Evacuees from the Superdome to be moved to the Astrodome

I'm glad that Houston is able to help out in some way during this catastrophe.

‘Nightmare’ worsens: more flooding, and death
Superdome evacuees going to Astrodome; Mississippi coastline ‘obliterated’

BREAKING NEWS
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 9:44 a.m. ET Aug. 31, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - With the city still flooding after levees failed, officials on Wednesday made plans to bus evacuees at the Superdome and other shelters to Houston's Astrodome.

New Orleans was filling with water after an initial attempt to stop one leaking levee failed, while police fought to stop widespread looting in the stricken city.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said everyone still in the city, now huddled in the Superdome and other rescue centers, needs to leave. She said she wanted the Superdome evacuated within two days.

“We need to evacuate the people in the Superdome and other shelters and in the hospitals,” she told NBC’s “Today” show on Wednesday. “Those are our basic missions today.”

Houston officials later said those evacuees would be sent via 475 buses to the city's Astrodome. The stadium's schedule was cleared through December to make it available.

Blanco said that trying to fix the levees has been “an engineering nightmare,” with sandbags dropped from the air simply falling “into the eternal black hole.”

“This is a nightmare,” she added, “but one that will give us an opportunity for rebirth.”

Hundreds dead?
Officials said it was simply too early to estimate a death toll. In Mississippi, officials confirmed that at least 100 people had died in the killer storm and said the toll was almost certain to go much higher.

Vincent Creel, a spokesman for Biloxi, Miss., said that in that city alone the death toll is “going to be in the hundreds.”

A 30-foot storm surge in Mississippi wiped away 90 percent of the buildings along the coast at Biloxi and Gulfport, leaving a scene of destruction that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said was “like there’d been a nuclear weapon set off.”

Many areas were “absolutely obliterated,” he told NBC’s “Today” show, making it tough for rescue crews. “You can't see any asphalt because the streets are covered with lumber and shingles and furniture. And so it’s one house at a time; most places it’s not really a house, it's digging through three, four, five feet of rubble to see if anybody’s under there.”

New Orleans: Dead pushed aside
U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu said she had heard at least 50 to 100 people were dead in New Orleans, where rescue teams were so busy saving people stranded in homes they had to leave bodies floating in the high waters.

Mayor Ray Nagin said hundreds, if not thousands, of people may still be stuck on roofs and in attics, and so rescue boats were bypassing the dead.

“We’re not even dealing with dead bodies,” he said. “They’re just pushing them on the side.”

Rescuers in boats and helicopters plucked bedraggled flood refugees from rooftops and attics. Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said 3,000 people have been rescued by boat and air, some placed shivering and wet into helicopter baskets. They were brought by the truckload into shelters, some in wheelchairs and some carrying babies, with stories of survival and of those who didn’t make it.

“I’m alive. I’m alive,” shouted one joyous woman as she was ferried from a home nearly swallowed by the rising waters.

Katrina, one of the most punishing storms to hit the United States in decades, struck Louisiana on Monday with 140 mile per hour winds, then slammed into neighboring Mississippi and Alabama.

New Orleans at first appeared to have received a glancing blow from the storm, but the raging waters of Lake Pontchartrain tore holes in the levee system that protects the low-lying city, then slowly filled it up.

Nagin said at least 80 percent of the city, much of it below sea level, was covered with water that was in places 20 feet deep.

In Jefferson Parish, one of the hardest-hit areas, parish president Aaron Broussard said a complete rebuilding would be required. “Jefferson Parish as we knew it is gone forever,” he told reporters.

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