Leonard T. Harris Sr. views his kitchen after the roof was ripped off by the powerful winds of Hurricane Katrina in Gretna, Louisiana, yesterday. - REUTERS
NEW ORLEANS (AP):
ANNOUNCING ITSELF with shrieking, 145-mph winds (233-kph), Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast just outside New Orleans, submerging entire neighbourhoods up to their roofs, swamping Mississippi's beachfront casinos and blowing out windows in hospitals, hotels and high-rises.
For New Orleans - a dangerously vulnerable city because it sits mostly below sea level in a bowl-shaped depression - it was not the apocalyptic storm forecasters had feared.
But the Big Easy and elsewhere along the coast took a walloping yesterday, as scores of people had to be rescued from rooftops and attics as flood waters rose around them.
At least five deaths were blamed on 'Katrina' - three people killed by falling trees in Mississippi and two killed in a traffic accident in Alabama. And an untold number of other people were feared dead in flooded neighbourhoods, many of which could not be reached by rescuers because of high water.
PRAYING FOR HELP
"Some of them, it was their last night on earth," Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, said of people who ignored orders to evacuate the city of 480,000 on the weekend. "That's a hard way to learn a lesson."
'Katrina' knocked out power to more than three-quarters of a million people from Louisiana to the Florida's Panhandle, and authorities said it could be two months before electricity is restored to everyone. Ten major hospitals in New Orleans were running on emergency backup power.
The federal government began rushing baby formula, communications equipment, generators, water and ice into hard-hit areas, along with doctors, nurses and first-aid supplies. The Pentagon sent experts to help with search-and-rescue operations.
As of yesterday evening, 'Katrina' was passing through south-east Mississippi, moving north at 18 mph (29 kph). It had weakened into a mere Category One hurricane with winds near 75 mph (120 kph).
But it is far from finished. Forecasters said that as the storm moves north through the nation's mid-section over the next few days, it may spawn tornadoes over the southeast and swamp the Gulf Coast and the Tennessee and Ohio valleys with a potentially ruinous eight inches (20 centimetres) or more of rain.
'Katrina' had menaced the Gulf Coast over the weekend as a 175-mph (280-kph), Category 5 monster, the most powerful ranking on the scale. But it weakened to a Category Four and made a slight right-hand turn just become it came ashore.
