AND YOU BASTARDS DARED CALLED THEM COWARDS...God, Have Mercy On Your Hateful Souls......
-
Missing police feared dead
Missing police feared dead
Missing police feared dead
JULIE CART, EDWIN CHEN AND SCOTT GOLD
Link Here
NEW ORLEANS—Hundreds of police officers are missing and many may be dead because of Hurricane Katrina, says a top police official.
Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley said about 700 of the city's 1,600 police officers were told to stay home until the storm passed so that they would be available to be deployed wherever needed.
Between 400 and 500 officers remained
unaccounted for yesterday and many
were feared dead, although Riley said some probably walked away from the job.
He declined to speculate about how many officers might have perished: "One is too many.''
"We don't know how many officers are dead," he said. "We don't know how many officers drowned. That's a fear of ours.''
The city continued its evacuation yesterday, with officials trying to convince the thousands of residents who were refusing to leave that the city was too dangerous for them to remain. If the stragglers insist on staying, they will be forcibly evacuated, officials said.
Rescuers scoured ravaged neighbourhoods of clapboard houses, grand estates and housing projects to find corpses and persuade the city's last stubborn residents to leave.
"Some are finally saying, `I've had enough,'" said Michael Keegan of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "They're getting dehydrated. They are running out of food."
Across a flooded city where as many as 10,000 holdouts were believed to be stubbornly staying put, police made it clear in orders barked from front porches and through closed doors that they would return.
Police Superintendent Eddie Compass said officers soon would begin entering houses and removing resisters.
"We're going to be respectful," he said. "We understand it is a dramatic experience, and we're going to handle it that way. We are very sensitive to the needs of our community.''
The orders to evacuate came as Congress swiftly approved $51.8 billion (U.S.) in relief for the devastated Gulf Coast, bringing the total so far to more than $62 billion. Federal officials now assume their share of the relief and cleanup will top $100 billion.
As a Mexican military convoy rolled across the Texas border with relief supplies, Louisiana officials were praising Canadians for their swift response.
State Senator Walter Boasso called a Vancouver search and rescue team that arrived days before the U.S. Army, "Fabulous, fabulous guys" and pointedly asked why it took "seven days to get the army in."
The front page of yesterday's Times-Picayune, the New Orleans paper now publishing from Baton Rouge, bluntly warned the diehards: "Clear out or else." Its website trumpeted: "25,000 body bags."
Police said they were 80 per cent done with their scan of the city for voluntary evacuees, after which they planned to begin carrying out Mayor Ray Nagin's order to forcibly remove remaining residents from a city filled with disease-carrying water, broken gas lines and rotting corpses. The job of carrying out the mayor's order rests largely with the 1,000 or so remaining members of New Orleans' beleaguered police force.
As the voluntary evacuation draws to an end, receding floodwaters revealed even more rotting corpses left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which crashed ashore Aug. 29.
Volunteer rescuer Gregg Silverman, part of a 14-boat contingent from Columbus, Ohio, said he expected to find more survivors. Instead, he found mostly bodies.
"They had me climb up on a roof, and I did bring an axe up to where a guy had tried to stick a pipe up through a vent," Silverman said. "Unfortunately, he had probably just recently perished. His dog was still there, barking. The dog wouldn't come."
As for other bodies: "We are not recovering them. We are just tying them up to banisters, leaving them on the roof."
The number of dead climbed after bodies were removed from the Memorial Medical Center. They had been left behind on Sept. 1 when the centre was evacuated because of rising waters. CNN reported 14 bodies were removed.
A week and a half after the storm's fury, there are only hints at what the final death toll might be. In Mississippi, the figure stands at around 200 but more than 1,000 are feared dead. In New Orleans, the mayor has suggested the number of dead could reach 10,000. Officials hope the body count won't reach predicted heights but the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is taking the lead in the recovery, has brought 25,000 body bags to the Gulf region.
The challenge of dealing with the dead runs deeper than simply where to store them. Among other things: How do you establish the victims' names, especially when many probably don't have dental records? And how do you return the dead to their relatives when no one knows who or where they are?
At two collection sites — one in downtown New Orleans and one in neighbouring St. Bernard Parish — federal mortuary teams are collecting information that may help identify a body. They will also collect whatever personal effects are on the bodies, in hopes that something might be used later to identify the victims.
At a temporary warehouse morgue in St. Gabriel, which had been prepared to take 1,000 bodies but is being readied to handle 5,000, the dead are photographed and forensic workers hope to use dental X-rays, fingerprints and DNA to identify them. But being submerged in water can damage fingerprints quickly and the intense heat some corpses have been exposed to makes it hard to identify them.
It could be years before everybody is identified, warned Amy Mundroff, a forensic anthropologist who worked on identifying victims after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Yesterday, the Army Corps of Engineers said New Orleans was about 60 per cent flooded — down from 80 per cent last week — but was slowly being drained by 37 of the 174 pumps in the Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, and 17 portable pumps. They can pump out 330 cubic metres per second, roughly equal to 432 Olympic-size swimming pools per hour. Engineers said the mammoth undertaking could take months, and may be complicated by corpses getting clogged in the pumps.
Some 400,000 homes are still without power and where water has been restored, it is not drinkable. The city is still dangerous — not because of armed criminals, as was the case last week, but because of the sewage-laden floodwaters that are believed to contain E. coli and a type of cholera-like bacteria. At least four deaths among evacuees are linked to infected wounds.
Fires also continued to rage yesterday, with at least 11 blazes burning across the city, including a rash of fires that destroyed three buildings at Dillard University. Across town at the Audubon Zoo, some of the 1,400 animals were lost, but keepers have been too busy caring for survivors to take a count.
At Louis Armstrong Airport, now a military encampment, city council met for the first time since Katrina, with members defending how they handled the disaster and defiantly vowing to rebuild.
"New Orleans has been built back from many disasters," said Councillor Cynthia Hedge Morrell. "New Orleans was here before there was a United States of America."
Those sentiments were echoed in part by members of the city's mostly white elite. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," Jimmy Reiss, a descendant of an old Uptown family, told The Wall Street Journal. "I'm not speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again or we're out," said Reiss, who serves in Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority.
In Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush declared Sept. 16 a national day of remembrance for the dead and pledged the government would cut red tape to provide $2,000 each in disaster assistance to families and to make sure they continue receiving Medicaid, food stamps and other federal benefits. He said about 400,000 families had already registered with FEMA for federal help. So far, more than half a million Americans have received emergency food stamps.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, star wire services
--Unbelievable.--
Missing police feared dead
Missing police feared dead
Missing police feared dead
JULIE CART, EDWIN CHEN AND SCOTT GOLD
Link Here
NEW ORLEANS—Hundreds of police officers are missing and many may be dead because of Hurricane Katrina, says a top police official.
Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley said about 700 of the city's 1,600 police officers were told to stay home until the storm passed so that they would be available to be deployed wherever needed.
Between 400 and 500 officers remained
unaccounted for yesterday and many
were feared dead, although Riley said some probably walked away from the job.
He declined to speculate about how many officers might have perished: "One is too many.''
"We don't know how many officers are dead," he said. "We don't know how many officers drowned. That's a fear of ours.''
The city continued its evacuation yesterday, with officials trying to convince the thousands of residents who were refusing to leave that the city was too dangerous for them to remain. If the stragglers insist on staying, they will be forcibly evacuated, officials said.
Rescuers scoured ravaged neighbourhoods of clapboard houses, grand estates and housing projects to find corpses and persuade the city's last stubborn residents to leave.
"Some are finally saying, `I've had enough,'" said Michael Keegan of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "They're getting dehydrated. They are running out of food."
Across a flooded city where as many as 10,000 holdouts were believed to be stubbornly staying put, police made it clear in orders barked from front porches and through closed doors that they would return.
Police Superintendent Eddie Compass said officers soon would begin entering houses and removing resisters.
"We're going to be respectful," he said. "We understand it is a dramatic experience, and we're going to handle it that way. We are very sensitive to the needs of our community.''
The orders to evacuate came as Congress swiftly approved $51.8 billion (U.S.) in relief for the devastated Gulf Coast, bringing the total so far to more than $62 billion. Federal officials now assume their share of the relief and cleanup will top $100 billion.
As a Mexican military convoy rolled across the Texas border with relief supplies, Louisiana officials were praising Canadians for their swift response.
State Senator Walter Boasso called a Vancouver search and rescue team that arrived days before the U.S. Army, "Fabulous, fabulous guys" and pointedly asked why it took "seven days to get the army in."
The front page of yesterday's Times-Picayune, the New Orleans paper now publishing from Baton Rouge, bluntly warned the diehards: "Clear out or else." Its website trumpeted: "25,000 body bags."
Police said they were 80 per cent done with their scan of the city for voluntary evacuees, after which they planned to begin carrying out Mayor Ray Nagin's order to forcibly remove remaining residents from a city filled with disease-carrying water, broken gas lines and rotting corpses. The job of carrying out the mayor's order rests largely with the 1,000 or so remaining members of New Orleans' beleaguered police force.
As the voluntary evacuation draws to an end, receding floodwaters revealed even more rotting corpses left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which crashed ashore Aug. 29.
Volunteer rescuer Gregg Silverman, part of a 14-boat contingent from Columbus, Ohio, said he expected to find more survivors. Instead, he found mostly bodies.
"They had me climb up on a roof, and I did bring an axe up to where a guy had tried to stick a pipe up through a vent," Silverman said. "Unfortunately, he had probably just recently perished. His dog was still there, barking. The dog wouldn't come."
As for other bodies: "We are not recovering them. We are just tying them up to banisters, leaving them on the roof."
The number of dead climbed after bodies were removed from the Memorial Medical Center. They had been left behind on Sept. 1 when the centre was evacuated because of rising waters. CNN reported 14 bodies were removed.
A week and a half after the storm's fury, there are only hints at what the final death toll might be. In Mississippi, the figure stands at around 200 but more than 1,000 are feared dead. In New Orleans, the mayor has suggested the number of dead could reach 10,000. Officials hope the body count won't reach predicted heights but the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is taking the lead in the recovery, has brought 25,000 body bags to the Gulf region.
The challenge of dealing with the dead runs deeper than simply where to store them. Among other things: How do you establish the victims' names, especially when many probably don't have dental records? And how do you return the dead to their relatives when no one knows who or where they are?
At two collection sites — one in downtown New Orleans and one in neighbouring St. Bernard Parish — federal mortuary teams are collecting information that may help identify a body. They will also collect whatever personal effects are on the bodies, in hopes that something might be used later to identify the victims.
At a temporary warehouse morgue in St. Gabriel, which had been prepared to take 1,000 bodies but is being readied to handle 5,000, the dead are photographed and forensic workers hope to use dental X-rays, fingerprints and DNA to identify them. But being submerged in water can damage fingerprints quickly and the intense heat some corpses have been exposed to makes it hard to identify them.
It could be years before everybody is identified, warned Amy Mundroff, a forensic anthropologist who worked on identifying victims after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Yesterday, the Army Corps of Engineers said New Orleans was about 60 per cent flooded — down from 80 per cent last week — but was slowly being drained by 37 of the 174 pumps in the Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, and 17 portable pumps. They can pump out 330 cubic metres per second, roughly equal to 432 Olympic-size swimming pools per hour. Engineers said the mammoth undertaking could take months, and may be complicated by corpses getting clogged in the pumps.
Some 400,000 homes are still without power and where water has been restored, it is not drinkable. The city is still dangerous — not because of armed criminals, as was the case last week, but because of the sewage-laden floodwaters that are believed to contain E. coli and a type of cholera-like bacteria. At least four deaths among evacuees are linked to infected wounds.
Fires also continued to rage yesterday, with at least 11 blazes burning across the city, including a rash of fires that destroyed three buildings at Dillard University. Across town at the Audubon Zoo, some of the 1,400 animals were lost, but keepers have been too busy caring for survivors to take a count.
At Louis Armstrong Airport, now a military encampment, city council met for the first time since Katrina, with members defending how they handled the disaster and defiantly vowing to rebuild.
"New Orleans has been built back from many disasters," said Councillor Cynthia Hedge Morrell. "New Orleans was here before there was a United States of America."
Those sentiments were echoed in part by members of the city's mostly white elite. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," Jimmy Reiss, a descendant of an old Uptown family, told The Wall Street Journal. "I'm not speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again or we're out," said Reiss, who serves in Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority.
In Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush declared Sept. 16 a national day of remembrance for the dead and pledged the government would cut red tape to provide $2,000 each in disaster assistance to families and to make sure they continue receiving Medicaid, food stamps and other federal benefits. He said about 400,000 families had already registered with FEMA for federal help. So far, more than half a million Americans have received emergency food stamps.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, star wire services
--Unbelievable.--
posted by Christy at 12:58 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home