It’s not over until it’s over — and it isn’t over.
That’s the key fact about Hurricane Katrina, which slammed on shore in New Orleans as a Category 5 storm, was later downgraded to a Category 3 storm — and has left confirmed deaths in Mississipi, unconfirmed deaths in Louisiana, high floodwaters and tornado warnings in its feisty path.
According to MSNBC, the storm’s human and property destruction is only now becoming clear in Mississippi
As dawn broke over the ravaged Gulf Coast on Tuesday, New Orleans saw new flooding, rescuers in boats and helicopters furiously searched for Hurricane Katrina survivors, and Mississippi’s governor said the death toll in just one county could hit as high as 80.
“The devastation down there is just enormous,� Gov. Haley Barbour told NBC’s “Today� show.Barbour cited unconfirmed reports of up to 80 fatalities in Harrison County, adding that the number was likely to rise.
“We know that there is a lot of the coast that we have not been able to get to,� Barbour said. “I hate to say it, but it looks like it is a very bad disaster in terms of human life.�
More than a million people along the Gulf Coast spent the night without power and powerless to deal with the aftermath of what could be the most expensive storm ever to hit the United States. Tens of thousands of homes were flooded, and many evacuees were not being allowed back to their homes for many days as thousands of utility crews worked to restore power.
Biloxi, Mississippi was hard hit and a levee broke in New Orleans, reports CNN:
In Biloxi, a 25-foot storm surge crashed in from the Gulf of Mexico on Monday and inundated structures there. Up to 30 people are believed to have been killed when one apartment complex on the beach collapsed in the storm.
“This is our tsunami,” Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway told the Biloxi Sun Herald newspaper, referring to the December 26, 2004, tsunami that killed more than 226,000 people in the Indian Ocean region….
“CATASTROPHIC” declares a New Orleans Times-Picayune story about a levee breaking — and you get the feeling as you read it that New Oreans nonetheless barely approached the feared disaster of The Big One that could have decimated the city:
A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new .hurricane proof. Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina’s fiercest winds were well north. The breach sent a churning sea of water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing across Lakeview and into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park and neighborhoods farther south and east….
Police officers, firefighters and private citizens, hampered by a lack of even rudimentary communication capabilities, continued a desperate and impromptu boat-borne rescue operation across Lakeview well after dark. Coast Guard helicopters with searchlights criss-crossed the skies. Officers working on the scene said virtually every home and business between the 17th Street Canal and the Marconi Canal, and between Robert E. Lee Boulevard and City Park Avenue, had water in it. Nobody had confirmed any fatalities as a result of the levee breach, but they conceded that hundreds of homes had not been checked.
As the sun set over a still-roiling Lake Pontchartrain, the smoldering ruins of the Southern Yacht Club were still burning, and smoke streamed out over the lake. Nobody knew the cause of the fire because nobody could get anywhere near it to find out what happened.
Dozens of residents evacuated to the dry land of the Filmore Street bridge over the Marconi Canal were stranded between the flooded neighborhood on their right, and the flooded City Park on their left, hours after they had been plucked from rooftops or second-story windows.
Firefighters who saved them tried to request an RTA bus to come for the refugees, but realized was no working communications to do so. Ed Gruber, who lives in the 6300 block of Canal Boulevard, said he became desperate when the rising water chased him, his wife, Helen, and their neighbor Mildred K. Harrison to the second floor of their home.
When Gruber saw a boat pass by, he flagged it down with a light, and the three of them escaped from a second- story window.
On the lakefront, pleasure boats were stacked on top of each other like cordwood in the municipal marina and yacht harbor. The Robert E. Lee shopping center was under 7 feet of water. Plantation Coffeehouse on Canal Boulevard was the same. Hynes Elementary School had 8 feet of water inside. Indeed, the entire business district along Harrison Avenue had water to the rooflines in many places. Joshua Bruce, 19, was watching the tide rise from his home on Pontalba Street when he heard a woman crying for help. The woman had apparently tried to wade the surging waters on Canal Boulevard when she was swept beneath the railroad trestle just south of Interstate 610. Bruce said he plunged into the water to pull her to safety. He and friends Gregory Sontag and Joey LaFrance found dry clothes for the woman and she went on her way in search of a second-story refuge downtown.
The extent of the tragedy can be grasped when you read this transcript of a CNN broadcast — which underscores how a Category 5 storm’s death, damage and desctruction would have been literally mind-boggling. A few highlights:
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But you’re never prepared for this. You know, we did a lot of our crying earlier. But there’s a lot more crying to be done, because a lot of people lost their lives and lost everything. I know my family, we lost about everything….
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That’s right, Aaron.
BROWN: It’s been quite a — we don’t use this word lightly, but quite a dramatic and difficult night down there, hadn’t it?
MESERVE: It’s been horrible. As I left tonight, darkness, of course, had fallen. And you can hear people yelling for help. You can hear the dogs yelping, all of them stranded, all of them hoping someone will come.
But for tonight, they’ve had to suspend the rescue efforts. It’s just too hazardous for them to be out on the boats. There are electrical lines that are still alive. There are gas lines that are still spewing gas. There are cars that are submerged. There are other large objects. The boats can’t operate. So they had to suspend operations and leave those people in the homes.
As we were driving back, we passed scores of boats, Fish and Wildlife boats that they brought in. They’re flat bottomed. They’ve obviously going to put them in the water just as soon as they possibly can and go out and reach the people who are out there who desperately need help.
We watched them, some of them, come in. They were in horrible shape, some of them. We watched one woman whose leg had been severed. Mark Biello, one of our cameramen, went out in one of the boats to help shoot. He ended up being out for hours and told horrific tales. He saw bodies. He saw where — he saw other, just unfathomable things. Dogs wrapped in electrical — electrical lines who were still alive that were being electrocuted.
The police are having radio problems. At least they were earlier this evening. They didn’t have enough boats. They put out an appeal to various police who had personal boats to bring them to the scene. But the problem was the people who had the boats couldn’t get to the boats to bring them to the scene to go out and rescue the people.
People are out there tonight. One of the EMS workers told us that the water is driving, and I can tell you that when we came back into the city tonight, it certainly was higher here. Whether it’s rising in that neighborhood as much as it has here, I don’t know — Aaron.
Meanwhile, Katrina has clearly given a stiff uppercut to the region’s oil and gas refineries — and there consequences are already being felt, the New York Times reports:
The region that produces and refines a major portion of the nation’s oil and natural gas was largely shut down by Hurricane Katrina yesterday, further tightening strained energy markets and sending prices to new highs.
As oil companies evacuated offshore operations throughout the Gulf of Mexico, oil production in that region was reduced by 92 percent and gas output was cut by 83 percent.
The latest interruptions in oil supplies are likely to send retail gasoline prices even higher than the current average of $2.60 a gallon. They have prompted the Bush administration to say it would release emergency oil stocks from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve if needed.
“We are still in the soap-opera phase where everyone is still wondering what is going on,” said Dan Pickering, the president of Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston-based energy research firm. “The next 24 to 48 hours, as the companies get out to see if there has been any damage, are really going to determine how significant this is.”
Halfway through the hurricane season, the storm hit at an especially bad time for consumers, who have seen gasoline prices climb to their highest level in a generation, and adds to worries that oil prices might be hurting the American economy.
And weblogs continued to report some stories and thoughts not seen in traditional news reports:
–The Mississippi based blog Red Dog Bites:
Maybe 50 or so dead in Harrison County so far. Who knows how many perished in Ward 9 in N.O. It may be days/weeks/months before there can be an actual accounting of the death and destruction caused by Katrina. I fear it will be much worse than we think now.
I once lived “down there” in Gautier. My house was about 30 to 40 yards from a finger on Mary Walker Bayou. I haven’t heard about the damage or the storm surge from Pascagoula to Ocean Springs, but if I can split the difference between Mobile Bay and Gulfport, at least 18 to 20 feet. I can only imagine that my old house has significant water inside it. I hope the owners left before the storm came in. But I know the people there and many of them used to brag about weathering Camille and I’m sure they felt safe. I fear many of them were wrong this time.
–Louisiana-based Ian McGibboney:
Conditions in Lafayette have cleared up. In fact, I just took a bike ride, and noticed the humidity was almost nonexistent. Go figure that it takes horrible weather to make it feel good around here.
I just saw a live air-cam of New Orleans, and the Superdome looks like a giant rusty hubcap. Sections of the outer roofing have vanished, and much of the city is submerged, gutted or both. Though the aftermath doesn’t appear as apocalyptic as some predicted (it never does), this is still as close as it’s come in a long time. Hopefully we’ll soon know how we can contribute to the cleanup effort.
–Mississippi-based HattiesBlog asks “Just How Long Can Three Peopple And Three Cats Survive In A Hallway?”
This is the question I’m currently asking about TC who is hunkering down as we speak. She’s there with her moother, Scott, and three cats. I’ve talked to another friend in Hattiesburg who is also in the hallway with her husband and their animals. I’ve been doing a little digging to try and give you something about New Orleans. Truth be told, there’s not a whole lot. There are some folks still blogging or trying to blog. Like I said, I’m not as internet savvy as TC, so just use the links in previous posts for blogs that may be coming out of New Orleans. There is basically NO electricity and the water is on the rise.
As for the weather where I am, its blustery and raining. We may see more wind than we earlier expected, but I think on the whole this is the best place we can be. I’m trying to stay in contact with TC about every hour so I can know what is happening. If there is anyone out there in the Ocean Springs area that can give me some information it would be greatly appreicated.
–Mississippi-based Pasty White Adventures is written by teenage girl and she has a long fascinating post. Here’s a small part:
…..I really have no clue at this point as to what I should do. Everyone is going crazy over this storm and rushing around trying to get prepared, but see, thing is, they do the same thing for every storm, and most of them just blow over without any trouble at all, so this storm could be a big flop too. On the other hand, this storm just feels…..different…..
She writes that she can pick up things from the wind — and her vibes are very bad:
Okay, I doubt anyone is reading this anyway, but if you are, please don’t think I’m insane or making this up or trying to get attention, because I am most certainly not. I swear on this blog and all that’s holy, I’m telling the truth. Now, I’m not claiming to be a super-hero or some poor, tragic, misunderstood freak who rises above the odds to become her city’s hero(though that would be pretty boss), I’m just saying I have some unexplained ability. Anyway, back to the hurricane. Like I was saying, this storm just feels different. The wind is acting different from what it has all those other times when the storms turned out to be big let downs. So for the first time since I can remember, I’m actually scared of the wheather. When you have the power to read the wind, and it tells you that something bad is coming, you listen. So please, anyone who reads this and laughs at me, please, please, take this hurricane seriously, no matter what you believe or think about me, a storm is never something to laugh at.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.