[Centraal Hurricane Katrina] Problemen in New Orleans deel 5

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Convoys bring relief to New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- On the day President Bush visited this devastated city, thousands of tired and angry people stranded at the convention center welcomed National Guard troops and trucks carrying food, water and medicine with cheers and tears of joy.



"The crowd erupted," said Tishia Walters, a woman in the convention center crowd told CNN by telephone. "Flags went flying, people shouting and waving. There's like 7,000 people out here in dying conditions," she added. Walters said she was outside of the center when she saw the National Guard and police arrive.

"It's amazing. They've come in full force," she said. Lt. Gen. Russel Honore was directing the deployment of National Guard troops -- expected to number 1,000 -- from a New Orleans street corner. Honore said getting food and water to the people at the convention center was difficult. "If you ever have 20,000 people come to supper, you know what I'm talking about," the general said. "If it was easy, it would have been done already."

CNN's Barbara Starr, who is traveling with the three-star general, said Honore is "very determined to keep this looking like a humanitarian relief operation." "A few moments ago, he stopped a truck full of National Guard troops ... and said, 'Point your weapons down, this is not Iraq,' " Starr reported. Authorities continued working to evacuate the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, trying to help the weakest people first.

Nagin said in a statement that more than 10,000 people had been evacuated from the city Thursday but that more than 50,000 survivors were still on rooftops and in shelters, in urgent need of help.

Bush arrives in New Orleans

President Bush met on Friday afternoon with Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who blasted federal relief efforts in an expletive-laced diatribe earlier in the day. Blanco and Nagin met Bush at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where a field hospital and staging center have been set up. In an expletive-laced radio interview Thursday night, Nagin said the government was "feeding the people a line of bull" and called on government officials to "get off your asses."

Nagin lashed out at state and federal authorities, saying they were "thinking small" in the face of the massive crisis. Hours earlier, the president took a ground tour in Biloxi, Mississippi, to inspect storm damage. The president said he is "satisfied" with the federal government's response to the Katrina disaster, although there is not "enough security in New Orleans, yet."

Bush embraced two women as they recounted their ordeal and talked to other people in their Biloxi neighborhood.

Police outnumbered and outgunned

Overnight, police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct station, trying to protect it from gunmen roaming the city, CNN's Chris Lawrence reported. One New Orleans police sergeant compared the situation to Somalia and said officers were outnumbered and outgunned by gangs in trucks. The officer hitched a ride to Baton Rouge on Friday morning, after working 60 hours straight in the flooded city. He has not decided whether he will return.

He broke down in tears when he described the deaths of his fellow officers, saying many had drowned doing their jobs. Other officers have turned in their badges, he said. In one incident, the sergeant said he saw bodies riddled with bullet holes, and the top of one man's head shot off.

Other developments

State officials have spotted a "major" oil spill in the Venice area of the Mississippi Delta region, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality said Friday. A department news release said two tanks capable of holding 2 million barrels appeared to be leaking. The statement did not give the precise location of the spill. Venice is about 75 miles southeast of New Orleans.

The Houston Astrodome in Texas, where thousands of refugees had been bused over the past couple of days, stopped accepting refugees late Thursday. However, authorities later decided to process evacuees at the Astrodome and house them in the nearby Reliant Arena, said Patrick Trahan, a city spokesman. Other New Orleans refugees are being taken to the Texas cities of Huntsville, San Antonio and Dallas.

Offers of support have poured in from all over the world. Many countries have offered condolences and made donations to the Red Cross, including Britain, Japan, Australia and Sri Lanka, which is still recovering from last year's tsunami.

In Washington, the House approved a $10.5 billion disaster relief request from the Bush administration. The Senate approved the measure Thursday night.

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Op zaterdag 3 september 2005 00:24 schreef Roi het volgende:
Dit is dus eigenlijk deel 6

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The big disconnect on New Orleans
The official version; then there's the in-the-trenches version

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views from the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.

But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN's transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here's what they had to say:

Conditions in the Convention Center

FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need.

Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people.

CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they're all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw... people who are dying in front of you.

Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you've got about 3,000 people here in this -- in the Convention Center right now. They're hungry. Don't have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.

Uncollected corpses

Brown: That's not been reported to me, so I'm not going to comment. Until I actually get a report from my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I'm just not going to speculate.

Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us.

Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy -- that's how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I'm like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just -- I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He's dead.

Hospital evacuations

Brown: I've just learned today that we ... are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It's gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they're in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I've seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There's over 200 patients still here remaining. ...We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly ... where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations.

# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can't get. The conditions are such that it's very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It's pretty rough.

Violence and civil unrest

Brown: I've had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they're banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I've had no reports of that.

CNN's Chris Lawrence: From here and from talking to the police officers, they're losing control of the city. We're now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn't safe to be out on the street.

The federal response

Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.

Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we're doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.

Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.

Nagin: They don't have a clue what's going on down there.

Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.

Security

Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There's some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there's somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face.

Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.

Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.

Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They're literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.

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Op zaterdag 3 september 2005 01:08 schreef marcb1974 het volgende:
Veel van de verpleegsters in de ziekenhuizen gaven zichzelf een infuus om toch maar vocht binnen te krijgen
Agenten die hun eigen politieburo moeten verdedigen tegen aanvallers
Branden die niet geblust kunnen worden door een gebrek aan water