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.
As long as people ferry these folks food, water and medicine, they will never leave. I know it sounds harsh, but the only way to get them out is to starve them out. But nobody is going to want to take the political responsibility for denying anything to the residents of New Orleans, so this will not be allowed to happen.
So you are going to have stubborn morons staying in their homes, getting twice daily deliveries of hot meals by helicopter and bitching that there isn't enough salt in the paella. And you'll probably have a CNN camera right there to record their complaints.
You aint seen nothing yet: Wait until all those cops who walked off the job come back and are put back on duty like they never left.
If people refuse to leave, they should be handed a written notice that there will be no support for them, including water or food and medical services. Take down their name and closes relative not in NO and make them sign it.
Adam Housley on FNC a little while ago was reporting that he's talked to a number of folks who actually could have evacuated and chose not to. Sigh.
But, but, wouldn't that mean that the feds weren't invited in from the very beginning? No, that can't be true, otherwise it can't be Bush's fault.
Blanko's performance in this crisis foreshadows what Hillary's would be, were she president. These women are so insecure, that they would rather see everyone around them die than to admit their mistakes. I have seen this character flaw in the workplace, but in life-and-death situations the consequences are tragic.
A good idea that will never happen. If these people are denied anything, they will be on the TV 24/7 about how President Bush! is denying them this or that. It is simply not poitically feasible for anybody to deny these folks anything, because they will be stand-ins in the minds of the people for the poor innocents who perished.
So, Nagin's the one who's been in charge for the past week. Good to know.
It makes you wonder about whether some in New Orleans EVER had the "right stuff."
I pray they keep these fine people on the payroll.
Essentially, they are all NOW without jobs.
sw
I suspect that you're right too. Too much corruption. These police officers aren't very well trained and prepared to do their job, are they? FWIW, I just heard this morning that the governor still hasn't declared a state of emergency for LA.
I'd like to point out that New Yorkers didn't know if this was THE ATTACK or JUST THE BEGINNING. There may have been another 20 attacks coming, bio-weapons or whatever. All through this THEY STILL BEHAVED LIKE COURAGEOUS, RATIONAL HUMAN BEINGS.
You know, the people I know from New York are among the best people I know in the world. I'm from Tennessee originally, so that's a major concession.
This being said, I know there were similar heroics and sacrifice made in NOLA, but I'm left feeling disgusted by their animalistic behavior rather than inspired by their courage.
There's no other way to put it. Where I felt hope from New York I feel nothing but shame from NOLA.
I pray for those who did live up to our hopes and ideals. I pray for their recovery. Yet there is a small percentage of people in NOLA who have damaged thier name and image for all time. I can't wish any worse upon them than what happened, nor would I wish this upon them to begin with. Still, neither am I compelled to support or subsidize such a grand failure such as the culture that NOLA has bred.
Best that the water washes all of it away.
Let us salvage the people that we can and help them build a new and better world for themselves.
Leave the rats to the ruin.
Utter claptrap. Woman are not insecure as a gender. There are good and bad, just like men. I can't stand Hillary, but I don't think she is an incompetent leader. She is corrupt and she's a hard-core socialist. That she is competent makes her all the more dangerous.
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