Katrina: Superdome leaking
2005-08-29 15:14
New Orleans - Fear ripped through the largest emergency shelter in New Orleans on Monday as rain from Hurricane Katrina
seeped through the roof of the Superdome sports arena.
"The Superdome management assured us this would be the safest place in New Orleans," a clearly shaken reporter told a local radio station as the eye of the Category Four hurricane approached the low-lying city.
"This is starting to get nervous," the reporter said as people climbed up into the stands of the sports arena to escape the water accumulating at ground level.
"There's a lot of strange sounds. That waterproofing that was (on the roof) may be in the process of being peeled off.
"There is no open sky, but there is water seeping into the Superdome."
Tens of thousands of local residents who were unable or unwilling to heed a mandatory evacuation order lined up on Sunday morning to get into what the city called a refuge of last resort.
By nightfall, more than 30 000 had gathered there and more continued to straggle in even as gale-force winds rocked the city, the radio reporter said.
It was lights out in the French Quarter, where visibility was virtually nil as rain shot across the sky in sheets.
And winds were so powerful that, in the Best Western hotel on historic Saint Charles Street, some of the beds shook as the gusts whipped by.
At 11:00 GMT, the eye of the storm was located about 112km south-southeast of New Orleans as the storm barrelled northward at around 25km per hour.
With less than an hour to go before the eye of the storm hit, flooding had not yet set in the French Quarter, but it was a growing concern, as the city's water pumps shut down.
Hospitals in the area, meanwhile, were preparing evacuation plans to get patients and personnel off lower floors.
Although slightly weaker than on Sunday, the monster storm has already forced hundreds of thousands of area residents, from New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi, to flee and seek refuge on higher ground.
An estimated 80% of New Orleans residents have left the low-lying, flood-prone city, according to local officials.
- AFP