|
New Orleans: All must go
04/09/2005 18:18 - (SA)
|
|
|
 |
|
| A makeshift tomb at a New Orleans street corner conceals a body that had been lying on the sidewalk for days in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (Dave Martin, AP) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Metairie - US homeland security chief Michael Chertoff on Sunday set the stage for a complete evacuation of people from deluged New Orleans following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.
"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 with the hope that we're going to continue to supply them with food and water," Chertoff said in Metairie, Louisiana.
"The flooded places when dewatered are not going to be sanitary, not healthy. There's not going to be a way to get food and water," he said.
Chertoff said separately on the Fox News Sunday television programme: "We are basically moving the city of New Orleans to other parts of the country."
Authorities have estimated it would take several months to drain the one-time bustling jazz capital and start making it habitable.
"We have to shelter people, we have to feed them, we have to educate their kids, we have to get them medium-term housing and we have to give them hope," Chertoff said.
- AFP
|
