Thread: Disease fear rises in New Orleans

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Disease fear rises in New Orleans
By Thomas Farragher and Stephen Smith, Globe Staff | September 7, 2005

NEW ORLEANS --Fouled and filthy water slowly receded from this broken, nearly empty city yesterday, while officials tallying the dead worried about contamination and disease.

They also began to assess the severity of the damage that Hurricane Katrina caused to the Gulf Coast environment.

As four of the city's 148 pumps whirred to life, draining a murky brew of floodwater into Lake Pontchartrain, authorities braced for what might emerge as the water is drained.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin, after viewing his battered city from the air, said 60 percent of its terrain remained flooded, down from 80 percent in the immediate aftermath of the killer storm. Beneath the water, he said, lay a nightmarish soup of bodies, mosquitoes, fuel, and contaminants.

''It's going to be awful, and it's going to wake the nation up again," Nagin said.

Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, expressed concern that the debris-filled water would become a dangerous breeding ground.

''What I'm really worried about now is how many bodies we're going to find in there," she said. ''You've got dead animals in there. Spilled fuel.

''It's not going to be a pretty sight," Blanco said. ''My next big worry is contamination and disease."

Blanco implored residents who were still in the city to evacuate so the cleanup could begin in earnest, and so the potential threat of disease could be reduced.

Blanco said those who had stayed behind may have criminal records and fear incarceration, or may have mental health problems exacerbated by the destruction.

''We're going to coax them out," she said. ''We're bringing in chaplains to talk to them. We certainly don't want disease outbreaks. That's our next big worry, and that would be the next big tragedy."

In drier sections of the city, rescuers offered residents food if they agreed to leave. Those who didn't were no longer receiving supplies, officials said.

''These are people who tried to stick it out, but time and a lack of food has worn them down," said one rescue worker, Brady Devereaux, a Texas firefighter. ''So we are using food to lure them out."

The US Army Corps of Engineers said hundreds of pumps are on their way to New Orleans to speed the city's draining. It remained unclear how many of the idle pumps already there could be repaired, but officials said they expected many would need to be replaced. Thirty-three new devices that have arrived in recent days should begin pumping soon.

''Hundreds of them are on order," said a corps spokesman, Tim Hitchings. The city should be dry in 24 to 80 days, he said.

In another sign of progress, the state said it plans to open bids Friday for temporary repair work on the 5.4-mile bridge that carries Interstate 10 over Lake Pontchartrain between New Orleans and Slidell. The bridge is impassable.

Brigadier General Michael Fleming of the National Guard said his troops have begun to ''embed" within the New Orleans Police Department, which has been staggered by the storm and its aftermath. Two officers have killed themselves, and many have quit.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said the recovery of bodies is underway. And Fleming said that if his troops, now numbering 40,000 in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, are asked to assist in that grim duty, they will.

Mortuary teams have made plans to process more than 5,000 bodies. The federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team had three teams of 30 each from around the country ready to deal with the victims' remains. As of yesterday, the official count stood at 83. Some officials have said that Katrina's death toll could exceed 10,000.

''We're going to count one at a time," said Bob Johannessen, a spokesman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals. ''It could take days. It could take years. It could take lifetimes."

The process of identifying the dead has not begun, officials said. Fleming said the process must be carried out ''with great dignity."

''I mean these people were somebody's mother, somebody's father," he said.

In the Garden District yesterday, roads that were a tangle of tree limbs and other detritus a few days ago had been cleared. They were under heavy patrol by National Guard troops, who stopped all civilian vehicles to ask drivers about their reason for being in the city as well as their destination.

But fire broke out at a large house in the Garden District, a neighborhood of antebellum mansions, and flames leaped from one house to another, consuming several by midmorning.

In all, firefighters battled at least four major fires, with smoke in the air uptown and downtown as the military ferried in water on helicopters.

The deputy police chief, Warren Riley, said that authorities were not sure what had started the fires and that they did not have the resources to investigate; they had enough on their hands trying to rescue survivors who still remained stranded in eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish. Highway overpasses were crowded yesterday with lines of trailers carrying skiffs, rafts, and airboats that launched off flooded exit ramps to search for survivors.

Michael D. McDaniel, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Quality, said that from oil spills to wrecked treatment plants, ruined marshland to spoiled fisheries, the hurricane's impact on the region's ecosystems is almost unimaginable in scope.

He said two major oil spills -- one measuring 68,000 barrels -- and overturned boats up and down the coast have left ''almost a solid sheen" on the region's waters. ''Everywhere we look, there's a spill," he said.

Twenty-five large sewage plants, and 500 smaller ones, have been damaged or wiped out.

From 140,000 to 160,000 homes in Louisiana have been destroyed, leaving behind what will be mountains of waste, he said.

In addition, critical protective marshland is now underwater.

Heavy metals will sink into the sediment of the lake. The oil eventually will dissipate, and the impact will be felt for years, but some marshland may eventually recover. ''One of the things about nature is nature is resilient," McDaniel said. ''Nature will recover."

Health officials said that so far, their worst fears about outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid have not materialized. Their central concern was that many evacuees lack treatment for diseases such as diabetes and mental illness.

Reports of illnesses are ''all over the map," said Dr. Hilarie Cranmer, a Brigham and Women's Hospital doctor who is in Baton Rouge helping the Red Cross.

''The biggest issue," she said, ''is that you've had a million people displaced from their doctors -- the diabetics, the hypertensives, the pregnant, the mentally ill.

''We're seeing people escalate in the shelters with mental illness because they don't have access to their normal medications," Cranmer said.

After a full week of finger-pointing, frustration, and anger, Blanco said it's time for news conferences and politics to take a back seat to a full-scale recovery.

''I think our resources are strengthening," she said. ''Those of us in the decision-making chairs are feeling better. The supply chain has improved the morale. We're putting families back together slowly but surely."

FEMA said 315,568 Louisiana households have registered for federal assistance. About 32,000 people have been rescued.

Some dry sections of the city could have running water within days.

The Air Force has finished its massive airlift of elderly and seriously sick patients from New Orleans's major airport.

A total of 9,788 patients and others were evacuated by air.

A critical portion of the recovery effort is being provided by members of the 249th Prime Power Battalion of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Andy Backus, a Maine native.

Backus said some power lines remain intact in and around New Orleans, but areas to the east of there, where Katrina's winds were fiercest, most ferocious, have been demolished.

At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted there are plenty of forces to continue with the relief effort indefinitely.

''We have the forces, the capabilities, and the intention to fully prosecute the global war on terror while responding to this unprecedented humanitarian crisis here at home," Rumsfeld said. ''We can and will do both."

Myers reported that 41,000 National Guard troops and 17,000 active-duty forces from more than 40 states were on duty along the Gulf Coast supporting the efforts.

In Baton Rouge, law enforcement agencies announced the first federal arrest since the hurricane slammed ashore eight days ago.

Wendell Bailey was arrested and charged with being a felon in possession of firearms and attempting to destroy a military rescue helicopter.

Meanwhile yesterday, US Senator David Vitter said he met with the owner of the New Orleans Saints in an effort to get the team to play some games this year at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge.

''We are starting to see some significant progress," Nagin said. ''I'm starting to see rays of light."

Bryan Bender, Stephen Smith and Carey Goldberg of the Globe staff and correspondents Keith O'Brien and Kaitlin Bell contributed to this report, and material from wire services was used. Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com

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September 7, 2005
Flooding Recedes in New Orleans; U.S. Inquiry Is Set
By JERE LONGMAN and SEWELL CHAN
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 6 - The floodwaters began to drain fitfully from this crippled city on Tuesday as a handful of pumps came back into operation. But with growing concerns about gas leaks, fires, toxic water and diseases spread by mosquitoes, Mayor C. Ray Nagin said he wanted to ratchet up pressure on the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 remaining citizens to leave.

Mr. Nagin said he was reissuing a mandatory evacuation order and urged stragglers to leave immediately, saying he did not want possible explosions and disease to increase a death toll that, Lt. David Benelli, president of the Police Association of New Orleans, said could reach 2,000 to 20,000.

In Washington, President Bush promised an investigation into what went wrong in the response to Hurricane Katrina and planned to dispatch Vice President Dick Cheney to the Gulf Coast to cut through any bureaucratic obstacles slowing the recovery.

The Senate and the House also announced their own investigation into the government's response, with Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a leading Republican, calling the response "woefully inadequate."

"If our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy," said Ms. Collins, chairwoman of the Homeland Security Committee, "how would the federal, state and local governments have coped with a terrorist attack that provided no advance warning and that was intent on causing as much death and destruction as possible?"

The committee is preparing for public hearings next week on response to the storm.

Officials said about 60 percent of New Orleans was still under water, but that was down from a peak of about 80 percent. Most of the gain came because the Army Corps of Engineers began opening gaps in the city's levees after the water level in surrounding bodies of water fell. The holes ensured that the levees - designed to keep water out of the below-sea-level city - would not hold it in.

Four of the approximately 40 pumping stations in the New Orleans area were running on Tuesday at least at partial capacity, officials said, but haltingly; a fifth giant one, at the 17th Street Canal, site of a major levee breach, started but had to be shut off again because the pumps sucked in debris.

Officials said it would take 24 days to pump the water from an eastern section of New Orleans and 80 days to clear the flooding from Chalmette, the nearby seat of St. Bernard Parish.

The receding waters were expected to reveal ever more bodies, to be identified by a team of forensic pathologists, medical examiners, coroners and morticians from local funeral homes.

"We are going to take one deceased victim at a time and count one at a time," said Robert Johannessen, a spokesman for Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals. Of the process of identifying the bodies, Mr. Johannessen said, "It could take days, it could take years, it could take lifetimes."

The official death toll in Louisiana stood at 83, but state officials said the counting had only begun. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour announced Tuesday evening that the state's "unofficial but credible estimate" of the death toll was at 196, but that it was still rising. Mr. Barbour said that more than a quarter of the deaths had been reported in inland counties, not along the coast.

Evacuees continued to come back into Jefferson Parish to check on their homes, overwhelming roads and bridges. Interstate 10, which connects Baton Rouge and New Orleans, was backed up for about five miles.

Louisiana officials offered a first glimpse at the environmental wreckage. The state secretary of environmental quality, Michael D. McDaniel, said that wildlife habitats along hundreds of miles of coastline had been destroyed and that the hurricane exacerbated the slow coastal erosion that had already made the coast more vulnerable to hurricanes.

Mr. McDaniel said that there was no alternative to pumping billions of gallons of brackish water back into Lake Pontchartrain, but that it was too early to determine the harmfulness of the toxins and pollutants that were being slowly sifted out of New Orleans.

"I know there's been a lot of discussion about 'toxic soup' and 'witch's brew,' " he said. "I've seen no data to date that backs up that kind of statement. We do know and would expect that there are a lot of bacteriological contaminants in the water."

In New Orleans, four major fires had broken out by Tuesday morning and gas leaks were numerous, Mayor Nagin said.

"I don't want make any statement that suggests I'm giving up on New Orleans," he said at a news conference. "But it's a very volatile situation in the city right now. There's lots of oil on the water and there's gas leaks where it's bubbling up, and there's fire on top of that. If those two unite, God bless us. I don't know what's going to happen."

Mr. Nagin said in an interview that a new evacuation order would eliminate exemptions that had allowed people to stay in hotels and hospitals. Essentially, the city will be closed to everyone but law enforcement, military, and public safety and health officials while it is drained of water and utilities are restored. The 82nd Airborne Division closed a Hyatt hotel to civilians on Tuesday afternoon.

The new evacuation order has been drafted and will be issued shortly, Mr. Nagin said, even though Louisiana state officials question his authority to issue such a command. "I don't care, I'm doing it," he said. "We have to get people out."

That meant people were once again bound to the city's convention center, where 25,000 people or more had huddled in desperate conditions for days. At St. Charles and Louisiana Avenues, about two dozen people were patted down by federal customs officials and placed on a bus for the convention center, where they were to be airlifted out of town.

Told that some people were waiting as long as three hours at the convention center before being flown out, Mr. Nagin said that was a considerable improvement over the five days that it took some people to be evacuated last week.

Lucas Russ, 65, a retired school district employee, said, "It's getting nasty and really smelly," as he prepared to board a bus with a bag of his belongings.

Mr. Russ said that National Guard troops had told him he had to leave and that he would receive no more food and water. Guard officials denied that, and Mr. Nagin said that many evacuees were delirious, severely dehydrated, missing their medication and in need of immediate medical attention.

The mayor said that the National Guard had asked him whether handing out sustenance provisions would encourage people to stay, but that his response was, "Do not harm anyone, do not allow anyone to starve, do not allow anyone to go without water and always treat everyone with respect."

That left officials with the question of how to strongly encourage holdouts to leave. No one is being forced to leave yet, but officials said that could change.

"We may have to force people out to save their lives, if we get to that point," said P. Edwin Compass III, superintendent of police. "I'm using this as a tactic to scare people into leaving."

Brig. Gen. Michael P. Fleming, an Army National Guard commander said of a forced evacuation: "It's a tough decision. Between the mayor and governor, if they decide that's what's to be done, the New Orleans Police Department, the state police and National Guard would be part of it. We would help them implement it if we're called on to do so."

With assistance from 4,000 National Guard troops and another 4,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne, New Orleans was now secure and "locked down," with looting reduced to minimal levels, said Warren J. Riley, the deputy superintendent of the New Orleans police.

Mr. Nagin said, "I think we're turning the corner."

Still, parts of the city, like the Ninth Ward and New Orleans East, along with Chalmette in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, remain inundated, and it could take two months to get electricity fully restored to the hardest-hit areas, officials said. Police officers and firefighters have been inoculated against hepatitis, cholera, typhoid, tetanus and diphtheria.

The spine of St. Charles Avenue, with its broken canopy of oak trees and its streetcar tracks laced with downed power lines, provided a look at the successes and failures of New Orleans's recovery effort on Tuesday. Near St. Charles and Josephine Street, a fire consumed two city blocks, officials from the Oklahoma National Guard said.

At Lee Circle, Victor Mejia, 58, a janitor, stood in the shade and said he had no intention of leaving. "I live here," he said. "Where am I going to go?"

With attention turning to what had gone wrong, Mr. Nagin said he wanted an independent assessment of the missteps, saying he believed the matter was beyond the ability of politicians to solve. He blamed a lack of coordination, a rescue plan that was slow to be carried out and what he called a "two-step" danced by federal and state officials to determine who was in charge.

The mayor said he welcomed any effort to criticize his own handling of the crisis.

"My big question to anybody who's trying to shift the blame is, 'Where were you?' " Mr. Nagin said. "I was here. I know what happened. I walked among the people in the Superdome and in the convention center. I saw babies dying. I saw old people so tired, they said, 'Just let me lay down and die.' They can talk that, but bring it on. I'm ready for it."

No Photographing the Dead

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 6 (Reuters) - The Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Tuesday that it did not want news photographers to take pictures of the dead as they were recovered in New Orleans.

FEMA rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats.

An agency spokeswoman said that "the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect."

Jere Longman reported from New Orleans for this article, and Sewell Chan from Baton Rouge, La. Michael Cooper contributed reporting from Jackson, Miss.; Anne E. Kornblut from Washington; and Matthew L. Wald from Vicksburg, Miss.