Recovery operation under way
2005-09-06 18:09
New Orleans - New Orleans showed the first rays of recovery from Hurricane Katrina on Tuesday as engineers pumped water out of the corpse-littered city to clear the way for months of cleanup operations.
With United States troops keeping order and all but the most stubborn survivors evacuated a week after floodwaters inundated the southern jazz capital, thousands of suburban residents were back to check on their homes.
President George W Bush, on his second tour of the stricken Gulf Coast, said on Monday officials were "doing the best they can" to cope as Washington erupted in a round of finger-pointing over the official response.
Scattered corpses
New scenes of horror were reported here, foreshadowing the grim discoveries ahead as mobile morgues collected bodies from the disaster that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said may have left 10 000 people dead.
A sheriff said rescuers found the bodies of 22 people who had lashed themselves together around a pole in an eastern suburb in an apparently desperate attempt to survive Katrina's fury.
Resident Eric Breaux said he saw 15 corpses, most of them caught in barbed wire at the country club in suburban Metairie. He said he personally tethered three cadavers to street signs to keep them from floating away.
Good news
Battered New Orleans got its first good news on Monday after engineers succeeded in closing a massive hole in a levee that broke and unleashed the surging waters of Lake Pontchartrain on the city.
The massive round-the-clock project saw contractors drive piles into the gap and huge twin-rotor Chinook helicopters dump hundreds of bags full of sand, cement and bits of torn-up roadway.
The repair allowed engineers to start pumping water back into the lake while planning to blow holes in strategic points farther down the levee to allow water to seep out.
But authorities estimated it would take between 36 and 80 days to drain the city, making it months before authorities could clean up a disease-breeding soup of floodwater, gasoline, sewage and other contaminants.
Nothing left of city
In the city's relatively intact western suburbs, thousands of evacuees who fled the storm returned on Monday to check on the state of their battered homes and salvage what they could.
Even as the suburban residents returned, police and rescue teams in the heart of New Orleans struggled to persuade some last diehard survivors of the storm to finally abandon their homes.
"There is absolutely no reason to stay here. There are no jobs. There are no homes to go to, no hotels to go to, and there is absolutely nothing here," New Orleans deputy police chief Warren Riley told a news conference Monday.
"We advised people that this city has been destroyed and it's completely been destroyed," he said. "No food or any reason for them to stay. There is no power, trees are down, and power lines are down."
Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands of evacuated residents faced an uncertain future. Some 20 states have offered to take in victims, but officials scrambled to find them lodging, medical care and schools for their children.
Another move
Some 4 000 evacuees were to be moved on Tuesday from the Astrodome stadium and Reliant arena complex in Houston, Texas to two cruise ships docked in the port of Galveston, officials said.
Washington moved to ease a looming unemployment crisis, with labour secretary Elaine Chao signing a national emergency grant for more than $100m to create 25 000 temporary jobs.