Orleans Breaking News
Monday, September 05, 2005
New Orleans staggers to its feet for next step on long road
By Ron Thibodeaux and Gordon Russell
Staff writers
In a city in dire need of some divine intervention from the most catastrophic week in its history, the first post-Katrina Sunday in New Orleans was infused with the sounds of military helicopters and sporadic gunfire instead of lilting hymns and Gospel readings.
On the seventh day of this disaster of biblical proportions, the last evacuees from the fetid conditions of the Superdome and the Convention Center rested with New Orleans in the rearview mirror of the buses taking them to clean, safe havens far away.
In the city they finally left behind, churches were empty, bells did not peal, Sunday services were not held and the Saints, the football version, were said to be pondering their own evacuation, possibly a permanent one, to San Antonio, Texas.
Entergy workers made their first foray into New Orleans to begin the gargantuan task of assessing the damage to the city's electrical system. Their arrival was a glimmer of encouragement in the vista of despair that confronts those charged with rebuilding the city.
Meanwhile, in adjacent Jefferson Parish, authorities braced for a Labor Day invasion of evacuees expected to return for a first look at their homes.
Search and rescue operations continued and during the late afternoon, helicopters using Interstate 10 as a landing pad were pulling people from rooftops in Mid-City and other parts of town.
Law enforcement agencies fielded about 1,000 distress 911 calls Saturday from people still trapped in attics of buildings surrounded by water, State Police said Sunday.
For the city's police officers in particular, Sunday was the first day to get something like a breather after working around the clock for the past eight days.
"Today is the first day you will see a smile on some of the officers' faces," said NOPD Capt. Marlon Defillo, who was taking a break on the neutral ground of Loyola Avenue with Detective William Charbonnet. "This has been a tremendous challenge for members of the police department, but they've held their ground. They've given their hearts and souls."
New Orleans Police officers sent up a cheer at one point Sunday at a report that their colleagues had engaged in a shootout with an armed group on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans, with several of the suspected marauders - but none of the police officers - being hit. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot eight people, killing five or six of them.
Defillo said police morale had hit a low point around Wednesday or Thursday in terms of the stress on officers, who had to try to keep the city safe without a working communications system amid increasing anarchy . While it was harrowing, reports that hundreds of police officers abandoned ship are false, he said.
"There was a report that 60 percent of our officers bugged out and hadn't been seen since Monday night. It is totally untrue," Defillo said.
What happened, according to Defillo, was that the NOPD's communications system crashed in the wake of the storm, making it impossible for officers to contact one another.
"We had to work on the buddy system, two guys staying together," he said. Defillo acknowledged that "there were some people who bugged out" but he didn't have an estimate of their numbers.
Defillo himself was feeling better after shaving for the first time in a week and taking an impromptu bath in the green, leafy water of a backyard swimming pool. He was wearing a clean pair of acid-washed jeans and a polo shirt that he "found."
The scene was more intense in flood-ravaged St. Bernard Parish, where rescue efforts still lag behind those of New Orleans. Sheriff Jack Stephens authorized his haggard deputies to shoot to kill looters or anyone else who poses a threat.
Small gangs of heavily armed career criminals are roaming the parish's isolated eastern half and looting buildings, Stephens said.
"These are the same a------- who have been testing us for 20 years," Stephens told his SWAT team at a security briefing. "Today is the day they are going to listen to us or we're gonna take 'em out."
As National Guard troops and utility workers launched their patrols through the abandoned neighborhoods of New Orleans on Sunday morning, federal, state and local authorities intensified their finger-pointing at one another over the breakdowns in last week's rescue efforts.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff struggled on NBC's "Meet the Press" to explain why federal agencies were so slow to react to the crisis and sought to deflect at least part of the blame toward the evacuation plan confected by city and state officials.
Later in the same program, a ragged Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard broke down as he told the national audience how a colleague's elderly mother died in her home Friday after waiting four days for rescuers that never arrived.
With thousands of federal troops finally assisting in what had been an ineffective, disorganized operation, 19,000 people were removed from the Convention Center in less than 24 hours and the final evacuees from the Superdome boarded a bus for somewhere, anywhere.
Hundreds of people continued to mill around the outside of both facilities, arriving on foot in hopes of getting a ride out of town.
Col. Henry Whitehorn, superintendent of Louisiana State Police, estimated that 2,000 people, many of them with serious medical problems, were still housed inside the terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport.
A busload of 160 people that the state Legislative Black Caucus arranged to deliver to Alexandria ended up at a shelter there, not in facilities at the former England Air Force Base as the lawmakers had intended.
Angry that thousands of Louisianians are being bused out of state because of an apparent lack of shelter space, the black caucus members had called on the federal government Saturday to make Louisiana's military installations available.
Jefferson Parish officials prepared Sunday for a huge influx of residents expected to return today to see what Katrina did to their homes. Hours after the storm hit, Broussard had decreed that evacuated Jefferson residents stay away only for a week to give parish authorities a fighting chance to get control of the destruction and bedlam there.
Many parish officials are skeptical about the decision to let residents return even this soon, but Broussard stood by his decision, saying residents need to see for themselves how bad things are so they can move on with their lives.
"I am the only elected official who is in favor of doing this, but people need to understand that they're not coming back to Wally Cleaver's neighborhood," he said Sunday. "I am doing this to jumpstart the economy, not the economy of Jefferson Parish. That is destroyed. I want to jumpstart the economies of the residents of Jefferson Parish, who need to find new jobs, new places to live."
Long lines are expected today at checkpoints where parish authorities will verify that returnees live in Jefferson Parish before letting them in.
The 1 million-plus number of homes and businesses that lost power in the area was down to 643,000, Public Service Commissioner Jimmy Field said. LSU researchers testing the floodwaters for contamination levels also reported that they had taken the first water samples from canals draining into Lake Pontchartrain and expect to have the results in about two days.
Entergy was able to send a 12-member assessment team, flanked by National Guardsmen, into the city to inspect storm damage.
"The main thing we were trying to find out is what needs to be done to restore power to the Central Business District," utility spokesman Chanel Lagarde said.
In St. Tammany Parish, Cleco reported it has restored power to 5,000 of its 80,000 customers, beginning with hospitals, other essential locations and sites along the parish's main traffic arteries.
In San Antonio, where New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson had been conspicuously silent about the impact of Katrina on his football team's hometown and its residents, reports surfaced that the team's management is considering pulling out of the city and relocating, perhaps permanently, to San Antonio, where Benson has a business interests and a ranch outside of the city.
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