[Mb-civic] Many Evacuated, but Thousands Still Waiting - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Many Evacuated, but Thousands Still Waiting
White House Shifts Blame to State and Local Officials

By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Spencer Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 4, 2005; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 3 -- Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day 
awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration 
officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all 
levels have called a failure of the country's emergency management.

President Bush authorized the dispatch of 7,200 active-duty ground 
troops to the area -- the first major commitment of regular ground 
forces in the crisis -- and the Pentagon announced that an additional 
10,000 National Guard troops will be sent to Louisiana and Mississippi, 
raising the total Guard contingent to about 40,000.

Authorities reported progress in restoring order and electricity and 
repairing levees, as a hospital ship arrived and cruise ships were sent 
to provide temporary housing for victims. As Louisiana officials 
expressed confidence that they had begun to get a handle on the crisis, 
a dozen National Guard troops broke into applause late Saturday as Isaac 
Kelly, 81, the last person to be evacuated from the Superdome, boarded a 
school bus.

But there remained an overwhelming display of human misery on the 
streets of New Orleans, where the last 1,500 people were being evacuated 
from the Convention Center amid an overpowering odor of human waste and 
rotting garbage. The evacuees, most of them black and poor, spoke of 
violence, anarchy and family members who died for lack of food, water 
and medical care.

About 42,000 people had been evacuated from the city by Saturday 
afternoon, with roughly the same number remaining, city officials said. 
Search-and-rescue efforts continued in flooded areas of the city, where 
an unknown number of people wait in their homes, on rooftops or in 
makeshift shelters. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced 
by the flooding -- 250,000 have been absorbed by Texas alone, and local 
radio reported that Baton Rouge will have doubled in population by 
Monday. Federal officials said they have begun to collect corpses but 
could not guess the total toll.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301680.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050904/05a7d79a/attachment-0001.htm