Posted on 09/05/2005 2:47:58 AM PDT by Uncle Joe Cannon
New Orleans police to be pulled off streets
By Chris Adams, Martin Merzer and Susannah A. Nesmith Knight Ridder Newspapers
NEW ORLEANS — On the seventh day, the mayor of New Orleans said he would surrender control of his shattered city to federal and state officials, and authorities issued dire predictions of the human cost of Hurricane Katrina.
"We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday. "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."
Last night, Mayor Ray Nagin said his entire police force would be pulled off the streets by tomorrow and all firefighters, paramedics and emergency dispatchers also were being sidelined. They will be sent to Baton Rouge for evaluation and counseling, he said.
He noted that two police officers committed suicide in recent days, and he said the other uniformed officers were traumatized by recent events. National Guard troops and state law-enforcement officers will replace them, he said.
"I'm not going to sit back and let another one die," Nagin said.
In one incident yesterday, seven men fired at a sheriff's deputy who had been sent to New Orleans from another part of Louisiana. The deputy was hauling a boat to a staging area for a rescue mission at the time, police said. Police officers shot the seven men, police said, killing two.
"The security forces won," Nagin said. "We're going to make this city safe. Anybody out there who has any ideas of doing anything but evacuating — there will be serious consequences."
Also yesterday, clergy and their flocks prayed for the souls of the dead — and for deliverance of the living. "God didn't bring this destruction on us," Vince Munoz of Biloxi, Miss., told 40 people at what little was left of the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Biloxi, where congregants worshipped in an outdoor courtyard.
"It's the nature of the planet since the Garden of Eden," he said. "God is using this to help us reach out to each other."
In a separate incident, a civilian helicopter lay on its side in New Orleans after an apparent crash landing last night. Details weren't immediately available, but early reports said two crew members suffered injuries.
Chertoff's comments and others by federal officials echoed the predictions of state and city officials and seemed designed to condition Americans for death counts that could reach the thousands. President Bush yesterday called Katrina, which struck the area last Monday, a "tidal wave of disaster."
"I think it's evident it's in the thousands," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said yesterday on CNN before he headed to the area.
Louisiana officials released their first official death toll — 59 — but said they knew of 100 other victims in the state, and they expected the number to soar as attention turned from searching for survivors to recovering the dead.
"We were working for the living, and now we are working for the dead and the living," said Dr. Louis Cataldie, a state medical official in Louisiana. "It's pretty tough, pulling out dead bodies."
In St. Gabriel, La., northwest of New Orleans, authorities guarded a 125,000-square-foot warehouse transformed into a morgue capable of holding more than 1,000 bodies. Residents said trucks, some refrigerated, had been stopping there for days, though no one knew if any bodies had been delivered.
"I wasn't able to help the living," said St. Gabriel Mayor George Grace, "so I was not at all upset about having a suitable place to house the dead."
In the New Orleans area, down this blocked street and around that tattered corner, portions of the city blinked back to life. Some people emerged from their homes for the first time in almost a week; some traffic lights even burst into green, yellow and red.
"Today, Sunday — right now — this is the first time I've come out," said Deborah Phelps, 56, of the Bywater section, near the French Quarter.
Throughout the region, people reached out to each other, often with sad results.
Rescue teams along the upper Gulf Coast struggled to gain access to wrecked inland communities, and when they did reach them, they often discovered bodies.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said 12 dead were found in Laurel, Miss., almost 100 miles inland.
In New Orleans, an odd, eerie sense of serenity was punctuated only by the sound of helicopters hovering above rescue sites.
Missing were the usual post-storm sounds of recovery: the hum of portable generators, the buzz of chain saws clearing roads, the tap-tap-tap of homeowners hammering blue tarpaulins on broken roofs.
One reason: Few survivors remained in the city that little more than a week earlier was home to 485,000 people. Most of the living had been evacuated, but casualties still floated down the streets and lay abandoned on highways.
Still, holdouts refused to leave, to the amazement of appalled volunteers who searched house-to-house through flooded, broken, starving neighborhoods.
At one point, a U.S. Navy helicopter hoisted a resident in a basket, brought her into the helicopter and whisked her away to one of the area's evacuation centers. Her neighbors wept and waved as they watched her go.
They said they were staying behind to care for older residents who refused to leave.
"That is not a reasonable alternative," Chertoff told "Fox News Sunday." "We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean this city."
A water-rescue team from Jefferson County, Ky., worked as hard to persuade people to evacuate as it worked to find them in the first place.
"The ones who didn't want to leave at first are now realizing they're running out of food, water and medicine, and it's time to go," said Eddie Whitworth, a team member.
Whitworth said the rescuers found two families that didn't want to leave the bodies of loved ones, but ultimately they were convinced that they had to save themselves.
Those who insisted on remaining behind included some of the city's quirkiest inhabitants, people such as Larry Wheeler, a disabled Vietnam veteran who sat in a lounge chair outside his apartment on dry but tree-clogged Sophie Wright Place. He smoked a cigarette and listened to the radio.
He pointed to his second-floor apartment. "That's Fort Larry right up there," he said.
Much of the metropolitan area remained flooded, but portions of the city had avoided the floods, though not the chaos provoked by the hurricane and its aftermath.
The sense of danger that was prevalent Thursday and Friday had dissipated but not disappeared. People who had been afraid to come out of their homes for fear of looters finally did so. Police, National Guardsmen and deputy sheriffs from far-away counties and parishes patrolled the city — with weapons at the ready.
In Jefferson Parish, some traffic signals were coming to life. Work crews in lift trucks worked on traffic signals on Causeway Boulevard. On River Road, which hugs the Mississippi River levee, some signals were already on.
To the north, in the overwhelmed city of Baton Rouge, hundreds of evacuees continued to pour into makeshift shelters, often seeking lost relatives.
One man carried a sign with the name of his wife's family scrawled on it. Children searched lists for names of missing siblings. A mother asked volunteers for help finding her daughter. In other developments:
• Oil refiners made progress in restoring some of their lost production capacity. Exxon Mobil, Marathon Oil and offshore pipeline operators said their operations were beginning to ramp up.
• Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a doctor, worked on patients at the makeshift medical-treatment center at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Frist said he arrived Saturday and called the progress made at the airport facility "amazing."
"Yesterday was organized chaos," he said. "Today, there's no chaos."
• Emergency managers in Texas and many other parts of the country began coming to grips with the long-term consequences of the mass relocation of Americans generated by Katrina. More than 250,000 Louisiana evacuees are living in Texas. Others were expected as far away as Utah, West Virginia and Iowa.
If you can't stand heat, don't even go into the kitchen. Nobody made them put on their badges. New Orleans always was a target for major hurricanes. Any cop going to work in New Orleans should have known the day might come when New Orleans would be slammed big-time. All the experts predicted it.
Soldiers are expected to do their duty, even when all of their buddies are being shot to pieces around them.
Why couldn't the 200 AWOL cops have jumped into the idle school buses and started driving their fellow citizens out of harm's way?
I understand one New Orleans boy had the guts to steal a bus and drive a bunch of his fellow citizens to safety in Texas.
That young man apparently instinctively knew a cluster foxtrot when he saw it and knew this disaster called for extraordinary action, not inaction.
There is no excuse for allowing armed thugs to take over the city. NONE
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What unspeakable horrors have you seen? Are you a combat vet? A Firefighter who has seen children burned beyond recognition? A cop wh has stood post at a multiple murder by stabbing scene where the victims were young, innocent and raped before being killed?
There are people who can take it and people who can't. Until you experience it yourself you cannot predict your own reaction. And, btw, do you believe that the groups you mentioned had no suicides?
Reality: Cat 5 in the Gulf?
Reaction:I'll stay.
Reality: Cat 4 on my house?
Reaction:I'll stay.
Reality: Levees topped?
Reaction:I'll stay.
Reality: Fresh water gone?
Reaction:I'll stay.
Reality: Food gone?
Reaction:I'll stay.
MSM screams "There's no help !"
Then why do they watch Oprah & Dr. Phil (and other "utter claptrap" shows) in great numbers?
Why do they fall for that, and all of the other psycho-babble on TV?
Why do they cake their faces with make-up and go in droves for boob jobs and other purely cosmetic surgery?
Why is it that women, in much greater numbers than men, go for weight-loss gimmicks and schemes, that have been demonstrated to rarely work in the long run?
Not generalizing about ALL women, just asking a few of the many questions out there that may concern women and insecurity.
Easy to say when you didn't have your whole life destroyed in a storm.
All of us find it easy to be armchair quarterbacks.
Living it is a different thing.
I think more likely, hizzoner just copped an attitude and said "Fine, you want the city you got it. " Then, to his employees, "Come on boys we going home and let the feds do the heavy lifitng.". Passive aggressive BS, pulling his own men and abandoning resposibility altogether.
I'll second that!
"So, Nagin's the one who's been in charge for the past week. Good to know."
EXACTLY!
How could the president be at fault if he wasn't even in charge?
The Democrats' attack on our president is so illogical, it's not even funny!
Compare and contrast the NYPD and NYFD during 9/11 with the NOPD. Not a pretty picture.
I'll bet his next gig is with CNN as a political commentator.
WON? The mayor seems to think this was a game.
Huh. That give a whole new meaning to "that John Wayne dude".
Uggghh.
Becki
I don't think he wants any of his officers shot for looting.
"LA is a big enough state. Why didn't we just send massive numbers of FEMA and other trailers and tents, and set up virtual communities somewhere outside of NO, but still in LA?"
I think your solution is best.
I'm sure lots of the evacuees are decent citizens. But I hate that possible gang members are being sent out across America, especially to the smaller cities and towns that don't presently have a problem with gangs.
Whoa! Calm Down. No I am not a combat vet. And of course i am not saying that no Vietnam vets, firefighters et all have committed suicide. It was stupid of you to even ask that qustion.
I just got a feeling that Nagin and the police are in on something together. 1/3 of them abandon their jobs, 2 kill themselves. Maybe some of them are dead in the streets for all we know at this point. And if so, at whose hand? Now Nagin wants to send them off to Vegas. For R&R? Yeah maybe.
Another freeper someone told me that one of the police who killed himself did so after learning his wife was dead. That relieved suspicion a great deal. As i said i could be paranoid about this, and probably unjustly so. But the situation with the NO cops is ....strange. I just can't find the appropriate word at the moment.
And you don't think men do that? Metrosexuals? You just can't make those generalizations. We need a leader like Maggie Thatcher in New Orleans NOW!
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