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Cops, troops warn holdouts in New Orleans
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-08 15:01
Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA spokesman, said the agency has hired a contractor to help remove bodies in the expectation that there may be large numbers of corpses.
"Nobody has any numbers or anything they're going by other than guesswork," Bahamonde said.
Residents at 1315 19th St in Gulfport, Miss., move their belongings out of the apartment building on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2005. Jaylen Moore left his great-grandmother Jane Carroll's apartment in this building to live in Chicago after Hurricane Katrina damaged their home. [AP] |
The enormity of the disaster came ever-clearer in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, which was hit by a levee break that brought a wall of water up to 20 feet high. State Rep. Nita Hutter said 30 people died at a flooded nursing home in Chalmette when the staff left the elderly residents behind in their beds. And Rep. Charlie Melancon said more than 100 people died at a dockside warehouse while they waited for rescuers to ferry them to safety.
The floodwaters continued to recede, though slowly, with only 23 of the city's normal contingent of 148 pumps in operation, along with three portable pumps. The water in St. Bernard Parish had fallen 5 feet.
John Hall, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said it was not clear how long it would be before all the pumps were running.
"There's a long way to go. We need to get a lot more capacity on line to make a real difference," he said.
Because of the standing water, doctors were being urged to watch for diarrheal illnesses caused by such things as E. coli bacteria, certain viruses, and a type of cholera-like bacteria common along the warm Gulf Coast.
Given the extent of the misery, Louisiana's two U.S. senators — Democrat Mary Landrieu and Republican David Vitter — wrote a letter to Senate leaders Wednesday urging them to put aside partisan bickering in assigning blame over the federal response and focus on providing for victims.
"Please do not make the citizens of Louisiana a victim once again by allowing our immediate needs to be delayed by partisanship," they wrote.
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