Engineers try to stop flooding
2005-09-24 20:44
New Orleans - Hurricane Rita poured more water into New Orleans for a second day on Saturday and inundated fishing villages along Louisiana's coast, where hundreds of people were rescued from homes swamped by up to nearly two metres of water.
"We need help now," said Sherry Adam of Lafitte, about 30 kilometres south of New Orleans.
Rescuers in boats were pulling residents from flooded homes along a remote stretch of swamp land between the city and the Gulf of Mexico. Seawater poured over levees and into homes.
"I've never seen it this bad," said Adam, 55. "This land will gone in no time."
Residents were taken to a bridge, where they were placed on National Guard trucks and transported to a nearby high school on dry land.
By Saturday morning, the storm dumped 18.5 centimetres of rain on Baton Rouge and 11.9 centimetres on Lafayette. The New Orleans airport in Kenner got 5.1 centimetres.
Although New Orleans escaped the worst of the storm, engineers said they need at least two to three weeks to pump water from the most heavily flooded neighbourhoods after they plug a series of levee breaches.
"The surge got higher than we expected in the canal," said Dan Hitchings, an engineer overseeing recovery operations for the Army Corps of Engineers. "It's still spilling in there this morning."
The corps planned to drop sand bags and boulders into several large gaps that appeared on Friday in a part of the Industrial Canal levee that had been patched after Hurricane Katrina.
Rita's storm surges eroded part of the levee, sending water rushing into the city's Ninth Ward neighbourhood, which already was badly damaged and mostly abandoned.
Only about eight centimetres of rain was expected in the city throughout the day from Rita's outer bands, relieving fears that rains would overwhelm the city's already battered pump system and produce even worse flooding.
South of New Orleans in low-lying Jefferson Parish, a storm surge of about two metres swamped some neighbourhoods that escaped much of the flooding from Katrina, said Albert Creppel, a constable in the town of Jean Lafitte.
"The water is pouring in back there," Creppel said. "We've got breaks all over the levies."
Additional flooding remained a concern in New Orleans even though the expected rainfall was less than originally forecast. Lake Pontchartrain was nearly two metres above normal.
- SAPA