Dorothy Divic, 89, is surrounded by onlookers trying to keep her alive on a street outside the New Orleans Convention Center yesterday. Several people among the thousands of stranded hurricane evacuees have died while waiting outside the building, with no sign of imminent help on the way. - REUTERS
NEW ORLEANS, (Reuters):
ROTTING BODIES littered New Orleans' streets yesterday and troops headed in to control looting and violence, as thousands of desperate survivors of Hurricane Katrina pleaded to be evacuated from the flooded city, or even just fed.
The historic jazz city became a playground for armed looters, and sporadic gunfire hampered chaotic and widely criticised rescue efforts.
The mayhem in New Orleans, after Katrina's attack on the United States Gulf Coast on Monday, resembled a refugee crisis in a Third World hot spot. There was a television report that a sniper opened fire on rescue workers as they tried to evacuate sick patients from a flooded hospital.
HOSPITALS STRIPPED
Bodies lay in the streets and attackers armed with axes and steel pipes stripped hospitals of medicine. Authorities said they feared thousands of people were dead but they could still only guess at the death toll. One victim was left abandoned in a wheelchair with just a sheet covering the corpse.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded for urgent help in getting evacuees to safety. "This is a desperate SOS," he said in a statement.
Nagin said between 15,000 and 20,000 survivors were still stranded outside the city's convention centre and, with supplies rapidly running out, there were no signs of the buses that had been promised to take them to decent shelter.
"We need ground transportation to get the evacuees out. We need to get them to shelter, get them to food, get them to a safer environment," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said.
Military reinforcements descended in helicopters, and armoured personnel carriers patrolled Canal Street, which borders New Orleans' legendary French Quarter district of bars and fleshpots.
Senior Pentagon officials said the National Guard force on the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast would be raised to 30,000, and 3,000 regular army soldiers may also be sent in to tackle armed gangs that have looted stores across New Orleans.
"We will not tolerate lawlessness, or violence, or interference with the evacuation," Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said. "I'm satisfied that we have ... more than enough forces there and on the way."
The boost would bring to nearly 50,000 the number of part-time guard and active-duty military personnel committed to the biggest domestic relief and security effort in U.S. history after Monday's onslaught by killer Hurricane Katrina.
