As someone who has openly pined to go work at a New Orleans paper (especially the wonderfully named Times-Picayune), I watch what Hurricane Katrina has done to the city with an extra level of horror. What if I’d been there? What would happen to me or, more importantly, my wife?
Some Federal Emergency Management rescue operations were suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out, Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington. “In areas where our employees have been determined to potentially be in danger, we have pulled back,” he said.
A National Guard military policeman was shot in the leg as he and a man scuffled for the MP’s rifle, police Capt. Ernie Demmo said. The man was arrested.
“These are good people. These are just scared people,” Demmo said.
Outside the Convention Center, the sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement. Thousands of storm refugees had been assembling outside for days, waiting for buses that did not come.
At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry people broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.
An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered with a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
“I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.” He added: “You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here.”
The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.
“They’ve been teasing us with buses for four days,” Edwards said.
People chanted, “Help, help!” as reporters and photographers walked through. The crowd got angry when journalists tried to photograph one of the bodies, and covered it over with a blanket. A woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm.
John Murray, 52, said: “It’s like they’re punishing us.”
The Superdome, where some 25,000 people were being evacuated by bus to the Houston Astrodome, descended into chaos as well.
Huge crowds, hoping to finally escape the stifling confines of the stadium, jammed the main concourse outside the dome, spilling out over the ramp to the Hyatt hotel next door — a seething sea of tense, unhappy, people packed shoulder-to-shoulder up to the barricades where heavily armed National Guardsmen stood.
At the front of the line, heavily armed policemen and guardsmen stood watch and handed out water as tense and exhausted crowds struggled onto buses. At the back end of the line, people jammed against police barricades in the rain. Luggage, bags of clothes, pillows, blankets were strewn in the puddles.
Many people had dogs and they cannot take them on the bus. A police officer took one from a little boy, who cried until he vomited. “Snowball, snowball,” he cried. The policeman told a reporter he didn’t know what would happen to the dog.
