[Mb-civic] Troops pouring in with aid - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Troops pouring in with aid
Scant resources and fears of violence strain relief workers

By Thomas Farragher and Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff  |  September 3, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- National Guard troops poured into this storm-staggered 
city yesterday as smoke fouled the air, corpses piled up in morgues, and 
bitter residents said President Bush was merely acknowledging the 
obvious when he said the US response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation 
was not adequate.

Four days after the killer storm roared ashore, the swath of destruction 
still seemed otherworldly and the emergency response to it continued to lag.

Sporadic gunfire was still heard in pockets of the city. About 100 
patients and 900 staff members at Charity Hospital, the city's largest 
public hospital, were stranded because relief workers feared violence 
would thwart their rescue. Bodies piled up in a flooded underground morgue.

At the downtown hospital, medical staff administered saline and 
intravenous nourishment to one another as food and water supplies 
dwindled to almost nothing.

''People will continue to die," said Don Smithburg, chief executive of 
the Louisiana State University hospital systems. ''Our heroic staff just 
can't continue to keep on keeping on."
Pop-up National guard deployments

An explosion at a warehouse rocked New Orleans before daybreak, and a 
second large fire erupted downtown in an old retail building in a dry 
section of Canal Street, deepening the sense of collapse in the city. 
Basic information about how many died in the wake of Katrina, how many 
remain stranded, and when the full force of national disaster relief 
efforts would take hold was impossible to obtain. A bus carrying 
survivors away from New Orleans overturned, killing one person and 
injuring several others.

Federal disaster officials were on the defensive about a response that 
many assailed as too sluggish.

''It was beyond our immediate capabilities, for sure," said William 
Lokey, federal coordinating officer for the Federal Emergency Management 
Agency. ''I'll probably be lying awake a long time second-guessing, 
thinking about how we might have done things differently."

http://www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/03/troops_pouring_in_with_aid/
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