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Katrina death toll may be 10,000: mayor
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-06 08:54
A week after Hurricane Katrina, engineers plugged the levee break that
swamped much of the city and floodwaters began to recede, but along with the
good news came the mayor's direst prediction yet: as many as 10,000 dead, AP
reported.
Sheets of metal and repeated helicopter drops of 3,000-pound sandbags along
the 17th Street canal leading to Lake Pontchartrain succeeded Monday in plugging
a 200-foot-wide gap, and water was being pumped from the canal back into the
lake. State officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say once the canal
level is drawn down two feet, Pumping Station 6 can begin pumping water out of
the bowl-shaped city.
Some parts of the city already showed slipping floodwaters as the repair
neared completion, with the low-lying Ninth Ward dropping more than a foot. In
downtown New Orleans, some streets were merely wet rather than swamped.
Military personnel patrol St. Charles Street
in New Orleans, as evacuations of Hurricane Katrina continued on September
5, 2005. Thousands of families returned to their battered homes outside
New Orleans on Monday to pick up the pieces left by Hurricane Katrina, and
President George W. Bush promised support to aid recovery from a disaster
in which aid efforts were bungled and 10,000 may have died.
[Reuters] | "We're starting to make the kind of
progress that I kind of expected earlier," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said of
the work on the break, which opened at the height of the hurricane and flooded
80 percent of the city up to 20 feet deep.
The news came as many of the 460,000 residents of suburban Jefferson Parish
waited in a line of cars that stretched for miles to briefly see their flooded
homes, and to scoop up soaked wedding pictures, baby shoes and other cherished
mementoes.
Thousands of houses in New Orleans, Louisiana
remain under water one week after Hurricane Katrina went through
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama September 5, 2005.
[Reuters] | "A lot of these people built these
houses anticipating some flood water but nobody imagined this," sobbed Diane
Dempsey, a 59-year-old retired Army lieutenant colonel who could get no closer
than the water line a mile from her Metairie home. "I'm going to pay someone to
get me back there, anything I have to do."
"I won't be getting inside today unless I get some scuba gear," added Jack
Rabito, a 61-year-old bar owner who waited for a ride to visit his one-story
home that had water lapping to the gutters.
Katharine Dastugue was overjoyed to find that floodwaters had gone across her
lawn but stopped just inches from her doorstep. As she stood waiting for a boat
to take her in, she made a list of thing she hoped to salvage before being
forced to leave again Wednesday.
"If I can just get my kids' baby photos," she said. "You can't replace
those."
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