New Orleans Left to the Dead and Dying
AP News
By ALLEN G. BREED
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - As the last weary refugees from the Superdome and convention center headed to shelters, New Orleans drew closer to dealing with its dead, a gruesome landscape of corpses expected to number in the thousands.
No one knows how many people were killed by Hurricane Katrina and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating in the ruined city, crumpled in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.
Echoing the mayor's prediction, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Saturday she expected the death toll to reach the thousands. And Craig Vanderwagen, rear admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service, said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.
Touring an airport triage center, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a physician, said "a lot more than eight to 10 people are dying a day."
Most were those too sick or weak to survive. But not all.
Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death and another commit suicide at the Superdome. Womack was beaten with a pipe and treated at the airport center, where bodies were kept in a refrigerated truck.
Chertoff: Feds in Control of New Orleans
Breitbart
WASHINGTON
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Sunday the federal government is in control of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans after days in which authorities failed to reach stranded refugees and evacuate the city.
Chertoff declined to estimate the death toll from the hurricane and its aftermath, but conceded that untold numbers of people could be found dead in swamped homes, floating in the water and in the facilities used as shelters.
"We need to prepare the country for what's coming ... we are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods, it is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine," Chertoff said on "Fox News Sunday."
Kanye West's Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC
Washington Post
By Lisa de Moraes
Saturday, September 3, 2005; C01
Why We Love Live Television, Reason No. 137:
NBC's levee broke and Kanye West flooded through with a tear about the federal response in New Orleans during the network's live concert fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina last night.
The rapper was among the celebs and singers participating in the one-hour special, produced by NBC News and run on the NBC broadcast network, as well as MSNBC and CNBC, because, hey, the numbers couldn't be any worse than usual on a Friday night and hopefully they'd raise a chunk of change for a good cause, the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.
Among the performers, Faith Hill sang "There Will Come a Time," which included the lyrics, "The darkness will be gone, the weak shall be strong. Hold on to your faith." Aaron Neville performed Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" with its chorus: "They're trying to wash us away, they're trying to wash us away."
West was not scheduled to perform; he was one of the blah, blah, blahers, who would read from scripts prepared by the network about the impact of Katrina on southern Louisiana and Mississippi.
West and Mike Myers had been paired up to appear about halfway through the show. Their assignment: Take turns reading a script describing the breach in the levees around New Orleans.
*Related
The Show Didn't Benefit by Censors
LA Times
By Robert Hilburn, Times Staff Writer
AS we enter the celebrity telethon phase of the Katrina tragedy, NBC's "A Concert for Hurricane Relief" stands as a blueprint for its own kind of institutional failure.
By censoring Grammy-winning rapper Kanye West's remarks critical of President Bush during its West Coast feed of the program Friday night, the network violated the most moving and essential moment in an otherwise sterile, self-serving corporate broadcast.
"It would be most unfortunate," the network said in a statement defending its action, "if the efforts of the artists who participated tonight and the generosity of millions of Americans who are helping those in need are overshadowed by one person's opinion."
Excuse me, but whose tragedy is this: NBC's or America's?
NBC may have been nervous about West's comments, including the notion that America and its president are unresponsive to the needs of the poor. But you can be sure those remarks would have been cheered more than anything else in the program by the black parents and children still trapped in the New Orleans Convention Center and the Superdome if they had been able to hear them.
The line NBC stopped us from hearing on the West Coast: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
The puzzling thing is why NBC axed that, but allowed another provocation, potentially more disturbing, to stay in: "We already realized a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they've given them permission to go down and shoot us."
As White House Anxiety Grows, Bush Tries to Quell Political Crisis
New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
and ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 - Faced with one of the worst political crises of his administration, President Bush abruptly overhauled his September schedule on Saturday as the White House scrambled to gain control of a situation that Republicans said threatened to undermine Mr. Bush's second-term agenda and the party's long-term ambitions.
In a sign of the mounting anxiety at the White House, Mr. Bush made a rare Saturday appearance in the Rose Garden before live television cameras to announce that he was dispatching additional active-duty troops to the Gulf Coast. He struck a more somber tone than he had at times on Friday during a daylong tour of the disaster region, when he had joked at the airport in New Orleans about the fun he had had in his younger days in Houston. His demeanor on Saturday was similar to that of his most somber speeches after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," said Mr. Bush, slightly exaggerating the stricken land area. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."
The president was flanked by his high military and emergency command: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As Mr. Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the president's senior political adviser, listened on the sidelines, as did Dan Bartlett, the counselor to the president and Mr. Bush's overseer of communications strategy. Their presence underscored how seriously the White House is reacting to the political crisis it faces.
The Bursting Point
New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS
As Ross Douthat observed on his blog, The American Scene, Katrina was the anti-9/11.
On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.
Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.
The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.
And the key fact to understanding why this is such a huge cultural moment is this: Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures that have cumulatively changed the nation's psyche.
Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib.
Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans
Army Times
By Joseph R. Chenelly
Times staff writer
NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
Jones said the military first needs to establish security throughout the city. Military and police officials have said there are several large areas of the city are in a full state of anarchy.
Dozens of military trucks and up-armored Humvees left the staging area just after 11 a.m. Friday, while hundreds more troops arrived at the same staging area in the city via Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.
“We’re here to do whatever they need us to do,” Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon, of the Oklahoma National Guard’s 1345th Transportation Company. “We packed to stay as long as it takes.”
Guardsmen 'played cards' amid New Orleans chaos: police official
Yahoo
NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - A top New Orleans police officer said that National Guard troops sat around playing cards while people died in the stricken city after Hurricane Katrina.
New Orleans deputy police commander W.S. Riley launched a bitter attack on the federal response to the disaster though he praised the way the evacuation was eventually handled.
His remarks fuelled controversy over the government's handling of events during five days when New Orleans succumbed to lawlessness after Katrina swamped the city's flood defenses.
The National Guard commander, Lieutenant General Steven Blum, said the reservist force was slow to move troops into New Orleans because it did not anticipate the collapse of the city's police force.
Law Officers, Overwhelmed, Are Quitting the Force
New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 - Reeling from the chaos of this overwhelmed city, at least 200 New Orleans police officers have walked away from their jobs and two have committed suicide, police officials said on Saturday.
Some officers told their superiors they were leaving, police officials said. Others worked for a while and then stopped showing up. Still others, for reasons not always clear, never made it in after the storm.
The absences come during a period of extraordinary stress for the New Orleans Police Department. For nearly a week, many of its 1,500 members have had to work around the clock, trying to cope with flooding, an overwhelming crush of refugees, looters and occasional snipers.
P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police, said most of his officers were staying at their posts. But in an unusual note of sympathy for a top police official, he said it was understandable that many were frustrated. He said morale was "not very good."
"If I put you out on the street and made you get into gun battles all day with no place to urinate and no place to defecate, I don't think you would be too happy either," Mr. Compass said in an interview. "Our vehicles can't get any gas. The water in the street is contaminated. My officers are walking around in wet shoes."
Fire Department officials said they did not know of any firefighters who had quit. But they, too, were sympathetic to struggling emergency workers.
W. J. Riley, the assistant superintendent of police, said there were about 1,200 o
Mississippians' Suffering Overshadowed
Breitbart
By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Associated Press Writer
JACKSON, Miss.
Mississippi hurricane survivors looked around Saturday and wondered just how long it would take to get food, clean water and shelter. And they were more than angry at the federal government and the national news media.
Richard Gibbs was disgusted by reports of looting in New Orleans and upset at the lack of attention hurricane victims in his state were getting.
"I say burn the bridges and let 'em all rot there," he said. "We're suffering over here too, but we're not killing each other. We've got to help each other. We need gas and food and water and medical supplies."
Gibbs and his wife, Holly, have been stuck at their flooded home in Gulfport just off the Biloxi River. Water comes up to the second floor, they are out of gasoline, and food supplies are running perilously low.
Until recently, they also had Holly's 75-year-old father, who has a pacemaker and severe diabetes, with them. Finally they got an ambulance to take him to the airport so he could be airlifted to Lafayette, La., for medical help.
Doctors fear tainted water gave shelter residents dysentery
Nola
The Associated Press
BILOXI, Miss. (AP) — About 40 people have been treated for vomiting and diarrhea and doctors believe the patients may have contracted dysentery because of tainted water. Officials closed a shelter Saturday because more than 20 people there fell ill.
The shelter at Mary L. Michel 7th Grade School in Biloxi had been without water and power since the storm hit Monday. About 400 people had been staying there, and doctors said some may have ignored warnings to stay away from water.
Some water came back on late Friday, but it was not safe to drink or even to use to brush teeth or clean up, said Dr. Jason Dees, a volunteer working at the emergency room of Biloxi Regional Medical Center.
Dees said patients started coming in around 2 a.m. Saturday, with vomiting and diarrhea, many of them from the shelter. It appeared to be dysentery, but that could not be confirmed until samples were tested in Jackson.
Health officials were trying to get the word out about the water.
"Don't even bathe in the stuff for now," Dees said. "We don't know what might be in it."
Sen. Frist Becomes Medical Volunteer
Breitbart
By JONATHAN M. KATZ
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON
Bill Frist took off his senator's coat on Saturday and flew for New Orleans as a medical volunteer. But what he found among the thousands needing treatment from Hurricane Katrina was a rescue effort in chaos: patients sleeping on luggage conveyors, teams of nurses who didn't know each other's names and a total communication breakdown.
"In the airport right now there is no communication between one unit and another," said Frist, R-Tenn., the Senate's majority leader and a surgeon.
"No coordination with how many people will be coming in the door 10 minutes later," he told The Associated Press. "That's sort of the most disappointing thing. It's probably the greatest failure."
Frist left Washington around 4:30 a.m. Saturday on his private plane. He spent most of the day helping to treat thousands of victims at Louis Armstrong International Airport and the New Orleans Convention Center.
He spoke by phone from a helicopter shuttling him between the two, taking a 45-minute tour above the flooded streets of downtown.
Frist also said the federal government had acted too slowly in dealing with the hurricane's aftermath.
The Two Americas
Truthout.org
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Saturday 03 September 2005
Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."
"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."
"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."
They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.
After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."
New Orleans a 'ghost town' for 9 months
The Independent
By Geoffrey Lean and Andrew Gumbel
Published: 04 September 2005
New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US government believes.
The bleak assessment will deepen the biggest crisis faced by President George Bush, who last week called the devastation of Hurricane Katrina a " temporary disruption".
As the relief effort finally got under way yesterday for the tens of thousands of people left without food, water, medicines or the rule of law for five days, the federal official in charge of disaster recovery told foreign diplomats that reconstruction cannot begin until next summer.
The President is now facing a political hurricane of his own, with gathering criticism, even from inside his own party, for failing to heed warnings of the city's vulnerability, cutting spending on its defences to pay for the wars on terror and in Iraq, and responding sluggishly to the worst natural catastrophe ever to hit his country.
Phones, Computers Coming To Astrodome Survivors
Rense
By Matt Slagle
9-3-5
Thousands of Hurricane Katrina refugees packing into Houston's Astrodome are getting electronic access to the outside world.
Corporations, volunteers and nonprofit agencies continued working Friday to install telephones and Internet-enabled computers inside the sprawling former sports stadium in one of many efforts aimed at bringing communications technologies to hurricane victims.
Astrodome refugees, displaced from the Superdome in New Orleans, were getting 10 minutes blocks of time to make free local and long distance calls.
Many of them haven't heard from friends or family _ nor have they been able to let loved ones know they're safe _ since Katrina ravaged their hometown on Monday.
Audree Lee, 37, said she was relieved after hearing her teenage daughter's voice. Lee had relatives take her daughter to Alabama so she would be safe.
"I just cried. She cried. We cried together," Lee said Thursday after using one of the free lines at the Astrodome. "She asked me about her dog. They wouldn't let me take her dog with me. ... I know the dog is gone now."
Technology For All, a Houston nonprofit, was coordinating with authorities to set up a center in the Astrodome with 40 desktop computers loaded with Internet connections and office productivity software.
