Posted on 09/01/2005 5:57:30 PM PDT by Uncle Joe Cannon
New Orleans in Anarchy With Fights, Rapes
Friday September 2, 2005 12:46 AM
AP Photo MSDP112
By ALLEN G. BREED
Associated Press Writer
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday, as corpses lay abandoned in street medians, fights and fires broke out and storm survivors battled for seats on the buses that would carry them away from the chaos. The tired and hungry seethed, saying they had been forsaken. ``This is a desperate SOS,'' mayor Ray Nagin said.
``We are out here like pure animals,'' the Rev. Issac Clark said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where he and other evacuees had been waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead.
``I'm not sure I'm going to get out of here alive,'' said tourist Larry Mitzel of Saskatoon, Canada, who handed a reporter his business card in case he goes missing. ``I'm scared of riots. I'm scared of the locals. We might get caught in the crossfire.''
Four days after Hurricane Katrina roared in with a devastating blow that inflicted potentially thousands of deaths, the frustration, fear and anger mounted, despite the promise of 1,400 National Guardsmen a day to stop the looting, plans for a $10 billion recovery bill in Congress and a government relief effort President Bush called the biggest in U.S. history.
New Orleans' top emergency management official called that effort a ``national disgrace'' and questioned when reinforcements would actually reach the increasingly lawless city.
About 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New Orleans convention center grew increasingly hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth and the dead. Police Chief Eddie Compass said he sent in 88 officers to quell the situation at the building, but they were quickly driven back by an angry mob.
``We have individuals who are getting raped, we have individuals who are getting beaten,'' Compass said. ``Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon.''
A military helicopter tried to land at the convention center several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced the choppers to back off. Troopers then tossed the supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.
In hopes of defusing the situation at the convention center, Mayor Ray Nagin gave the refugees permission to march across a bridge to the city's unflooded west bank for whatever relief they could find. But the bedlam made that difficult.
``This is a desperate SOS,'' Nagin said in a statement. ``Right now we are out of resources at the convention center and don't anticipate enough buses.''
At least seven bodies were scattered outside the convention center, a makeshift staging area for those rescued from rooftops, attics and highways. The sidewalks were packed with people without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.
An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
``I don't treat my dog like that,'' 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair.
``You can do everything for other countries, but you can't do nothing for your own people,'' he added. ``You can go overseas with the military, but you can't get them down here.''
The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.
``They've been teasing us with buses for four days,'' Edwards said. ``They're telling us they're going to come get us one day, and then they don't show up.''
Every so often, an armored state police vehicle cruised in front of the convention center with four or five officers in riot gear with automatic weapons. But there was no sign of help from the National Guard.
At one point the crowd began to chant ``We want help! We want help!'' Later, a woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm, ``The Lord is my shepherd ...''
``We are out here like pure animals,'' the Issac Clark said.
``We've got people dying out here - two babies have died, a woman died, a man died,'' said Helen Cheek. ``We haven't had no food, we haven't had no water, we haven't had nothing. They just brought us here and dropped us.''
Tourist Debbie Durso of Washington, Mich., said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, ``'Go to hell - it's every man for himself.'''
``This is just insanity,'' she said. ``We have no food, no water ... all these trucks and buses go by and they do nothing but wave.''
At the hot and stinking Superdome, where 30,000 were being evacuated by bus to the Houston Astrodome, fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething sea of tense, suffering people who waited in a lines that stretched a half-mile to board yellow school buses.
After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up, with a group of refugees breaking through a line of heavily armed National Guardsmen.
One military policeman was shot in the leg as he and a man scuffled for the MP's rifle, police Capt. Ernie Demmo said. The man was arrested.
Some of those among the mostly poor crowd had been in the dome for four days without air conditioning, working toilets or a place to bathe. An ambulance service airlifting the sick and injured out of the Superdome suspended flights as too dangerous after it was reported that a bullet was fired at a military helicopter.
``If they're just taking us anywhere, just anywhere, I say praise God,'' said refugee John Phillip. ``Nothing could be worse than what we've been through.''
By Thursday evening, 11 hours after the military began evacuating the Superdome, the arena held 10,000 more people than it did at dawn. National Guard Capt. John Pollard said evacuees from around the city poured into the Superdome and swelled the crowd to about 30,000 because they believed the arena was the best place to get a ride out of town.
As he watched a line snaking for blocks through ankle-deep waters, New Orleans' emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert blamed the inadequate response on the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
``This is not a FEMA operation. I haven't seen a single FEMA guy,'' he said. He added: ``We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans.''
FEMA officials said some operations had to be suspended in areas where gunfire has broken out.
A day after Nagin took 1,500 police officers off search-and-rescue duty to try to restore order in the streets, there were continued reports of looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings - and not all the crimes were driven by greed.
When some hospitals try to airlift patients, Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan said, ``there are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, `You better come get my family.'''
Outside a looted Rite-Aid drugstore, some people were anxious to show they needed what they were taking. A gray-haired man who would not give his name pulled up his T-shirt to show a surgery scar and explained that he needs pads for incontinence.
``I'm a Christian. I feel bad going in there,'' he said.
Earl Baker carried toothpaste, toothbrushes and deodorant. ``Look, I'm only getting necessities,'' he said. ``All of this is personal hygiene. I ain't getting nothing to get drunk or high with.''
While floodwaters in the city appeared to stabilize, efforts continued to plug three breaches that had opened up in the levee system that protects this below-sea-level city.
Helicopters dropped sandbags into the breach and pilings were being pounded into the mouth of the canal Thursday to close its connection to Lake Pontchartrain, state Transportation Secretary Johnny Bradberry said. He said contractors had completed building a rock road to let heavy equipment roll to the area by midnight.
The next step called for using about 250 concrete road barriers to seal the gap.
In Washington, the White House said Bush will tour the devastated Gulf Coast region on Friday and has asked his father, former President George H.W. Bush, and former President Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign for victims.
The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness.
``I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this - whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud,'' Bush said. ``And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together.''
Donald Dudley, a 55-year-old New Orleans seafood merchant, complained that when he and other hungry refugees broke into the kitchen of the convention center and tried to prepare food, the National Guard chased them away.
``They pulled guns and told us we had to leave that kitchen or they would blow our damn brains out,'' he said. ``We don't want their help. Give us some vehicles and we'll get ourselves out of here!''
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perhaps some good might come out the whole world watching--maybe all of the potential muslim immigrants are watching this on Al-Jazeera and will decide to stay put instead of coming to live here!
Shoot to Kill. It is the fault of PCism that people are being robbed and raped. The softness of PCism has the system frozen. PCism is afraid to go out and kill the perps. They will be called racist and they are afraid that great sympathy will be poured out for the poor looters and rapists who lost their lives rather then the innocent victims, not unlike those who protest the death of a heinous killer when he/she is being executed but care not for the innocent babies murdered before or during birth. It is the same mentality and it is freezing authorities up from making the necessary decision to kill the looters, murderers and rapist. The decision must be made to kill anyone looting, raping or murdering on the spot in a situation like this. When Galveston was hit by a hurricane with mass devastation and there were looters they did what they had to do, they shot them and added them to the piles of dead to be burned. That was before PCism took over in this country. People knew to do what they had to so that mass anarchy would not occur. They protected the lives and property of the innocent rather then the guilty. These looters, rapists and murderers have become the enemy in a war against our country when they choose to take advantage of people after a horrific catastrophe like this. We shoot our enemies in a war situation with the intent to kill them.
If your focus is style over substance I guess that's a valid criticism. Just like calling the President a chimp because he stumbles over words.
ABSOLUTELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's an interesting observation. Checking back in my comments this is the only other 'hurricane thread' that I have posted on and I only made one post and here is what I said there:
To: george wytheThis is a tragedy of nearly incomprehensible proportions. The Gulf coast is in great need of prayers and cash.
218 posted on 09/01/2005 9:31:40 AM MDT by TigersEye (It was you who made my brown eyes blue...)
Anything else you'd like to share?
It's just strategery.
If you had read my other posts you would have found that that is exactly my point about shooting looters and thugs on sight.
Not according to the east coast 'O'Reilly' conservatives here. They got together and had a whole thread about it and decided that martial law does not suspend the Constitution.
Are you thinking of former justice Thurgood Marshall or some other Marshall?
Actually I was thinking of marshaling together the spell-checkers here and seeing if they wanted to start a petition to impeach the President for mispronunciation.
If I were out of control I would have been suspended or banned in a minute. No one here is special. Some just think they are.
Do you know what State Soveriegnty is?
" All that's missing are reports of ravenous wolves chewing on corpses."
I've been reading reports that packs of wolves have been sighted moving south from Montana and Wyoming.
Its the gators you have to worry about. But you know...voodoo is the city's main religion...so maybe they have something else in mind.
No, the Governor of the state initiates the marshal law plan that was legislatedby the Louisiana government. this is not covered in the Constitution of the United States. This is one of those things left to the states to legislate...which part of the Constitution guarrantees that right to the states?
Having stayed and survived a major hurricane myself, Hurricane Hugo, I was willing to accept personal responsibility for my decision and rely on myself for my survival. Those Katrina survivors who could have left but chose to stay must also accept some of the responsibility for their decision.
Even though I know they made the wrong decision, I have sent money to help and will send more money in the future.
My wife has aunts, uncles & cousins in New Orleans and we haven't been able to find out if they are alive or dead. We will offer to let them stay in our home if we can get in touch with them. We wouldn't be going through this torment if they had evacuated.
Again, I'm sorry.
" This is what we get when me hire men-without-gonads to protect us."
The only person who can order the La National Guard to shoot to kill looters is the Governor.
She is a left wing Politically Correct B$tch. You are right, she has no gonads.
President Bush under our constitution can't send American Military in to stop the riots as per our constitution.
Points to ponder:
While some people are screaming about “government's mishandling”, and making excuses for the looters’ despicable behavior, think about this:
1.The National Weather Service gave people ample warning of the impending disaster. They had days to evacuate, but for whatever idiotic reasons they concocted, decided to stay. Don’t give me that crap about “no transportation”. Rent a U-Haul, pack your valuables, and GET OUT. The only people that had a valid reason are the handicapped and infirmed. However, they comprise a relatively small portion of the population. The rest don’t have an excuse.
2.Setting up disaster relief centers and command and control takes time. FEMA was prepared; the “blame Bush” contingent in New Orleans was not. Even so, how was FEMA, the Red Cross, or local law enforcement supposed to set up operations in the middle of a giant lake?
3.The looters revealed very early on that most of them are career thugs to begin with and are using this tragedy as an outlet to continue their crime sprees. C’mon people. They’re taking television sets. Where in the hell are they going to put them? Where are they going to plug in all the appliances they’re stealing?
4.New Orleans is just one of the Hurricane magnets in the Gulf area. The construction and re-inforcement of levees won't do much to hold back the tidal wave of water on a city that's about 5 feet below sea level.
5. If New Orleans put as much effort into personal responsibility, helping each other, and unifying the community as they do looting, blaming the government, and making asses out of themselves in the media spotlight, they’d be a lot better off.
You are exactly right, it would be an act of war upon the state. the State has to take care of itself in reality, the Federal Government constitutionally has its "hands" tied. Though Help will come unconstitutionally...
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