Grisly Scene Greets Bush in New Orleans

Grisly Scene Greets Bush in New Orleans
Agence France-Presse

Monday 12 September 2005

The grim harvest of bloated bodies continued unabated in New Orleans as President George W. Bush began a fresh tour of the region devastated two weeks ago by Hurricane Katrina.

Under attack for his handling of the crisis, Bush was to make his third tour of the storm-battered Gulf Coast, where hundreds of thousands have been made homeless and an unknown number lie dead in the streets and their flooded homes.

Police, troops and rescue crews in New Orleans pursued their round-the-clock mission of fishing out rotting corpses and pressing lingering survivors to leave their homes.

Teams fanned out in small boats and rubber waders in their house-to-house search for holdouts, while the city's downtown district echoed to the pounding of jackhammers and heavy machinery as crews cleared out debris.

A National Guard unit patrolled one neighbourhood, trying to persuade the old and infirm to abandon their homes, as nearly half a million others have done, and were inevitably stumbling across decomposing bodies in the streets.

"It ain't a pretty sight," said Sergeant James Terrel as his men went house to house. "I don't recommend walking down there. Even a lot of my guys don't want to see this kind of thing... and some of them have been in Iraq."

"We found this one right here in the street, in low lying water," he said, explaining that the only way his men could identify the victim as a black male was because of his hair and clothing.

In past years, the first Sunday of the American football season would have seen throngs of fans at the Louisiana Superdome.

The local team, the Saints, were instead playing their season opener against the Carolina Panthers in Charlotte, North Carolina, and kicked a 47-yard field goal with three seconds left for a thrilling 23-20 win.

When the team took the field, the crowd stood and applauded, many of them waving signs of support. "We love New Orleans" read one. "Let's all be Saints" said another.

But today, their home stadium is enduringly linked with the nightmare that swept New Orleans when Katrina hit.

The surrounding streets are a tangle of fallen power lines, smashed and charred homes, dead dogs, and abandoned cars, with not a soul to be seen, save a squad of four soldiers patrolling, picking their way past piles of steel and garbage.

At the First Baptist Church in Slidell, a small town just outside the city, the faithful wept as Pastor Michael Clauch led them in prayer.

"Father I ask you to wrap your arms around these people," Clauch prayed. "You will be their refuge, you will be their help."

The American Red Cross appealed for 40,000 volunteers to help ease the misery of the vast army of homeless.

"This is a disaster of such scope and such significance that it is not going to go away in weeks or even months," said Red Cross spokesman John Degnan. The organisation is housing 160,000 refugees in 675 shelters across the country.

Health officials declared war on mosquitoes in the swamp-like city, announcing an aerial spraying campaign to start Monday to thwart possible outbreaks of West Nile virus and other diseases.

But the US Army Corps of Engineers offered a gleam of optimism. It hoped to pump out the putrid waters still covering entire neighbourhoods of New Orleans by early October, about a month sooner than expected.

In addition, the city's international airport was to reopen to commercial flights on Tuesday. The facility has handled only humanitarian and military flights since Katrina struck.

After marking the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which briefly made him one of the most popular US presidents ever, Bush arrived on the USS Iwo Jima, moored in New Orleans, where he was to spend the night.

On Monday he was to tour the New Orleans area then visit Gulfport, Mississippi before returning to the White House on Monday.

With criticism mounting that the government's response to Katrina was too little, too late, Bush has seen his approval ratings sink to their worst levels since he took office in January 2001.

He urged Americans before the trip to rally behind the relief effort just as they had pulled together after September 11, 2001.

"Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and loss of life," Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday.

"We remember the resolve of our nation to defend our freedom, rebuild a wounded city, and care for our neighbours in need ... America will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it," he said.

Many Americans fault Bush's response to Katrina, saying his government reacted chaotically and tardily. As a result, hundreds of thousands of victims, many of them poor blacks, were exposed to a complete breakdown in order.

The latest opinion poll by Newsweek magazine found that just 38 percent approve of Bush's job performance, while 52 percent of respondents no longer trust him to make the right decisions in a foreign or domestic crisis.

And a survey by Time magazine suggested 61 percent of Americans thought the government should cut its spending in Iraq to help pay for post-Katrina reconstruction.

One big criticism of the relief operation was that federal, state and local official were hopelessly disorganised.

The Bush administration suffered its first political casualty of Katrina Friday when Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was replaced as pointman by Coast Guard vice admiral Thad Allen.

In a television interview on Sunday, Allen admitted he had encountered "a lot of frustration" in New Orleans, but good progress was being made to smooth out disorganisation.

But criticism of FEMA continued.

Colonel Jeff Smith, deputy director of emergency planning for Louisiana's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said FEMA was fumbling efforts to provide temporary shelters for evacuees.

"We have raised this issue now for days. We do not feel this process is working fast enough," he told reporters in Louisiana's capital, Baton Rouge.

Hurricane Katrina smashed into the US Gulf Coast on August 29, unleashing floods that swamped New Orleans and mighty winds that reduced homes in the states of Alabama and Mississippi to matchwood.

The confirmed death toll across the region passed 400, but the number of corpses being recovered from the receding floodwaters suggested an earlier estimate of 10,000 dead in New Orleans alone was excessive.

"I would suspect that number would be somewhat lower than that - as a matter of fact, a heck of a lot lower than that," the top military commander in the recovery effort, Lieutenant General Russel Honore, told CNN.

In contrast, Katrina's economic cost is being upgraded almost daily.

An estimate released on Friday by a private company, Risk Management Solutions, said the final bill will top 125 billion dollars, compared with 26.5 billion dollars notched up by Hurricane Andrew, which hit Florida in 1992.

Another hurricane, Ophelia, was meanwhile being monitored, with meteorologists warning it could hit southern US states early Tuesday.

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