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 Photo by Associated Press Residents in the Orleans Parish of New Orleans move to higher ground after Hurricane Katrina hits Monday. |
Katrina kills at least 58
Tuesday, August 30, 2005 8:45 AM PDT
By Los Angeles Times
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E-mail this articleNEW ORLEANS -- Whirling ashore like a destructive pinwheel, Hurricane Katrina delivered a glancing blow Monday to New Orleans, then spent its full fury on the Mississippi Gulf coast, swamping beach resorts and inland towns. At least 58 deaths were reported, most in Mississippi.
Public officials feared that deaths from Katrina would rise.
After hours of punishing rain and winds, emergency and rescue officials began maneuvering by boat and helicopter into remote stretches, looking for scores of residents reportedly stranded by floodwaters.
Katrina's last-minute wobble to the north spared New Orleans a direct hit, but the nearly deserted city still suffered through a long morning of terror as rising groundwater seeped through the ghostly French Quarter and shrieking headwinds shredded roof sections atop the Louisiana Superdome football stadium, where 10,000 refugees had sought safety.
"It sounded like this place was under attack," said Tyrone Brinson, 47, a native New Orleans resident who listened, unnerved inside the Superdome, as the wind clawed at the stadium's arched sheet-metal roof. "It sounded like somebody was coming through the wall. I thought the roof might go, the building, the whole thing."
The roof held, as did the city's waterlogged levee system along the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, again delivering low-lying New Orleans from the apocalyptic flood long predicted by safety officials and weather forecasters.
Although Katrina weakened from the ominous Category 5 hurricane it had been just hours earlier, it bulled ashore as a Category 4 storm with 140-mile winds. Katrina was the strongest hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast since 1969, when Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, killed 259 people.
Overnight Sunday, the hurricane's course shifted from west-northwest to a more northerly direction, said Eric Blake, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. That was enough to steer the worst of the storm east of New Orleans, preventing its heaviest gusts from blowing from the east or southeast, which would have strained New Orleans' levees to flood stages.
"I can't say that I have a sense we escaped the worst," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, acknowledging the devastation on the state's eastern edge. "We have a tough, tough people."
Across Louisiana and into Mississippi, Katrina's whipping gusts, as high as 135 mph along the coast, scoured away roofs in sprays of shingles, wood and concrete. Wind-weakened apartment houses and other large structures buckled -- at least 20 in New Orleans, authorities said. Shards of glass blew out of office buildings in the city's downtown.
Jim Pollard, spokesman for the Harrison County emergency operations center in Mississippi, told The Associated Press that 50 people were killed there, most of them at an apartment complex in Biloxi.
At least three others in Mississippi were killed by falling trees, officials said. In Alabama, two people died in a storm-related wreck.
Three residents of a New Orleans nursing home fleeing Hurricane Katrina aboard a school bus died Sunday during an evacuation to a Baton Rouge church, coroner's officials in East Baton Rouge Parish reported.
Along the battered Gulf Coast, high water was everywhere: Loose boats, garbage cans, sewage and oil slicks rode the choppy gulf waters. Torrents poured in over shattered docks.
Dirt-brown crests swelled to 20 feet along Mississippi's coastal towns of Biloxi and Gulfport. By late morning, floodwaters lapped toward the second floor of the shuttered Beau Rivage Casino on U.S. 90, emergency officials reported.
"It came in on Mississippi like a ton of bricks," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said of Katrina. "It's a terrible storm."
In Wiggins, Miss., a hill community 20 miles north of Gulfport, Olene Walters, 56, one of the town's holdouts, ventured out into Katrina's high winds and returned in shock.
The storm had stripped the roof off her beauty parlor and pulverized the Lake-A-Way RV Campgrounds she owns five miles outside of town.
Snapped pines, oaks and pecan trees littered the main highways, she said. "I stuck it out and now I'm wondering why," she said
In the Gulf, Exxon and Chevron officials left oil rigs deserted, flying out crews threatened by the approaching storm. The halt to operations in the Gulf, where 30 percent of American oil is produced, caused a spike in petroleum prices.
In Alabama, a runaway oil platform loosened by blistering winds struck a major bridge over the Mobile River, state officials said. At least two oil rigs were adrift in the Gulf.
Downed trees, impassable roads and wind-sagged homes stretched for miles inland as Katrina rumbled north, later weakening to a tropical storm.
Thousands of residents and evacuees packed into shelters around the region, waiting on cots and blankets while the hurricane shuddered overhead, losing punch as it carved a path toward the Mississippi Delta and Tennessee. In Carroll County, in western Georgia, one man was injured and more than 30 homes were destroyed by a tornado, an emergency center reported.
Blanco, Barbour and Alabama Gov. Bob Riley all declared their states disaster areas and sent National Guardsmen to aid in rescues and protect againt looters. Estimates of the damages ranged widely, but insurers projected that they could reach $25 billion.
President Bush authorized emergency assistance for Missisippi and Louisiana. "Our Gulf coast is getting hit and hit hard," Bush said in El Mirage, Ariz. He said the federal government "has got assets and resources that we'll be deploying to help you."
By day's end, Alabama's request for an emergency declaration was also "being expedited," said James McIntyre, a spokesman with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington.
FEMA disaster medical teams set up in Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Texas were preparing for rescue missions, McIntyre said, along with search dog teams. FEMA truck convoys prepared to haul in portable generators, water, ice, infant formula and food.
In Baton Rouge, more than 200 people were rescued by boat in four hours Monday afternoon. The governor said 100 elderly residents of a Jefferson Parish nursing home were taken out by boat by authorities.
"A lot of people are sawing through attics," Blanco said. "They probably don't have food supplies." But, she added, "if they're in the water, it is going to be dangerous."
Dwight Landreneau, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said 60 of his department's boats were deployed for rescues -- half in Jefferson Parish and the other half near the Superdome.
"There are thousands of people out there that are still stranded," Landreneau said. "We don't know what number of them are in immediate danger."
An estimated 40,000 homes were flooded in St. Bernard Parish, a suburb directly east of New Orleans. By late morning, the hurricane's storm surges ruptured a levee wall on the Industrial Canal, a five-mile waterway connecting the Mississippi River to the long Intracoastal Waterway. Water from the break spilled through the area, flooding the town's two main shelters and swamping the local National Guard armory, leaving even public safety officials homeless.
"We cannot see the tops of the levees," said Larry Ingargiola, director of the parish's office of Emergency Preparedness.
By day's end, there were some scattered reports of looting in New Orleans, public safety officials acknowledged. At about 5 p.m., about 30 looters descended on a general store in east New Orleans. Curtis Miller, 54, was taking pictures of storm damage when he saw the looters. "They're walking out with armloads of clothes, book bags, toilet paper, hand towels, baby diapers," Miller said. "Anything that is above the water, they're taking it."
But most of the homeless and evacuees appeared to be sitting tight. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said access routes to New Orleans would remain shut down.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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