The Grim Journey to find survivors of Hurricane Katrina by BBC News, NYT, The Independent 9:30am 7th Sep, 2005   September 15, 2005    "Sick and Abandoned", by Bob Herbert. (New York Times)    It was the stuff of nightmares. Poisonous water moccasins were swimming in the filthy water of the flooded first floor, and snipers, rats and even a 12-foot alligator were roaming the treacherous area just outside the hospital's doors.    "To me, it was like being in hell," said Carl Warner, the chief engineer for Methodist Hospital in the hard-hit eastern part of New Orleans. "There were bodies floating in the water outside the building, and our staffers had to swim through that water to get fuel for the generator."    The patients and staff at Methodist could have been evacuated before Hurricane Katrina hit. But instead they were condemned to several days of fear and agony by bad decision-making in Louisiana and the chaotic ineptitude of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some of the patients died.    Incredibly, when the out-of-state corporate owners of the hospital responded to the flooding by sending emergency relief supplies, they were confiscated at the airport by FEMA and sent elsewhere.    The time to evacuate the hospital was when it became clear that New Orleans was in the path of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. "We had about 137 patients," said Dr. Jeffrey Coco, the hospital's chief of staff, "and we had a company called Lifeguard that was going to take them out."    But apparently there was a reluctance to evacuate without some sort of governmental guidance. When the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, issued a mandatory evacuation order, hospitals were exempted. Dr. Fred Cerise, secretary of Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals, said Methodist officials could have decided on their own to evacuate, but that never happened.    Some of the patients were extremely ill, requiring ventilators or dialysis treatment or major surgery. When the hurricane hit, part of the roof blew off, windows were blown out, the atrium was badly damaged and the hospital was drenched with rain. On Monday night the power went out, and on Tuesday, after the levees broke, the first floor became hopelessly flooded.    By midweek you had a bizarre situation in which hundreds of people (patients, doctors, nurses, administrative staffers, relatives and people seeking emergency shelter) were stranded, cut off from the rest of the world, in a badly damaged hospital in a major American city.    Staffers with flashlights worked heroically in a sodden, stench-filled environment in which temperatures reached 110 degrees. Elevators did not work, and some patients weighing more than 400 pounds had to be carried up dark, reeking staircases. When ventilators shut down with the loss of power, volunteers worked in shifts to do the difficult hand-pumping necessary to keep patients alive.    Nevertheless, according to Dr. Albert Barrocas, the chief medical officer, the decline in the well-being of the patients was both palpable and widespread. "All of them were deteriorating in the sense of becoming weak," he said. "You could see in their faces the fact that they were scared."    By Tuesday evening four patients had died, and a dozen were dead by the time the hospital was finally evacuated Friday. Doctors believe half of the deaths were caused by the dreadful conditions in the hospital.    Everybody's suffering would have been eased if the emergency relief effort mounted by the hospital's owner, Universal Health Services in King of Prussia, Pa., had not been interfered with by FEMA. Company officials sent desperately needed water, food, diesel fuel to power the hospital's generators and helicopters to ferry in the supplies and evacuate the most vulnerable individuals.    Bruce Gilbert, Universal's general counsel, told me yesterday, "Those supplies were in fact taken from us by FEMA, and we were unable to get them to the hospital. We then determined that it would be better to send our supplies, food and water to Lafayette [130 miles from New Orleans] and have our helicopters fly them from Lafayette to the hospital."    Significant relief began to reach the hospital on Thursday, and by Friday evening everyone had been removed from the ruined premises. They had endured the agonies of the damned, and for all practical purposes had been abandoned by government at all levels.    When you consider that the Methodist Hospital experience was just one small part of the New Orleans catastrophe, you get a sense of the size of the societal failure that we allowed to happen. Welcome to the United States in 2005.    Published: 11 September 2005    "The water is going down slowly. The President's popularity is sinking like a stone", by Andrew Gumbel in New Orleans. (The Independent)    The Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina - lambasted on all sides of the political spectrum as disastrously slow if not also staggeringly insensitive - has sent the President's approval ratings plummeting.    A new poll published by AP put George Bush's popularity at below 40 per cent for the first time since he took office almost five years ago. Intriguingly, only 52 per cent of respondents said they specifically disapproved of his handling of the crisis along the Gulf coast. But 65 per cent - dismayed by soaring petrol prices and a whole panoply of other policy disappointments - said the country was heading in the wrong direction, up from 59 per cent a month ago. Even before the majority of the bodies have been fished out of the foul-smelling waters in New Orleans, the hurricane has triggered a knock-on political storm of rare intensity.    President Bush at first told his emergency management chief, Michael Brown, that he was doing "a heck of a job", only to relieve him of his hurricane relief responsibilities on Friday.    Mr Brown, and the administration, had endured days of intense criticism about the dearth of federal aid for days after Katrina hit. And Mr Brown only confirmed the widespread impression that he was completely unsuitable for the job by telling reporters in flood-stricken Louisiana moments after being ordered back to Washington: "I'm going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife and maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night's sleep."    As many commentators were quick to point out, the victims he had let down and left behind were sadly not afforded the same opportunity. Even conservative commentators have expressed their amazement at the apparent frivolity of President Bush and his allies in the face of the worst natural disaster in American history.    Texas congressman Tom DeLay, arguably the most powerful man in the House of Representatives, added his voice to a string of gaffes from the Bush family and others by telling a group of evacuees in a Houston shelter that their experiences were not all that different from attending summer camp.    "Now tell me the truth boys," Mr DeLay said, "is this kind of fun?"    In New Orleans itself, and along the ravaged coastline of Mississippi and Alabama, a greatly increased presence of police, National Guard and relief workers has stabilised what, for the first few days, had appeared to be a state of near-total anarchy. Rescue workers in New Orleans said the floodwaters were now receding at a pace of several inches a day - amounting to as much as two city blocks along some of the gentler inclines.    With most of the living now evacuated, officials are focusing on the gruesome task of recovering bodies - many of them bloated, decomposed, or gnawed at by animals. The media were excluded from accompanying official search parties, and a morgue set up in the small town of St Gabriel, on the way to Baton Rouge, did not issue updated figures on its body count.    But Homeland Security officials said initial indications were that the death toll might be significantly lower than the 10,000 previously feared. "Some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," said Terry Ebbert, the Homeland Security chief for the city of New Orleans. It was impossible to verify his assessment and many residents, made wary by two weeks of unreliable official pronouncements, were taking a wait-and-see attitude. Some indications of light at the end of a very dark tunnel were nevertheless apparent.    The Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the levee and drainage system in New Orleans that failed so spectacularly in Katrina's wake, now believes it will take just a month to dry out the city. Previously estimates had ranged anywhere from three months to a year.    As the country struggles with the consequences of widespread devastation and death, new stories continue to emerge about the federal government's various failures - relief supplies sent to non-existent staging posts, resources pumped into Texas and the Carolinas but not into Louisiana or Mississippi, families split up and flown to different parts of the country, in some cases without any advance knowledge of where the evacuees were being taken, and on and on.    In the middle of last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency run by Mr Brown promised to distribute $2,000 debit cards to those left most destitute by the storm. The cards were distributed only in Texas, however, and by Friday the programme had been abandoned altogether. Jane Bullock, who was the agency's chief of staff under President Clinton, told reporters she couldn't believe the agency was killing one of the few "great ideas" to have come out of the relief effort.    6 September 2005 (BBC News)    Rescue boats are patrolling New Orleans searching for pockets of survivors still waiting for help. The BBC's Gavin Hewitt travelled on one boat around the flooded streets.    New Orleans is still a city of countless human dramas and tragedy. We brought our own boat and headed into residential neighbourhoods. It is a grim journey, where bodies float uncollected in the water. We were asked to go to a house where there were children without their mother. We pull the boat to the door. Inside a daughter explains how her mother could not breathe. "She needed oxygen to breathe - but she don't have any," she says.    In a back bedroom we find her mother dead. There are five children - a neighbour insists they cannot stay in the house in the heavy heat. We agree to take them out in our boat. They say little, not even to the neighbour, as we help them with their few possessions.    It seems quite incredible to me that we are the only boat in a neighbourhood like this. In almost every street that we have gone into, there are people like this family with so many needs. We take them to a flyover where large numbers of people are still being evacuated. For the children this is at least a place of safety, but bewildering and uncertain.    We head back into submerged streets. In the tight roof space of a house, we find Bradley and Stanley De Penious. Dangling in a makeshift sling just above the water line is the body of their mother. They have been living like this for five days, unwilling to leave her. "We couldn't leave her - that's our mother," one of the men says. "She couldn't swim."    A rescue unit uses an axe to smash its way through the roof to save the two men. Nearby is the Kelly family, marooned, still staying on, stubborn. They are frightened to leave because they fear they will be held in a stadium in squalor.    One woman is six months pregnant and like so many they are angry and outraged.    And nearly a week on, up unlit stairs, it is easy to find pockets of the vulnerable, like a 95-year-old woman we saw with a "help me" sign in her window and one bottle of water.    Sometimes more than 40 helicopters hover above the city still rescuing people. They are highly visible but do not explain, for instance, why high wheeled vehicles have not been driven into these more accessible neighbourhoods.    When the authorities do come to these streets, it is more often in pickup trucks with guns. "There are a lot more cops and guns than doctors," Greg Henderson, a doctor, said. "For a long time, I'm sorry to say that I was the only doctor down here in central New Orleans."    September 6, 2005    "The larger shame behind New Orleans", by Nicholas D. Kristof. (The New York Times)    The wretchedness coming across our TV screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families. It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans.    The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.    But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even George W. Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.    The Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After falling sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Bush.    If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.    Indeed, according to the UN Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.    The national infant mortality rate has risen under Bush for the first time since 1958. The United States ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the CIA's World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.    So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. But nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The United States ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.    One dispiriting element of Katrina was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing more than 6,000, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery. "No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."    The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the United States - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.    It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.    None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990s, we made real headway.    The best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that might be politically feasible..    Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.    05 September 2005    "Times-Pic' Editor says President Bush bears ultimate Blame for weak response to Hurricane Disaster". (Editor & Publiher)    While the angry barbs and finger pointing continue today in assigning of blame for the horrendously poor response to the Gulf Coast hurricane catastrophe, Jim Amoss, the editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, is mincing no words. The feeble response, he says in an interview, is "ultimately Bush's failure, and it is a colossal one that may have cost many lives."    Just yesterday, an angry Times-Picayune published an "open letter" to the president, among other things, it called for the firing of Michael Brown, head of FEMA, and other top officials involved in fumbling the crisis.    Editor Amoss, said in an interview with The Oregonian in Portland, explained why the paper wrote it: "We needed to address the president directly....We felt that this is ultimately his failure, and it is a colossal one that may have cost lives, and certainly much physical damage to our community."    The newspaper is hardly known for Bush bashing. "It's a preposterous notion, that they couldn't get in here and their hands were tied. If any of us had experienced anything like that (level of failure) in our own companies, it would mean instant termination. The government ought to be held accountable in the same way."
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