On Friday, Thornton led a team of 22 contractors and a handful of Superdome employees on a tour of the facility to assess the damage caused by the hurricane and the storm victims who used the building as a refuge. It was the first time anyone other than Thornton or National Guard troops had been inside the building since Sept. 4.
The group included representatives from several national companies that specialize in environmental disaster abatement and demolition services. They donned gas masks, white jumpsuits and rubber hip boots. Some even rubbed Vick’s Vaporub under their noses to block the stench.
“You been in yet, Tim?” one of the specialists asked Superdome Commission Chairman Tim Coulon as he slipped on his suit and mask. “It’s like asking if you’ve ridden a big ride before. You want to know how scary it is before you get on.”
Inside, the Dome’s 1.8 million square feet looks trashed. Its floors, concourses, ramps, meeting rooms, offices and restrooms are littered with debris and refuse from the evacuees who endured hellish living conditions in the building for as many as five days after the storm.
The floor and Momentum Turf playing field have been transformed into a mushy lake of inch-deep black water. The fetid soup coated a sea of trash and spoiled food. The bathrooms on the 200 level overflow with human feces and urine. In one men’s room, the human waste spilled out of the entrance and into the concourse. Blood stains several walls. Stagnant for days in the still air, the water, spoiled food and human excrement will require decontamination and will be removed by professionals.
“You could put a petri dish in here and just see what grows,” one technician said. “The flies are telling you there’s a biohazard.”
The leftovers run the gamut – from mundane items such as clothes and blankets to the more personal, car keys, wallets, photo albums. One collection includes an organ donor card, a personal identification card, and another card with worn edges showing the picture of the Virgin Mary on one side and text on the other that reads, “I Am A Catholic. In case of accident please notify a priest.”
On the desk in the Dome’s office, ransacked by the people seeking shelter in the building, lay a neatly handwritten note on a small piece of folder notebook paper:
“Search and Rescue Team
Please Get
Old woman and legless old man
@ 2432 Ursalines Ave. (N.O.)”
‘The ultimate test’
Officials said at least 10 to 12 people died in the Dome, including a man who jumped or was pushed 50 feet to his death from one of the pedestrian walkways. A military police officer also was shot in the leg during an assault.
Sgt. Tony Small, a major crimes cold-case investigator for the New Orleans Police Department who was in the unit assigned to the Superdome, said at least four rapes occurred in the Dome, and the victims included a 2-year-old girl.
“That’s not rumors,” Small said. “It was horrendous.’’
It’s not known whether any arrests were made in those crimes.
Thornton slept on a cot in his office for four days behind the security of armed guards. “There were a lot of bad people in there,” he said.
On the suite level, windows were shattered; holes and graffiti marred several walls.
Damage to the luxury boxes varied from suite to suite.
In one, the liquor cabinets had been broken into and the chairs were rearranged but everything else was unharmed. Down the hall, one of the New Orleans Saints’ suites was ransacked. Leather couches were turned over. Holes were punched in the walls and pictures were shattered. A 10-by-18-inch picture of former Saints running back Ricky Williams lay in tatters on a bed of broken glass and splintered wood.
The Dome’s upper levels, which didn’t house storm victims, were in relatively good shape. Water, which seeped through the exposed roof’s sheet metal and seams during the storm, did most of the damage. Hardwood floors were buckled 6 inches high.
On the Dome’s perimeter concourse, knee-high piles of refused ringed the building as workers with shovels and forklifts worked to remove the fly-ridden heaps.
“She’s taken a hit,” Thornton said after striding into the fresh air and daylight. “She’s been given the ultimate test.”
Thornton said the damage was far greater than what the Dome endured in 1998 when 14,000 evacuees looted and trashed the building while taking shelter from Hurricane Georges in 1998.
“It’s a mess,’’ said Brian Messisco, a vice president for LVI Services Inc., an emergency response specialty company from Salisbury, N.C., that oversaw the remediation of the Pentagon and World Trade Center sites after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “It’s going to take a lot of work. But I think it can be done. It’s bad but not as bad as I thought.’’
Here's a thought... why don't they hire all those folks that stayed there and made the mess. Don't they need jobs? Then they could stay in their city and contribute to the rebuilding?
refuse from the evacuees who endured created hellish living conditions
When you are lost in the wilderness and there is nothing but the wild ahead, always walk upstream; after all, who wants to drink yesterday's water?
. . .bring on the bulldozers. . .this is one memory NO does not need.
What's new with this?
My friends in the NOLA area told me that the same happened years ago w/ a previous hurricane. When those being housed in the Dome didn't get let out when they wanted they trashed the place. I figured that's one of the reasons why NOLA didn't want people to use the Dome as a shelter of "first resort".
No, I can't find that in Google since the first million finds are all with Katrina, but I know that I was told the story.
At any rate, this previous experience certainly condemns the NOLA gov't, as they knew full-well what would happen at the Dome. At the very least they should've had made plans for the dome to be used in such a way, from water and food to emergency power and porta-johns.
Would be more cost effective to hit the place with a tactical nuke and build a new one.
Common practice of coroners and homicide detectives. Hmmmm.