WASHINGTON, 6 September 2005 — With Hurricane Katrina’s emergency rescue operations finally in place, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Americans yesterday that state and local officials have not informed top federal officials early on of the deaths and lack of food among Hurricane Katrina victims in the Superdome or Convention Center.
“The original plan, as I understand it, was to have the Superdome be the place of refuge, of last resort. Apparently, sometime on Wednesday, people started to go to the Convention Center spontaneously,” Chertoff told CNN Sunday.
Chertoff told NBC’s Meet the Press that he was not informed until hours after the levee burst Monday night that a second wave of water had flooded the city.
However, New Orleans’ mayor warned that 10,000 people may have died. A week after the storm, a definitive death toll remained elusive. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned on NBC’s “Today” that “it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have 10,000” dead.
Despite the grim estimate, he was more upbeat than in previous days, when he railed against the federal government and broke down sobbing during a radio interview.
“We’re making great progress now, the momentum has picked up. I’m starting to see some critical tasks being completed,” he told NBC.
Meanwhile, health care problems are beginning to escalate in the devastated region and physicians who volunteered to care for the sick say red tape is keeping hundreds of them from reaching Hurricane Katrina survivors. Doctors, surgeons and paramedics say they have been marooned as government officials struggle with appointing them to the relief effort.
One primary-care physician from Ohio told reporters he had called and e-mailed the US Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, after seeing a notice on the American Medical Association’s website seeking volunteer doctors for the rescue operation.
An e-mail reply told him to watch CNN that night, when HHS Director Michael Leavitt was to announce a web address for doctors to enter their names in a database. “How crazy is that?” he asked.
Dr. Jeffrey Guy, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt University who has been in contact with mobile hospital doctors, said entire hospitals are contacting him, saying: “We need to take on patients,” but they can’t get through the bureaucracy.
“The crime of this story is, you’ve got millions of dollars in assets, and it’s not deployed,” Dr. Guy said. “We mount a better response in a Third World country.”
For the hurricane survivors, news about home is coming from an unusual source, a program available at the Google website, called Google Earth. www.earth.google.com allows users to zoom in on any address for an aerial view drawn from the database of satellite photos.
At Google Maps, posthurricane images are also available about flooded areas in New Orleans.
Most of the images are from the Remote Sensing Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has posted the images on its website www.noaa.gov.
Nearly 4,000 posthurricane images are available for public use, and the photographic overlays give a sense of a home, street or neighborhood’s situation.
“The intended uses of the images, of course, are official. For instance, the photos are helping the US Army Corps of Engineers to assess levee damage,” Mike Aslaksen, acting chief of NOAA’s Remote Sensing Division, told journalists. He said the first images were made less than 24 hours after Katrina struck and received over a thousand e-mail messages from people seeking information on the conditions of their homes.
But the images have not been able to help the Army Corps of Engineers protect themselves from snipers. The New Orleans police announced yesterday they had had to shoot five men Sunday who had been firing at engineers trying to repair a bridge damaged by Katrina.
There has been some official speculation that many of these sniper attacks have come from hardcore drug-takers who, unable to find drugs, have gone berserk and reacted violently. As of yesterday, reports say city police are enforcing a “shoot-to-kill” policy to restore order in the city.
