NEW ORLEANS — The city's police and emergency officials worked desperately Wednesday to prevent complete social disintegration as widespread looting continued for a second day and cresting floodwaters hid untold numbers of dead.
Though the flooding appeared to stabilize, 90% of New Orleans' homes were underwater, officials said. Repair crews readied 20,000-pound sandbags to plug gaping breaches in the city's levees, but officials bickered over the slow progress.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday September 20, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Hurricane survivor -- The caption for a Section A photo that ran Sept. 1 misspelled the first name of a boy who rode out Hurricane Katrina. His name is Dillion Chancey, not Dillan.
Bus caravans started to move 23,000 exhausted Superdome refugees to shelter in Texas. A few hundred people left Wednesday, and the full-scale evacuation was to begin at midnight. On a stretch of interstate near the stadium, a mob of flood victims began an anarchic march of their own, abandoning the ruined city.
Federal officials dispatched National Guard convoys and U.S. warships to the Gulf Coast to aid in rescues and deliver supplies.
The immense scale of the disaster spawned after Hurricane Katrina struck Monday, and the pressing burden of new emergencies, continued to threaten thousands of the dispossessed in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, where survivors scavenged for food and shelter and were at risk for dehydration as they waited on rooftops to be rescued.
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin predicted that "at minimum, hundreds" and "most likely thousands" of city residents lay in underwater graves. "We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," he said.
Despite the urgency of the situation for victims in need of rescue, Nagin ordered the city's police force Wednesday night to discontinue such missions and return to the streets to counter waves of looting that had turned violent.
"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas -- hotels, hospitals -- and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said. The mayor said 1,500 police officers, nearly the entire department, were being redeployed on the city's remaining stretches of dry land.
At flood-swamped Charity Hospital, looters with handguns forced doctors to give up stores of narcotics. Wal-Mart gun racks and ammunition supplies were stripped.
Thieves commandeered a forklift to smash the security glass window of one pharmacy, fleeing with so much ice, water and food that they left a trail behind them. Brazen gangs chased down a state police truck filled with food, and even city officials were accused of commandeering equipment from a looted Office Depot.
