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.
I do agree with your points. And I did state that it's a small percentage of people who are the major problem. I've also made donations to the effort to support a worthy cause.
To be honest, I never felt any shame about "Abu Grab". Court martial the soldiers and as far as the terrorists are concerned, put them out of their misery. Hollow tip should suffice. I have about as much regard for them as I would any other non-human entity such as mass murderers,rapists, looters and pedophiles.
That quote is from Billy Tauzin.
Two cops were in the Walmart looting for shoes.
One of those officers supposedly killed himself because he found out that has wife had died in the storm. I don't know about the other one.
You may be suspicious, but you'll never know until you walk a mile in their shoes.
Probably due to HIS, and the spineless demonRAT governor's, total lack of mature, focused, and tough leadership.
Those suicidal & traumatized cops were probably thinking, "If I can't get orders from the mayor or the governor, both apparently pussies, to SHOOT-ON-SIGHT these looting, raping, car & supplies (food, medicine, water, etc.)-jacking, rampaging, mudering savage hordes - then WHAT IN THE HELL am I doing here on this earth as a police officer?".
"fighting off the dregs of society all week long."
That is what cops are SUPPOSED to do. You know those metal "L" shaped things hanging in a holster on a cop's side? They're called guns and in a natural disaster like N.O. the cops have virtually unlimited authority to use them.
These bodies NEED to be counted.
That way, come next election, Republicans will know how many new demonRAT "voters" to look for.
For a mayor to order an entire urban first responder force out of the city...is just incomprehensible. Presumably Governor Blanco "DuBois" will take up the slack using State employees. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
If I didn't know better, I'd swear some democrat strategist is trying to force Bush's hand on federalization in Louisiana beyond the limits of the Constitution so they can impeach him.
I suspect he's doing it by the minute.
"Mayor holed up in hotel with armed guards because there is so much anger against authorities."
Campbell Brown NBC 9:05 am
I was reminded yesterday, that during Hurricane Floyd, an announcement was made via television that those who would not follow the mandatory evacuation were advised to write their name and next of kin on their arm with a permanent marker so their bodies could be identified.
Problem solved.
On the seventh day, God rested.
Great. Can't wait.
I agree with you.
This will be as much a fiasco as Castro dumping great numbers of his criminals on our shores way-back-when.
While there are probably some decent people among the evacuees, there is also the inner-city, thug gangster, criminal element. The very scum that was doing the looting, shooting, raping, and generally creating all the chaos down in N.O.
With their I.D. "lost" in the flood, who knows what scum will stay ("sheet man, I aint goin' back to that place") in our communities to prey on our law-abiding citizens, their families entered onto our welfare roles to further drag down our economies needlessly, and their illegitimate demonseed enrolled in our schools?
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?
That is, unless your mayor and governor are liberal demonRAT pussies that won't give the necessary LOOTERS-WILL-BE-SHOT-ON-SIGHT orders.
You're right. Another thing to consider is that this is personal, the dead and suffering in NO are likely to be the friends and families of these policemen. It is personal in a way that the nameless enemy in war isn't.
Mayor Nagin should be placed in stocks and subjected to public punishment.
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