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NEW ORLEANS - Already showered with death and devastation by Katrina’s howling winds and drenching rains, the city braced for more misery Tuesday as water poured through broken levees. Details on where the levees had given way were hard to come by, but the most serious breach appeared to be "a large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new 'hurricane proof' Old Hammond Highway bridge," according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. "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," the newspaper said. “There’s a serious leak and it’s causing the water to continue to rise,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin confirmed. Adding to the problem were malfunctions in the system the city uses to pump out floodwaters. So far, Nagin said, the historic French Quarter and central business district had not been badly flooded. But Tulane University Medical Center Vice President Karen Troyer-Caraway said the downtown hospital was surrounded by 6 feet of water and officials were considering evacuating its 1,000 patients. 'Whitecaps on Canal Street' “The water is rising so fast I cannot begin to describe how quickly it’s rising,” she said. “We have whitecaps on Canal Street, the water is moving so fast.” "No one anticipated this," NBC News' Brian Williams reported earlier, standing knee-deep in floodwaters in the quarter. The rising waters and failing pumps in the below-sea-level city were thwarting rescuers' efforts to pull hurricane victims to safety and assess the damage, but "many, many reports" of bodies floating in the flood tide made clear the deadly impact on the Crescent City, said Nagin. "We probably have 80 percent of our city under water," Nagin added, "with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. We still have many of our residents on roofs. Both airports are under water." Television footage showed plenty of other problems for New Orleans, including buildings on fire. And police said they had made a number of arrests for looting. The developing nature of the disaster made it impossible for officials to give specific accounts of which portions of the city were flooded, but aerial video showed standing water and destruction literally everywhere. 'A lot of people awaiting rescue' "All I know is when my people go out, they tell me there are a lot of people awaiting rescue. I hear there are hundreds of people still on their rooftops," said Gen. Ralph Lupin, commander of National Guard troops at the Superdome in New Orleans, where some 10,000 people had taken shelter. Eighty percent of the city's 485,000 residents had heeded orders to evacuate the city before the storm hit. Federal Emergency Management Agency Michael Brown said "it’s going to be weeks at least before people can get back" to their homes and business in New Orleans. And when they do return, "it’s going to be incredibly dangerous" because of structural damage to homes, diseases from animal carcasses and chemicals in homes, he said. Two kinds of levees As officials tried to inspect the damage to the levees, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, the retired chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, explained the "very extensive" system to MSNBC viewers. He said that New Orleans has two types of levees: one set holds the water back from the Mississippi River; the others provide protection from Lake Pontchartrain when it swells during hurricanes and other storms. Flowers said that he noticed in his time with the Corp that development and loss of wetlands along Louisiana's coast had cost New Orleans a lot of "natural hurricane protection." As to clearing the floodwaters amid the broken levees, Flowers explained that "some pumping can be done while those levees are being repaired." However, "This is a tough one. They're in for a long, hard pull in recovering from Katrina." |
