Narus.Info

This was the fourth day of perhaps the greatest natural disaster in American history. These timed entries, taken from WWL-TV, are chronological proof of the first real action taken of any kind by the President of the United States related to the disaster, at 2PM Central Standard Time, Wednesday August 31st. The hurricane warnings and evacuation orders started early Sunday, August 28th. At the point in time the President finally ended his vacation, nine hospitals either ran out of emergency generator fuel or were expected to.

Times-Picayune

WWL-TV

WDSU

The President arrived in Washington DC, finally ending his vacation, one hour ago. The emergency generators died for lack of fuel at Charity Hospital and Tulane Hospital in downtown New Orleans at about 8 o’clock this morning; both hospitals have their entrances and exits underwater.

New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004-

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.

– Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana;

Today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune Website:

Jeff officials plead for ‘necessities of life’ - 11:40 a.m.

The normally unflappable Jefferson Parish Emergency Management Director Walter Maestri broke into tears as he broadcast a call to help for anyone who could offer food or water to officials at the parish’s emergency operations center in Marrero.

Maestri said anyone who can help with the necessities of life for workers at the center can call (504) 349-5360.

Maestri said the water situation is so dire that like many people in the parish and the area, they are trapped in the center.

AP- In addition to what’s reported here, the generators have run out of fuel in Charity Hospital and Tulane Hospital. They are begging for evacuation (they have been asking for it since Monday night and it’s now Wednesday afternoon). Last night at midnight the Governor ordered the boat rescue teams, pulling people still waiting on rooftops, to stop and take a break. They refused. Bush’s vacation ends at 4PM today; Katrina was declared a Category 5 hurricane and the worst in U.S. history on Saturday afternoon. This means he continued his vacation and scheduled photo ops for four more entire days as the City of New Orleans flooded and Mississippi marked destroyed homes with red to note bodies that can’t be removed.

****ALL RESIDENTS ON THE EAST BANK OF ORLEANS AND JEFFERSON REMAINING IN THE METRO AREA ARE BEING TOLD TO EVACUATE AS EFFORTS TO SANDBAG THE LEVEE BREAK HAVE ENDED. THE PUMPS IN THAT AREA ARE EXPECTED TO FAIL SOON AND 9 FEET OF WATER IS EXPECTED IN THE ENTIRE EAST BANK. WITHIN THE NEXT 12-15 HOURS****

Times-Picayune blog, from exile in Houma

WDSU

AP-New Orleans in “Desperation,” a rare use of the word in AP headlines

“We will do our best to make sure this draft fails at the referendum,” he told a joint news conference with the U.S. ambassador, referring to a nationwide vote on the text due by October 15.

One of Their Last Reports:

Special needs residents to be transferred to Baton Rouge
8:40 a.m.
August 30
By Jan Moller
Baton Rouge Bureau

About 500 “special needs” residents being sheltered at the Superdome will be transferred Tuesday to the Louisiana State University Field House, a spokesman for the state Office of Emergency Preparedness said.

“Those people are going to be evacuated today by whatever means necessary,” said OEP spokesman Mark Smith. Once in Baton Rouge, they will be assessed by state medical teams.

Meanwhile, about 350 search-and-rescue boats set off at daybreak across flooded areas of Southeast Louisiana to look for people stranded in their homes on rooftops or in attics. Dwight Landreneau, secretary of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said at 8:15 a.m. that 700 people had been brought to safety.

“We are picking up as many people as the boats can hold, and we have others hanging on the sides,” Landreneau said.

Of the flotilla, 35 of the boats came from Texas, and another 60 are on the way.

More than 30 of the boats are being sent to hard-hit St. Tammany Parish, where state officials are still having trouble establishing communication links.

“St. Tammany Parish is a black hole to us right now,” Smith said.

Martial Law declared

Gov. Kathleen Blanco says the devastation being seen this morning “is greater than our worst fears.” She describes it as “totally overwhelming.” Blanco says there are no casualty figures yet, but that “many lives have been lost.”

Here is a large map of the New Orleans levee system defunded by Bush, which is now failing and filling New Orleans, including the French Quarter, with water.

A picture is emerging from the scattered reports that are coming in live to the cable tv channels. It appears to me that thousands of people, literally, are stranded in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, and possibly other locations. Nighttime rescues are picking up very large boatloads of people from the Ninth Ward, all being conducted by local residents, not the “authorities” who are totally overwhelmed according to many reports and quit at nightfall.

UPDATE: the VP of Tulane Hospital is reporting that their hospital is surrounded by six feet of water, rising an inch every 5 minutes. The levee has actually broken between Lake Pontchartrain and downtown New Orleans. According to this hospital official, there are white caps of flooding water heading down Canal Street. I just checked the live weather data and it is not raining in New Orleans, this water is coming from a major levee breach. An air evacuation of one hospital is underway with 70 patients on ventilators, and the Tulane one is waiting for the same. This is a very serious situation. The Times-Picayune’s web page (they have no paper right now) confirms the levee breakage. These are the very levees for hurricane protection that Bush slashed the budget for over dire warnings and protest from locals.

As night fell on a devastated region, the water was still rising in the city, and nobody was willing to predict when it would stop. After the destruction already apparent in the wake of Katrina, the American Red Cross was mobilizing for what regional officials were calling the largest recovery operation in the organization’s history.

SECOND UPDATE: The Mayor of New Orleans says 80 percent of the city is under water