Documents reveal Katrina's impact was foreseen

Documents reveal Katrina's impact was foreseen
Officials say the final death toll from Hurricane Katrina may be lower than initially feared amid the release of a document that appears to show that the scale of the disaster had been foreseen.

Thousands of residents are still in New Orleans and reluctant to abandon their homes.

Officials say they will not yet use force to get people to leave the city, where receding floodwaters are slowly revealing the grim human toll.

With no let-up in the criticism of the national response to the disaster, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says the head of the national agency overseeing disaster relief is being replaced.

Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown is to be recalled to Washington.

He will be replaced Vice-Admiral Thad Allen from the US Coast Guard.

"Hurricane Katrina will go down as the largest natural disaster in American history, and Mike has done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal response to this unprecedented challenge," Mr Chertoff said.

Mr Brown had resisted calls to resign over the sluggish federal response to the disaster.

President George W Bush had notably stood up for Mr Brown in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, telling him: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Disaster foreseen

But critics' arguments that the disaster was foreseen and that the federal response could have been better planned are reinforced by a year-old document from Mr Brown's agency.

The document outlines a scenario of 1 million evacuees and up to 350,000 left homeless in the event of a hurricane hitting New Orleans.

It has been made public by opposition Democrats.

It explains that a hurricane of between category three and five hitting the southern state of Louisiana would create "a catastrophe with which the state would not be able to cope without massive help from neighbouring states and the federal Government."

Katrina was rated as a category four hurricane when it made landfall.

State and federal emergency management officials "believe that the gravity of the situation calls for an extraordinary level of advance planning to improve government readiness to respond effectively to such an event."

It recognises that "standing water and diseases could threaten public health," and that there "would be severe economic repercussions for the state and region."

New Orleans itself has taken on the air of a ghost town - its once-vibrant streets are completely deserted save for the thousands of police and military conducting house-to-house searches.

With efforts under way to drain the still-inundated parts of New Orleans, US Army engineers say that the putrid floodwaters clogging the wrecked city will be pumped out by early next month.

That is nearly two months earlier than expected.

Death toll

The operation to recover the bloated bodies of those killed in the disaster, which struck the Gulf Coast more than a week ago, has also begun in earnest.

But Terry Ebbert, the director of homeland security for New Orleans, says that so far the number of bodies being recovered do not tally with comments by Mayor Ray Nagin that up to 10,000 people may have been killed.

"I think there's some encouragement in what we found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic death that some people predicted may not, in fact, have occurred," he said.

"The numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire predictions of 10,000."

Most of the city of half a million people remains underwater.

Mr Ebbert says officials have only just begun operations to recover bodies from flooded homes.

He did not provide any estimate of the number of people who may have been killed by the hurricane and subsequent flooding.

The official death toll in and around the city stands at 118, but estimates of a final toll have varied wildly with officials saying some 25,000 body bags have been made available.

Neighbouring Mississippi has reported 204 dead.

Mr Ebbert says the authorities would concentrate their efforts on evacuating remaining residents and recovering bodies.

"What we are starting today, again, in a joint operation of both the military, the National Guard, and the New Orleans police department, is a recovery operation, a recovery operation to search by street, by grid, for any remains of individuals who have passed away," he said.

- AFP

In other developments:
The director of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who has been strongly criticised for his handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina, has been sent back to Washington. (Full Story)
The US military says it will ban journalists and photographers from documenting the recovery of bodies left littering New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. (Full Story)
A 22-year-old man has flown home to Brisbane this morning, after surviving Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. (Full Story)
The 30-year-old Melbourne man, who was arrested in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hit, says he feared for his life in jail. (Full Story)
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