Even in the superdome where the number of officials and the relief effort is probably the strongest...things are getting testy and dire.
I pray the NG and needed equipement to evacuate people and to establish and maintain order during it, gets in there within the next 12-18 hours.
Ditto, and amen.
>I pray the NG and needed equipement to evacuate people and to establish and maintain order during it, gets in there within the next 12-18 hours.<
Amen, Jeff. They've got to get some order down there, or the death toll will surely skyrocket.
Here's the bigger problem.
They are rapidly losing their window of good will with the American people.
If they keep showing the non-stop footage of do-nothing local and state government with the looters, Americans will start demanding it be plowed over, declared Federal land, and use the entire coast for oil and gas exploration.
I'm hearing it now on local radio, and I was shocked - until I got home and saw the non-stop looting footage.
This is very, very bad for morale. I'm concerned.
I'm not an expert and I'm not there, but from what I've seen on television, there are people trapped everywhere in the city. They may have supplies (if they can get to them) for another day or two. The liquids are the most important thing, of course.
But there's no way to do a door to door search with boats in a city of that size in a couple of days. It simply can't be done, and there's no way to tell which houses belong to people who evacuated and who didn't.
Since it's a given that the water can't be pumped out of the city for several weeks if all goes well, what we are almost certainly going to hear for many weeks is a rising death toll from New Orleans as each home is finally re-entered.
Maybe there's some slim hope that people trapped in the upper floor or attic can break through the roof in the next day or two, but my guess is that the strongest and most able have already done that.
The only other hope is that more people evacuated than we think.