Nothing live...here's today's Times Picayune:
nola.com
They're moving the staff to Houma, hopefully they'll keep their main hurricane guy in town (I'm sure he wouldn't leave)...
A rather harrowing tale here:
nola.com
Flooding wipes out two communities
Hundreds believed to be trapped in their attics
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
By Brian Thevenot and Manuel Torres
Staff writers
As Jerry Rayes piloted his boat down St. Claude Avenue, just past the Industrial Canal, the eerie screams that could barely be heard from the roadway grew louder as, one by one, faces of desperate families appeared on rooftops, on balconies and in windows, some of them waving white flags.
The scene wouldn’t change for the next three hours, as Rayes and his son and nephew boated down St. Claude Avenue and deep into St. Bernard Parish, where water smothered two-story houses, people and animals. The men had to duck to miss streetlights that towered over Judge Perez Drive, the parish’s main thoroughfare.
The people Rayes rescued all told the same story, already written on their stunned and shivering faces: The water, it just came up so fast. Waist-deep in five minutes and neck-deep in 10.
"I was talking to my mother on the phone at 8 in the morning, telling her everything was fine," said Joan Hanson, 52, minutes after Rayes pulled her from a boat sitting at rooftop-level at a relative’s house, where she and her son had to swim to survive. "Then, next thing you know, it’s just gushing, gushing, gushing, and we can’t open the door, and then the water was up to my neck."
As Rayes surveyed the area hardest hit by one of the most destructive hurricanes in the nation’s history, he could only guess what rescuers would find when the water receded. The devastation of property appeared total, all the way from the Industrial Canel to well past Paris Road in Chalmette. The storm surge appeared to have wiped out the entire parish, given that most areas east of Chalmette are lower and closer to the Gulf of Mexico.
The cause of the flooding remained unclear, and city officials could not immediately be reached.
But American Red Cross officials said water from the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or MR-GO, topped the levees.
As he passed second-story windows that had been boarded up before the storm, Rayes wondered aloud if the boards had served to trap people inside rather than keep the storm out.
"There are going to be tons of dead people," Rayes said as he passed through the 9th Ward, where officials estimated that hundreds of people remained trapped late Monday. "They’re going to start finding them in their attics tomorrow.
I would have never thought of anything like this. This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life."
Other areas were nearly as hard hit. The storm surge approached the rooflines of homes across Treme and Gentilly Ridge. Eastern New Orleans also endured heavy flooding, though the extent was not immediately clear.
In the Bywater neighborhood, more than 90 percent of homes flooded and waters rose above 4 feet, particularly north of St. Claude Avenue, the main thoroughfare.
Only a small area between the Mississippi River levee and Burgundy Street was spared the flooding.
Dozens of residents sought refuge at Bywater Hospital, said a New Orleans police officer who, along with National Guard personnel, were trying to siphon gasoline from a nearby vehicle for the hospital’s generators, which ran respirators and other medical equipment for critically ill and elderly patients.
"We’re getting gas so they can keep on ticking, you know," said the officer, who did not give his name.
Many stores along St. Claude were flooded, their windows shattered. Signs littered the road, and power and telephone lines fell or dangled. At a neighborhood grocery store near the intersection of St. Claude and Elysian Fields avenues , a man could be seen through the store’s front windows sleeping on top of the counter.
Rayes, who rode out the storm uneventfully in the La Quinta Inn on Camp Street, started his day by putting his boat in the high water along Elysian Fields Avenue. "We were the first boat out; the police wouldn’t even go out," said the 48- year-old locksmith. "We went down Elysian Fields and picked up about 50 people on their roofs."
Then he brought his boat to the Industrial Canal, where a small SWAT team had put two boats in the water, not nearly enough to retrieve what some estimated as hundreds of stranded people in the neighborhood.
Rayes had a mission: to pick up a friend on top of a roof in Chalmette.
He passed 20 or 30 screaming people in the 9th Ward along the way.
A woman screamed as Rayes boated by: "Hey! Damn! Hey!" "You can’t save everybody," he said, as he passed street signs barely visible above the water along with scores of felled trees and downed power lines. "That’s all we heard for hours this morning."
As he motored toward St .Claude Avenue, which looked like a bayou rather than a thoroughfare, his boat passed Fats Domino’s pink-and-yellow-trimmed house on Caffin Avenue. About a half a dozen men screamed from the balcony, flailing their hands for help. He passed them by.
"What am I going to do? I got to go to the parish," he said. "There’s way too many people out there and to few boats."
A boat pulled alongside Rayes, driven by Wayne Landry, also of St. Bernard Parish and also on a private rescue mission. "I just dropped some off at the sugar mill, and I’m going to get more," he yelled from his boat. "The guy cut himself out with an ax. It’s sad."
Some people used cruder methods. Hanson’s 20-year-old son, Chris, had cuts all over his shaking hands when Rayes picked him up, from breaking the window so he and his mother could swim to safety. On their way to climb into a nearby relative’s boat, they swam during the peak of the hurricane, dodging felled branches and pieces of their destroyed fence.
In the Lower 9th Ward, Felton Bercy and his wife, Marie, stood in the darkness of their attic for hours only to have the water rise to their one-story ceiling in less than an hour – then threaten to take over the attic. Bercy had no ax, only an 18-inch hunting knife. It took him an hour and a half to claw through his roof.
"I had to have some daylight," Bercy said hours later, shivering after rescuers carried him and his wife to safety.
Back at the Industrial Canal, where St. Claude Avenue served as a boat launch, SWAT teams offloaded several boatloads of people with similar woeful tales: They hadn’t had money to leave; they had no car; they didn’t think it could possibly be as bad as they said on TV. Others said they had been abandoned by friends or family members.
"It’s not like we disregarded the warning," Darlene Wilson said. "We had people we depended on, and they abandoned us. I can’t believe they left us behind. The neighbors tried to help us out. We went to the attic. I thought I was going to die with my kids."
Timothy Jones emerged from the water after a long stay at St. Paul’s Church of God in Christ. He helped carry a beaten and soaked elderly couple from the boat, their feet dragging, their bodies limp. Sitting in the bed of a National Guard truck, peeking over the rails, Jones’ wife Isabella Vinnett was thankful her many prayers that day were answered, but also angry at a relative.
"I was abandoned by my family," she said, resisting her husband’s attempts to quiet her. "I got hold of my auntie, but she still abandoned me."
Another family the police boats pulled from the water emerged without its matriarch. Allison Berryhill, 30, said she had been talking to her mother on the phone right before a tree fell on their house and the water started rising fast.
"She said water was above their house and getting into their attic," Berryhill said. "I wasn’t able to reach her after that."
Rayes had gone to St. Bernard to pick up a friend, but discovered he had already found another boat out by the time Rayes arrived. But he would come back with a full boat anyway , picking up several stranded strangers.
Some waved him on, saying others needed his help more.
"You all right?" asked Ian Reyes, 20, to one man in a yellow two-story house nearly filled with water. "Yeah," the man said. "I’m just here with the dogs. The family’s out."
A while later, the men passed a brick two-story house. A man waved a white flag on a stick out the window. "I got my old lady here and a chow, that all right?" asked James Waringen, 48.
Rayes had been trying to avoid pets to make room for people, but he allowed it. After all, he’s got a dog, too.
Inside the second-story apartment, Waringen’s companion, Ann Griffin, starting shoving her cats into a duffel bag, as if to hide them. "Get your little whiskers in there," she said, zipping up the bag. She didn’t tell Rayes what was in the bag as she loaded it onto the boat.
Asked why she hadn’t evacuated, Griffin said, "I wasn’t going to leave my babies," motioning to the squirming duffel bag. "Plus, I’m just more comfortable staying at home than going somewhere where I don’t know anybody."
Even as she was surrounded by submerged buildings along Judge Perez Drive, Griffin predicted that, ultimately, little would change in the parish because of the storm.
"Same thing that happened after Betsy: nothing," she said. "We’ll just rebuild. But I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to buy a new car because his car doesn’t run. Hopefully, we won’t be in Louisiana."
Then she reconsidered.
"But everybody always comes back. I had three brothers and a sister get out, and they all came back."
Rayes dropped off Griffin, along with several other passengers, at the Regions Bank building, where an ad hoc shelter operated out of a broken mirrored window.
At first, the shelter turned her away because of her pets, but Rayes plied the men at the window with food and drinks, of which they had little.
They willingly took the Chow.
They unknowingly took the bag full of cats, which Griffin handed up gingerly to the window. "Be careful," she said. |
