[Mb-civic] 'It Was as if All of Us Were Already Pronounced Dead' - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

'It Was as if All of Us Were Already Pronounced Dead'
Convention Center Left a Five-Day Legacy of Chaos and Violence

By Wil Haygood and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 15, 2005; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS For five eternal-seeming days, as many as 20,000 people, 
most of them black, waited to be rescued, not just from the floodwaters 
of Hurricane Katrina but from the nightmarish place where they had 
sought refuge.

During that time, the moon that hovered over the Ernest N. Morial 
Convention Center seemed closer than anyone who could provide those 
inside the center with any help.

On the fourth day, after TV had been filled with live reports from the 
center describing sexual assaults, robberies and gunfire, single mothers 
desperately seeking help for their children and fathers doing their best 
to protect them, the federal official charged with leading the hurricane 
response, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, responded to an 
interviewer's question by saying it was the first he had heard that 
people "don't have food and water in there."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/14/AR2005091402655.html?referrer=email
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