SO who cares, I think the big story is how so many swallowed so much bull shit in a pure dan rather kind of way concerning FEMA's great response to Katrina.
Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated
Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated
6 bodies found at Dome; 4 at Convention Center
By Brian Thevenot
and Gordon Russell
Staff writers
After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.
The real total was six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.
That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports about the Dome and Convention Center.
"We swept both buildings several times, because we kept getting reports of more bodies there," Cataldie said. "But it just wasn't the case."
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina - making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages.
"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."
As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: evacuees firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people killed for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members" killing and raping people inside the Dome. Unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies, "we couldn't count."
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. Nagin told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
Military, law enforcement and medical workers agree that the flood of evacuees - about 30,000 at the Dome and an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 at the Convention Center - overwhelmed their security personnel. The 400 to 500 soldiers in the Dome could have been easily overrun by increasingly agitated crowds, but that never happened, said Col. James Knotts, a midlevel commander there. Security was nonexistent at the Convention Center, which was never designated as a shelter. Authorities provided no food, water or medical care until troops secured the building the Friday after the storm.
While the Convention Center saw plenty of mischief, including massive looting and isolated gunfire, and many inside cowered in fear, the hordes of evacuees for the most part did not resort to violence, as legend has it.
"Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated," said Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley. "If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them - then that became 18."
Soldier shot - by himself
Inside the Dome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified. Even that incident, in which Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion was injured, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested a suspect.
Watt was attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, which he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as he walked through about six inches of water, Watt was attacked with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun - he accidentally shot himself in the commotion. The attacker never took his gun from him, Baldwin said. New Orleans police investigated the matter fully and sent the suspect to jail in Breaux Bridge, Baldwin said.
As for other shootings, Baldwin said, "We actively patrolled 24 hours a day, and nobody heard another shot."
Doug Thornton, regional vice president of SMG, which manages the Dome, walked the complex from before the storm until the final evacuation and kept a meticulous journal. In a Sept. 9 interview, he said he heard reports of rapes and killings, but they were unconfirmed and came from evacuees and security officials.
"We walked through the facility every day, and we didn't see all this that was being reported," said Thornton, one of about 35 Dome employees who rode out Katrina in the building and lived there in the days after the storm hit. "We never felt threatened. It's hard to determine what's real and what's not real."
No victims
Inside the Convention Center, the rumors of widespread violence have proved hard to substantiate, as well, though the masses of evacuees endured terrifying and inhumane conditions.
Jimmie Fore, vice president of the state authority that runs the Convention Center, stayed in the building with a core group of 35 employees until Sept. 1, the Thursday after Katrina. He was appalled by what he saw. Thugs hotwired 75 forklifts and electric carts and looted food and booze from every room in the building, but he said he never saw any violent crimes committed, and neither did any of his employees. Some, however, did report seeing armed men roaming the building, and Fore said he heard gunshots in the distance on at about six occasions.
NOPD Capt. Jeff Winn's 20-member SWAT team responded on about 10 occasions to calls from the Convention Center, usually after reports of shots being fired. The group found people huddled in the fetal position, lying flat on the ground to avoid bullets or running for the exits. They also heard stories of gang rapes, armed robberies and other violent crimes, but no victims ever came forward while his officers were in the building, he said.
"What's true and what's not, we don't really know," he said.
Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center Sept. 2 at about noon.
It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. What the soldiers found - elderly people and infants near death without food, water and medicine; crowds living in filth - shocked them more than anything they'd seen in combat zones overseas. But they found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any killings, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.
Another commander at the scene, Lt. Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, said the crowd welcomed the soldiers. "It reminded me of the liberation of France in World War II. There were people cheering; one boy even saluted," he said. "We never - never once - encountered any hostility."
One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, said Edwards, who conducted the review.
It's possible more than four people died at the Convention Center. Fore, the center's vice president, said he saw another body outside the building early in the first week after the storm, covered in a shroud on the pavement along Julia Street, near the back of the Convention Center. It's unclear whether that body ended up in the nearby food service entrance, where the four confirmed bodies were found later.
Also, several news organizations reported the body of 91-year-old Booker T. Harris, which sat covered in a chair on Convention Center Boulevard for several days after he died on the back of a truck while being evacuated.
Just one of the dead appeared to be the victim of foul play, said Winn, one of few law enforcement officers who spent any time patrolling the Convention Center before it was secured. Winn, who did the final sweep of the building, said one body appeared to have stab wounds, but he could not be sure. Baldwin also said only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, apparently referring to the same body as Winn described. Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals, also confirmed just one suspected homicide at the Convention Center, though he said the victim had been shot, not stabbed.
A Washington Post report quoted another soldier who concluded that three of the four people appeared to have been beaten to death, including an older woman in a wheelchair.
But Spc. Mikel Brooks, an Arkansas Guardsman who said he wheeled the woman's dead body into the food service entrance, said she appeared to have died of natural causes. Brooks went on to say that the woman had expired sitting next to her husband, who shocked him by asking him to bring the wheelchair back.
The Post also cited evacuee Tony Cash and three other unnamed sources saying a young boy died of an asthma attack, but multiple officials could not confirm that death.
One attack thwarted
Reports of dozens of rapes at both facilities - many allegedly involving small children - may forever remain a question mark. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime under ideal circumstances, and tracking down evidence at this point, with evacuees spread all over the country, would be nearly impossible. The same goes for reports of armed robberies at both sites.
Numerous people told The Times-Picayune that they had witnessed rapes, in particular attacks on two young girls in the Superdome ladies room and the killing of one of them, but police and military officials said they know nothing of such an incident.
Soldiers and police did confirm at least one attempted rape of a child. Riley said a man tried to sexually assault a young girl, but was "beaten up" by civilians and apprehended by police. It was unclear if that incident was the one that gained wide currency among evacuees.
Baldwin, the National Guard commander of a special reaction team patrolling the Dome, also said he knew of only one attempted sexual assault of a child - but the details of his story, while similar, differed somewhat from that of Riley. It was unclear last week whether the two men spoke about the same incident.
Soldiers apprehended the assailant after a "commotion" in the bathroom exposed him, Baldwin said, but he knew nothing about the man being beaten. Furthermore, in a detail that raises questions about whether officials have full knowledge of any sex crimes, Baldwin said his men turned over one alleged child molester to New Orleans police - only to find him again inside the Dome two days later, reportedly attempting to molest other children.
"We ran into the same guy a couple days later," he said. "The crowd came to us and said, 'You better do something with this guy or we're going to do something with him.' ... That kind of re-confirmed (the first allegation), when the crowd came to us saying he was putting his hands on kids."
But other accusations that have gained wide currency are more demonstrably false. For instance, no one found the body of a girl - whose age was estimated at anywhere from 7 to 13 - who, according to multiple reports, was raped and killed with a knife to the throat at the Convention Center.
Many evacuees at the Convention Center the morning of Sept. 3 treated the story as gospel, and ticked off further atrocities: a baby trampled to death, multiple child rapes.
Salvatore Hall, standing on the corner of Julia Street and Convention Center Boulevard that day, just before the evacuation, said, "They raped and killed a 10-year-old in the bathroom."
Neither he nor the many people around him who corroborated the killing had seen it themselves.
Talk of rape and killing inside the Dome was so pervasive that it prompted a steady stream of evacuees to begin leaving Aug. 31, braving thigh-high foul waters on Poydras Street. Many said they were headed back to homes in flooded neighborhoods.
"There's people getting raped and killed in there," said Lisa Washington of Algiers, who had come to the Dome with about 25 relatives and friends. "People are getting diseases. It's like we're in Afghanistan. We're fighting for our lives right now."
One of her relatives nodded. "They've had about 14 rapes in there," he said.
The official word
In many cases, authorities gave credibility to portraits of violence broadcast around the world.
Compass told Winfrey on Sept. 6 that "some of the little babies (are) getting raped" in the Dome. Nagin backed it with his own tale of horrors: ''They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.''
But both men have since pulled back to a degree.
"The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," Compass said, conceding his earlier statements were false. Asked for the source of the information, Compass said he didn't remember.
Nagin frankly acknowledged that he doesn't know the extent of the mayhem that occurred inside the Dome and the Convention Center - and may never.
"I'm having a hard time getting a good body count," he said.
Compass said rumors had often crippled authorities' response to reported lawlessness, sending badly needed resources to respond to situations that turned out not to exist. He offered his own intensely personal example: The day after the storm, he heard "some civilians" talking about how a band of armed thugs had invaded the Ritz-Carlton hotel and started raping women - including his 24-year-old daughter, who stayed there through the storm. He rushed to the scene only to find that although a group of men had tried to enter the hotel, they weren't armed and were easily turned back by police.
Compass, however, promulgated some of the unfounded rumors himself, in interviews in which he characterized himself and his officers as outgunned warriors taking out armed bands of thugs at every turn.
"People would be shooting at us, and we couldn't shoot back because of the families," Compass told a reporter from the (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post who interviewed him at the Saints' Monday Night Football game in New York, where he was the guest of NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. "All we could do is rush toward the flash."
Compass added that he and his officers succeeded in wrestling 30 weapons from criminals using the follow-the-muzzle-flash technique, the story said.
"We got 30 that way," Compass was quoted as saying.
Asked about the muzzle-flash story last week, Compass said, "That really happened" to Winn's SWAT team at the Convention Center.
But Winn, when asked about alleged shootouts in a separate interview, said his unit saw muzzle flashes and heard gunshots only one time. Despite aggressively frisking a number of suspects, the team recovered no weapons. His unit never found anyone who had been shot.
Many soldiers and humanitarian workers now agree that although a number of bad actors committed violent or criminal acts, the evacuees responded well considering the hell they endured.
"These people - our people - did nothing wrong," said Sherry Watters of the state Department of Social Services, who was working with the medical unit at the Dome and noted the crowd's mounting frustration. "No human should have to live like that for even a minute."
Crowds pitch in
As the authorities finally mobilized buses to evacuate the Dome on Sept. 2, many evacuees were nearing the breaking point. Baldwin said soldiers could not have controlled the crowd much longer. They ejected a handful of people attempting to start a riot, screaming at soldiers and pushing crowds to revolt.
"We're not prisoners of war - y'all are treating us like evacuees and detainees!" he recalled one of them shouting.
But many others sought to quiet such voices. On the deck outside the Dome on Sept. 1, the day before buses arrived, preachers took it upon themselves to lead the agitated crowd in prayer and song.
"Everybody needs to help the soldiers," Baldwin recalled one of them saying. "We're all family here."
About 15 others joined the medical operation, as people collapsed from heat and exhaustion every few minutes, Baldwin said.
"Some of these guys look like thugs, with pants hanging down around their asses," he said. "But they were working their asses off, grabbing litters and running with people to the (New Orleans) Arena" next door, which housed the medical operation.
As the Dome cleared out Sept. 3, Beron, the National Guard commander, fashioned a plan to deal with the dead. He knew of the six bodies in the freezer, but expected far more. He and an Ohio National Guard commander sent 450 Ohio troops to search every nook of the Dome, top to bottom. They told them to mark locations of bodies on a map of the Dome, to rope off suspected crime scenes, and leave a chemical light sticks next to each one so they could be retrieved later.
"I fully expected to find more bodies, both homicides and natural causes," he said.
They found nothing.
Staff writers Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa contributed to this report.
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La. governor seeks nearly $32 billion in hurricane aid
Structural damage heavy in areas, but no deaths reported from Rita
Fishing communities are 'just obliterated'
Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Skies cleared Sunday, search-and-rescue helicopters rose overhead and relief workers poured into coastal lowlands hard-hit by Hurricane Rita 24 hours earlier. From Port Arthur, Texas, eastward into the empty marshes of southwest Louisiana, they found heavy structural damage and the inevitable post-hurricane flooding - but no deaths.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco flew over the area and asked thousands of evacuees -- mostly from small, low-lying towns in the region - not to return to their homes until storm officials give the all-clear.
She said she has asked President Bush for two federal aid packages totaling almost $32 billion for Louisiana, now reeling from the effects of two major hurricanes in a month.
Bush visited Texas and Baton Rouge on Sunday to monitor relief efforts but made no public appearances.
Blanco said she told him that Louisiana needs $11.5 billion to repair and rebuild bridges and highways shattered Aug. 29 by Hurricane Katrina, and now by Rita.
She also asked for $20.2 billion to upgrade levees and improve hurricane protection systems from Morgan City to Slidell, she said.
Energy officials are assessing Rita's damage to the concentration of gasoline refineries in the area. Early reports indicated that facilities in Houston fared well, but there were no clear damage reports yet for refineries in Port Arthur and Lake Charles.
Rita's powerful eastern side roared over relatively lightly populated marshes of southwestern Louisiana early Saturday. By Sunday, it was clear that while the storm had had few targets, it crushed and drowned the few small settlements scattered before it.
After a flyover, Blanco reported that fishing communities in lower Cameron Parish were swept away.
"Everything is just obliterated," Blanco told a roomful of workers at the emergency operations center in Lake Charles. Only whitecaps marked the place where Holly Beach, a fishing and resort spot, once stood.
"I could not tell where the Gulf started and ended," she said.
Cameron and Vermilion parishes were hit hardest.
To the east, an estimated 40 percent of Terrebonne Parish was underwater, said Kenneth Smith, president and chief executive officer of T.B. Smith Inc., an engineering and environmental firm familiar with the parish.
Smith estimated that 25,000 people were displaced in Terrebonne, with 10,000 homes and businesses flooded.
"It's kind of scary, because it's a Category 3 that hit 300 miles to the west of us," he said.
Nearly 4,000 National Guard members followed the storm into southwest Louisiana early Saturday equipped with helicopters, boats, high-water vehicles and chainsaws for search-and-rescue efforts, damage assessments, debris removal and road clearing, a spokesman for the Office of Emergency Preparedness said Sunday.
National Guard Lt. Col. Bill Doran said the Guard also was busy setting up several sites to distribute water, ice and military rations.
In Lake Charles, Interstate 10 was closed at the Calcasieu Bridge, officials said. The bridge was struck by two barges during Rita.
In more heavily populated Texas cities to the west of Rita's landfall, officials reported widespread property damage, roofless homes and businesses, and flooded streets.
But there were no deaths reported from weather effects in Louisiana or Texas.
Only one death was attributed directly to weather from Rita: A man was killed when a tornado destroyed his mobile home in Mississippi. On Thursday, 24 elderly evacuees were killed in a bus fire near Dallas.
"Even though people right here in Beaumont and Port Arthur and this part of Orange County really got whacked, the rest of the state missed a bullet," Texas Gov. Rick Perry told the Associated Press before a flyover of the Beaumont area.
Though Harris County Tax Collector-Assessor Paul Bettencourt said Rita caused "tens of millions of dollars" in structural damage in the Houston area, officials still were spared the task of managing a seriously storm-ravaged city. But they were left with another daunting challenge: managing the return of more than 2 million evacuees whose flights from the city Thursday created a history-making traffic jam.
Perry and Houston Mayor Bill White pleaded with residents to heed their instructions to return in phases, which might minimize the crush. The city closed its public schools until Wednesday.
But it was not clear if this would help.
"I'm not going to wait for our good neighbors to the north to get home and take a nap before I ask our good people to come home," said John Willy, the top elected official in Brazoria County, southwest of Houston. "Our people are tired of the state's plan. They have a plan too, and it's real simple: They plan to come home when they want."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of helping storm-tossed Louisiana residents get their lives back in order, had processed 910,383 applications for financial help as of Sunday morning, FEMA spokeswoman Rosemarie Hunter said.
Most of the $1.504 billion paid out to individuals and households has gone to victims of Hurricane Katrina, Hunter said. $9.6 million of it went to pay for things such as medical and funeral expenses, she said.
Payments are going out to hurricane victims four times a day in the form of checks or electronic funds transfers into their bank accounts. Post office boxes are being set up to receive checks for people living in shelters, and banks will establish accounts for individual storm victims to get their FEMA money electronically, she said.
On another front, Hunter said 100,000 housing units are en route to the state for Louisianans whose homes were destroyed by Katrina or Rita.
Additional reporting provided by Susan Finch, Jenny Hurwitz and Mary Swerczek. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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City moves past setback from Rita
Power restored briefly in the French Quarter
N.O. police taking over for National Guardsmen
By Coleman Warner
and Doug MacCash
Staff writers
New Orleans struggled to regain its footing in the wake of Hurricane Rita on Sunday as Corps of Engineers workers repaired a breach in an Industrial Canal levee, street flooding receded in neighborhoods near the lakefront, and Entergy workers restored power to the French Quarter.
As business owners and residents await word from Mayor Ray Nagin on when and how they can return to a city that has faced two hurricanes in the past month, law enforcement officials said there should be enough of a security presence when people return. But there were conflicting reports on the size of the military presence Sunday.
Nagin on Sunday didn't elaborate on his earlier plan to begin opening up Algiers and parts of Uptown to residents this week. A spokeswoman said Nagin is assessing conditions and should give a briefing today.
A pent-up desire to return was evident in the flurry of moving vans seen in the business district and in a few residents who managed to slip past military checkpoints en route to their homes.
At dawn Sunday, registered nurse Jessica Rodney, a California resident who bought a house recently in eastern New Orleans - an area mostly overrun by floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina - was halted at a checkpoint where Veterans Memorial Boulevard crosses the 17th Street Canal.
She said police wouldn't let her drive into New Orleans, so she parked and, when officers weren't looking, started walking. Taping plastic garbage bags over her feet at times when she walked through wet stretches, Rodney was last seen on Robert E. Lee Boulevard near Franklin Avenue in Gentilly.
"I have to check on my house," she said.
Rainwater that had collected in depths of one to two feet through much of Lakeview, a new dash of flooding officials attributed to the shutdown of pumps on the 17th Street Canal after a major floodwall breach there, was steadily receding Sunday. Waters that reached nearly from Robert E. Lee to Harrison Avenue now covered only a portion of the area's streets.
Corps of Engineers spokesman Brigadier Gen. William Grizoli announced during a Baton Rouge briefing that the storm surge that sent waters streaming across the Lower 9th Ward for a second time Friday had dropped sharply and that the latest levee breach had been sealed. Two to six feet of water remained in the residential area west of the Industrial Canal, he said.
From the Upper 9th Ward side of the Claiborne Avenue bridge over the canal, a twin-rotor Chinook helicopter could be seen dropping giant sandbags at the site of the levee breach early Sunday afternoon.
The Chinook wavered slightly in sporadic winds that whipped beneath its blades. Receding canal waters in the near-decimated area exposed bellied-up cars and window frames and sopping wood siding.
Moments after the Chinook's drop, a smaller, orange Sikorsky helicopter hovered close to the sealed breech and dropped a smaller load of sandbags.
A French Quarter that remained eerily dark Saturday night was powered up by Entergy workers at midday Sunday.
"Lights are on in the Quarter," one obviously pleased crew member, Tony Laborde, said as he stood at a corner on Bourbon Street. "Just turned them on. First time in a month."
The resumption of one facet of normalcy in the historic district faced a setback, however, when Entergy was notified of a fire on Burgundy Street and the utility shut down power again. Officials said there would be new efforts today to fully restore power to the district.
Some Quarter businesses were making do without power.
Diners chose from smoked-sausage sandwiches and hamburgers at Stella's restaurant at 1000 Decatur St. on Sunday afternoon. Air conditioning provided by a diesel generator, flowers on the tables, live music and $4 Bloody Marys added to a tenuous sense of regular business in the restaurant.
"People say, 'Thank you, thank you,'" said co-owner Pat Boswell. Asked where the restaurant acquired supplies, Boswell said, "anywhere we can." The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. until a fluid evening closing time that "gets later every night," according to Boswell.
At the Royal Sonesta Hotel in the Quarter, General Manager Hans Wandfluh said that the hotel has stayed open almost continuously since Hurricane Katrina, mostly serving emergency workers, and that he was growing agitated at the reluctance of many business owners he knows to get back into New Orleans and open their doors again. He said many people seem "television-drunk" from watching scary hurricane reports and are "so overloaded with information that they have lost focus."
Wandfluh said it is critical that people get back to work quickly, so that the business infrastructure of the city doesn't break down.
"We need clear, concise information for businesses, residents ... what to do, what to expect," he said.
Many displaced New Orleanians are nervous about the possibility of looting and other crimes in a city that, thanks to floodwaters and evacuation orders, has become a virtual ghost town.
Law enforcement officials concede that the size of the National Guard presence has been reduced sharply in recent days as federal officials shifted resources toward the Louisiana-Texas border in preparation for Hurricane Rita, but they said the protective force remains strong.
A changing of the guard is obvious in the streets of Orleans Parish as white and blue New Orleans police patrol cars largely replace camouflaged Humvees. Only 1,966 National Guardsmen remained in the city on Sunday, according to Task Force Pelican public affairs officer Maj. Pat Simon. Some troops have followed the path of Hurricane Rita west, performing search and rescue missions. Others have rotated out, replaced by civilian police. Capt. Marlon DeFillo, the New Orleans Police Department spokesman, said 1,450 officers are on duty, working 12-hour shifts.
There were conflicting reports about whether thousands of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army were staying in New Orleans or shipping out.
Capt. Kevin Anderson, commander of the police department's 8th District, based in the Quarter, said he isn't concerned about police staffing in coming days, noting that, in addition to soldiers, as many as 1,000 offices from outside agencies are supplementing the city force. But he conceded that police work is about to get more complicated.
"As more people start coming in, it's obviously going to strain our calls for service," Anderson said on St. Louis Street, near a boarded-up corner shop with a spray-painted sign: "Welcome to the thin blue line.''
Reporters Frank Donze and Trymaine Lee contributed to this report.
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