"The scenery here looks like the set of a disaster film in which the extras and even the guards have gone home for the night. The windows of stores have been broken. The skyscrapers stretch into the pitch-black heavens and occasionally a helicopter circles them. Other than the flashing of police lights, the city is completely dark."
SPIEGEL ONLINE - September 4, 2005, 04:57 PM URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,373074,00.html Martial Law on the Mississippi Baghdad, New Orleans By Matthias Gebauer in New Orleans When night falls in New Orleans, the city descends into chaos. The once vibrant metropolis feels like the abandoned stage of a disaster film. Bands of looters are roaming the streets, but most residents have already fled. Police are now using what remains of their strength to restore order in the city. New Orleans - The iron-grill-reinforced door of a small electronics shop on Magazine Street didn't want to cooperate with the authorities on Saturday night. Kevin Deal rammed it repeatedly with the shaft of his M-16 gun. The 22-year-old policeman's forehead was dripping with sweat. "Let daddy in," his colleague Josh Valek said, standing behind him. The police are here to loot the store on behalf of the state -- and Valek has a better tool to ram the door open. With his greatest possible strength, he hurls a car battery against the iron bars. After the third attempt, they pry the door open. The cops quickly search the store for anything that might be useful. But after just a few minutes, they leave empty-handed. For hours now, Deal and his colleague have been desperately searching for battery-powered pumps. Like thousands of other people in and around New Orleans, they've run out of gas for their car. But nearby, a gas station holds thousands of gallons of the sought-after fuel in an underground tank. But without power, the gasoline is as secure as an uncrackable safe. For now, they're going to have to siphon gasoline from private car owners: two gallons of gas, just over seven liters, is enough for them to continue patrolling the city for two hours. The neighborhood the two police are patrolling is especially popular with the looters. Hardly anybody is left here in Uptown -- most fled from their homes. Indeed, many doors are wide open to thieves or people who are just trying to put a roof over their heads. Without power, the area is pitch black at night, like much of the rest of the city. "As soon as it gets dark, the time for the looters has come," says Valek. The police, he concedes, have very little chance of catching them. The alarm's been ringing for days The only sign of the fact that only a few days earlier, thousands of people still lived here, is a brightly illuminated supermarket. The store must have an emergency generator somewhere. And for the past two days, the store's alarm system has been going off at short intervals. The doors have been barricaded with boards. But through a crack, you can see the empty shelves. Torn up packaging can be seen strewn all across the floor. Puddles of juice and milk cover the floor near the refrigerators. "A mob of about 40 people ransacked the place," says Valek. The police officer and his colleagues were only able to stop the looting by firing gunshots into the air. The chaos that followed the disaster is visible throughout the supermarket's neighborhood. Many wooden houses have been destroyed or badly damaged. Uprooted trees are spread across the streets. And Deal's and Valek's patrols almost always end in dead-ends -- either trees or cars moved by the forces of the hurricane or flooding block the roads. Valek closely inspects the cars using his search light. Cars have become a dangerous place for people to hide, he says, because looters could come along at any time, pull them out of their cars and take anything they have left. Martial law, just like in Iraq Last year, 26-year-old Valek was still fighting in Iraq as a soldier. >From his experience in Baghdad, the brawny officer, who still has a crew cut, knows the rule of war: He who shoots first survives. He says he finds it shameful that his hometown could spiral into a crisis zone in which martial law had to be imposed. "If people take food and water from stores, I can understand that as a police officer," he says. "But when they steal other things, that's totally messed up." He's embarrassed by the images on television of looting Americans. "It looks like a Third World country," he says, full of contempt. These police will continue working until the very end. They wear soiled uniforms that haven't been changed in days and bullet-proof vests beneath. And instead of carrying their normal pistols, they're armed with heavy machine guns, and they always keep one hand on the trigger. If there's so much as a suspicious move in a car, they arrest the people immediately. A curfew has been imposed all across the city after sundown. But Saturday night's patrols are relatively quiet. Somewhere in the city, looters have set fire to a store. And just after sundown, Deal and Valek arrest a man. He had been walking naked down Magazine Street and made a provocative gesture to the police with his penis. But what the police that was a bad joke was actually something more serious. After a preliminary examination in the provisional jail at the New Orleans Convention Center, a doctor determined that the man hadn't been able to take his psycho pharmaceutical drugs for days. For most of that period, he had been wandering, disoriented, through the area. An abandoned set The police continue their patrol through eerily silent downtown. The scenery here looks like the set of a disaster film in which the extras and even the guards have gone home for the night. The windows of stores have been broken. The skyscrapers stretch into the pitch-black heavens and occasionally a helicopter circles them. Other than the flashing of police lights, the city is completely dark. The only places where you can find any concentrations of people walking around is near the Convention Center and the Superdome -- people who are hoping to catch a bus to Houston or another city. They're the last of the 25,000 who sought refuge in the stadium and were taken out of the city on Saturday in a convoy of yellow school busses. They have left behind a mountain of trash, hundreds of shopping carts and massive puddles of stinking sewage. The police have banned all people from the building, though it's not as if anybody would actually want to go in. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/VpgUKB/pzNLAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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