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Bush abandons hurricane victims, protests break out
UNITED STATES President George W. Bush and his government have
come under heavy criticism, after they left thousands of Americans at the mercy
of Hurricane Katrina that has ravaged the coastal city of New Orleans.
Associated Press reported yesterday that fights and trash fires broke
out, rescue helicopters were shot at and anger mounted across New Orleans as
National Guardsmen in armoured vehicles poured in to help restore order across
this increasingly desperate and lawless American city.
"We are out here
like pure animals. We don’t have help," Reverend Isaac Clark (68) said outside
the New Orleans Convention Centre, where corpses lay in the open and evacuees
complained that they were dropped off and given nothing.
An additional
10 000 National Guardsmen from across the country were ordered into the
hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to shore up security, rescue and relief operations
in Katrina’s wake as looting, shootings, gunfire and carjackings spread and food
and water ran out.
But some Federal Emergency Management rescue
operations were suspended in areas where gunfire broke out.
Homeland
Security spokesman Russ Knocke was quoted as saying: "In areas where our
employees have been determined to potentially be in danger, we have pulled
back."
Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Cheri Ben-Iesan, who is the
spokesman at the city emergency operations centre, said: "Hospitals are trying
to evacuate. At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters
come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking potshots at
police and at helicopters, telling them, ‘You better come get my family’."
Police Captain Ernie Demmo said a National Guard military policeman was
shot in the leg during a scuffle with a civilian for his rifle. The man was
arrested.
"These are good people. These are just scared people," Demmo
added.
The Superdome, where some 25 000 people were being evacuated by
bus to the Houston Astrodome, descended into chaos.
Huge crowds, hoping
to finally escape the stifling confines of the stadium, jammed the main
concourse outside the dome, spilling out over the ramp to the Hyatt Hotel next
door — a seething sea of tense, unhappy people packed shoulder-to-shoulder up to
the barricades where heavily armed National Guardsmen stood.
Fights
broke out. A fire erupted in a trash chute inside the dome, but a National Guard
commander said it did not affect the evacuation.
After a traffic jam
kept buses from arriving at the Superdome for nearly four hours, a near riot
broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up.
Outside the Convention Centre, the pavements were packed with people
without food, water or medical care, and with no sign of law enforcement.
Thousands of storm refugees had been assembling outside for days,
waiting for buses that did not come.
At least seven dead bodies lay
scattered outside, and hungry, desperate people who were tired of waiting broke
through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets
of water and fruit juice and whatever else they could find.
An old man
in a chaise lounge lay dead as hungry babies wailed around him.
Around
the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a
blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
"I don’t
treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the
woman in the wheelchair. "I buried my dog."
He added: "You can do
everything for other countries, but you can’t do nothing for your own people.
You can go overseas with the military, but you can’t get them down here," he
moaned.
Just above the convention centre on Interstate, 10 commercial
buses were lined up, going nowhere.
The street outside the centre, above
the floodwaters, smelled of urine and faeces, and was choked with dirty babies’
nappies, old bottles and garbage.
"They’ve been teasing us with buses
for four days," Edwards said.
People chanted, "Help! Help!" as reporters
and photographers walked through. The crowd got angry when journalists tried to
photograph one of the bodies, and covered it over with a blanket.
A
woman, screaming, went onto the front steps of the convention centre and led the
crowd in reciting the Psalm 23 (The Lord is my Shepherd).
John Murray,
52, said: "It’s like they’re punishing us."
The first of hundreds of
busloads of people evacuated from the Superdome arrived early yesterday at their
new temporary home — another sports arena, the Houston Astrodome, 560 kilometres
away.
But the ambulance service in charge of taking the sick and injured
from the Superdome suspended flights after a shot was reported fired at a
military helicopter.
Richard Zuschlag, chief of Arcadian Ambulance, said
it had become too dangerous for his pilots.
The military, which was
overseeing the removal of the able-bodied by buses, continued the ground
evacuation without interruption, said National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Pete
Schneider.
The government had no immediate confirmation of whether a
military helicopter was fired on.
Yet all Bush could do was threaten the
stranded victims as he urged a crackdown on the lawlessness.
"I think
there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency
such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline (fuel)
pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush was
quoted as saying.
"And I’ve made that clear to our attorney general. The
citizens ought to be working together," he added.
On Wednesday, Mayor
Ray Nagin offered the most startling estimate yet of the magnitude of the
disaster. Asked how many people had died in New Orleans, he said: "Minimum,
hundreds. Most likely, thousands."
The death toll has already reached at
least 121 in Mississippi.
If the estimate proves correct, it would make
Katrina the worst natural disaster in the US since at least the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire, which was blamed for anywhere from
about 500 to 6 000 deaths.
Katrina would also be America’s deadliest
hurricane since 1900, when a storm in Galveston, Texas, killed between 6 000 and
12 000 people.
Nagin called for a total evacuation of New Orleans,
saying the city had become uninhabitable for the 50 000 to 100 000 who remained
behind after the city of nearly a half a million people was ordered cleared out
over the weekend, before Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast with 230 kilometres per
hour winds.
The mayor said that it would be two or three months before
the city functioned again and that people would not be allowed back into their
homes for at least a month or two.
Eyebrows have been raised over why so
many people, mostly African-Americans, have been left at the mercy of the
hurricane.
Former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial told the television
station NBC’s "Today" show that:
"So many of the people who did not
evacuate, could not evacuate for whatever reason. They are people who are
African-American mostly but not completely, and people who were of little or
limited economic means. They are the folks, we’ve got to get them out of there."
The criticism against Bush increased amid revelations that Hurricane
Katrina could not only have been anticipated, but was also worsened by the
effects of global warming.
At least one prominent study by a leading
American university suggests that hurricanes have become significantly stronger
in the past few decades during the same period that global average temperatures
have increased.
Ironically, the US government continues refusing to sign
the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change that came into effect in February this
year, and which seeks to limit the emission of greenhouse gases (gases that
absorb heat in the atmosphere and raise maritime (sea and ocean) temperatures.
Questions have been raised as to why the US government has failed to
shelter the victims, in addition to failing to monitor the build-up of the
hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez
added his voice to the criticism as he blasted Bush for waiting until after
Hurricane Katrina hit the US to end his vacation in Texas.
At the same
time, Chavez expressed sympathy for the storm’s victims and repeated his offer
to send aid workers to the devastated southern US states.
Katrina blew
up in the Gulf of Mexico to a Category 5 hurricane with winds of 280 kilometres
per hour before slackening a bit on Monday when it hit, swamping New Orleans and
the Mississippi coast. -- Associated Press/Herald Reporter.
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