cnn.com
New Orleans getting worse by the hour
Posted: 1:03 p.m. ET
CNN's John Zarella in New Orleans, Louisiana
We are part of a convoy of CNN personnel who left the city. We left the hotel this morning. As we did so, we helped evacuate people from it.
We drove on the sidewalks to stay high enough out of the water so the cars would not bog down until we made it over to Canal Street. Canal Street was dry in the middle. We stopped where the police were and I told one of the officers that we had these evacuees from the hotel and that we were told to drop them off there with him. He said, "Well, we're not going anywhere. We're only here because we can't get back to our station. Everything's flooded under water."
So they're sitting in the middle of Canal Street. We took the evacuees to another area by another hotel and dropped them off there.
We wound our way through the city this morning through back streets and side streets, downed power lines, around downed industries. We were driving on the wrong side of the road periodically, up along the Mississippi bank, along the levee and finally made it over the Huey P. Long Bridge on Highway 90. We are making our way up to Baton Rouge now. Highway 90 is a steady stream of traffic.
In New Orleans, there's no sanitation any longer. The knee-deep water in the hotel lobby is just full of stench. It is a miserable, deteriorating situation in the city and it is growing worse by the hour and the water is rising.
The fact of the matter is this bowl, as they call it, is filling up. The estimates of time that it's going to take to get the water out of the bowl are three to six months. You could be sitting there in absolutely untenable conditions, in water that is filled with disease and germs, for months to come, walking through it, slogging through it.
With the looting that's going on and with the deteriorating sanitation conditions, it is a situation where you can't cover the story because you can't venture out from the hotel. It's so dangerous, one, because the water is getting higher, and two, because of the disease factor that is beginning. There's no food, there's no water.
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