"There was a party going on in Bourbon Street the night before the hurricane struck," said Rosemary Rimmer-Clay, a Quaker from Brighton, England, who was visiting the city with her two sons, after escaping the immediate disaster area.
"One man stood up and said: `I don't want to die.' There was a real sense of impending doom," she said.
Trapped in the Park St Charles hotel, in the city's central business district, she sensed the party atmosphere evaporate as Katrina's 224kph winds approached.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
First came the stories of the 8m waves surging across Lake Pontchartrain. Then the toilets failed in the hotel and the lights went out.
"The atmosphere felt incredibly dangerous. It was like a war zone. But at the same time parts of it were incredibly boring, just sitting in the dark listening to crashing sounds," Rimmer-Clay recalls.
Then, after eight hours of meteorological violence, came silence. Katrina had torn across the city, dropping to a category 4 just before she roared in, but still the strongest hurricane to hit New Orleans for decades.
The fifth of the city's population who had chosen to stay -- or had no choice -- breathed a collective sigh of relief and waited for the lights to come back on, unaware that the storm surges had fatally weakened the levees protecting the city. After the wind, a new and more deadly force was about to be unleashed -- the waters of the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain.
Even before New Orleans could start to assess the damage the bad news started to leak out -- literally. Two levees had burst, sending huge waves washing down the city streets, turning them into canals.
Outside, as roads and buildings disappeared under water, chaos ensued in an orgy of looting.
"The police told us they were authorized to beat or shoot looters. I saw one man carrying a huge box of tampons; it was surreal," Rimmer-Clay said.
Witnesses told how they saw a mail van being held up and its contents ripped out.
On top of the long-term failures to protect the city, a new and deadly series of failures were about to be revealed. Confronted with the US's worst natural disaster, its inability to cope would shamingly be revealed.
There is presently only one way out of the city by car, and that is to the south. To the north, Interstate 10 disappears into a vast expanse of water 18km from the center. It is a surreal juxtaposition of Tarmac and swampland: man subsumed by nature. On the city's outskirts, at the junction with La Place, where 24-hour burger joints now stand strangely empty and road signs lie twisted at the road's edge, scores of school buses wait ready to transport the homeless out of the city into the welcoming arms of church groups across Louisiana.
At the end of last week, to get onto one of the buses was the equivalent of winning the Louisiana state lottery as huge lines formed to escape. The elderly and children get priority. Occasionally, someone in the crowd faints and has to be carried out by the soldiers of the National Guard, who finally have poured into this beleaguered city.
Few people now say much. Some shout at the television cameras: "We're dying," "I haven't had water or eaten for three days," "Doesn't anyone care?" But most are too tired to talk.
Instead they clutch their plastic bag bundles close to them like children. The high drama, the excitement of surviving Katrina, has been replaced by a dull hatred of the red brown swamp that now surrounds and imprisons them.
Only the motels and the pawn-shops outside the city are doing brisk business. Inside everything is closed, destroyed or looted. A few New Orleans' residents have driven out of the south side and returned through the police road-blocks with shotguns in their trunks, determined to protect their properties from the gangs of looters.
With no clear advice coming from the emergency services, thousands headed for the center of the city and ended up at the Superdome, the giant sporting arena, which had part of its synthetic roof ripped off in the storm.
As the numbers poured in, food and water quickly started to run out. Staff were forced to ration supplies, using handstamps to indicate who had received provisions. One man committed suicide, throwing himself off a ledge of the dome. A further 5,000 found themselves in the conference center where, if anything, the situation quickly became even worse.
There were reports of gunshots at the two venues, although the authorities attacked the media for circulating what they called unfounded rumors. Inside the dome and the conference center the bodies of the frail and elderly were left where they fell.
And for the vast the majority of US citizens, it has not been the destructive power of nature, compounded by human failings that has been so shocking, but the perception that so many of the city's most frail and vulnerable -- almost exclusively poor blacks -- were effectively abandoned.
The strain on the city's major hospitals soon became critical as their diesel-powered generators, necessary for sustaining the lives of people on ventilators and other medical equipment, began to run out of fuel. Plans were made to relocate the 350 patients and 1,000 doctors and nurses at Charity and University hospitals to facilities outside the city. Looters attempted to hijack a bus bringing drugs to the hospitals.
In the panic that followed, people desperately haggled with taxi drivers to get them out on the few dry roads south of the city. Why, residents are demanding to know, did the authorities not order a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans until Sunday? And why wasn't there adequate transportation laid on to help the sick and elderly, and those who could not afford to travel, to flee?
It is a question that was asked most powerfully in an editorial in New Orleans' own newspaper, publishing online as its presses have sunk under the water.
"The lack of a law enforcement presence is stunning. It is apparent that no one -- neither New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass nor state and federal officials -- were prepared for what would come after Katrina had passed through," the paper roared in an editorial last week. "Virtually everyone involved in public safety has failed the people left in New Orleans who are trying desperately to survive."
And it is not just the press whose anger is boiling over.
"We can send massive amounts of aid to the tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans," stormed Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' own homeland security chief.
For if the failure adequately to protect one of the US' most vulnerable cities from an avoidable disaster that has dwarfed Sept. 11 will be the subject for long-term congressional investigation, the failures of leadership on all sides in the aftermath of Katrina are already being laid vividly bare. The blame-game that has begun has already drawn in everyone from local officials to senators in the affected states, to even President George W. Bush himself in a round of mutual recriminations.
The criticism -- both explicit and implicit -- has seen partisan loyalties break down, as even local senior Republicans have let slip their frustration with the country's leadership. Among them has been Louisiana's Republican Representative Charles Boustany, who said he had spent two days urging the Bush administration to send help.
"I started making calls and trying to impress upon the White House and others that something needed to be done," he said. "The state resources were being overwhelmed, and we needed direct federal assistance, command and control, and security -- all three of which are lacking."
Some at least have been honest in their failings. Lieutenant General Russel Honore, in charge of the taskforce set up to respond to Katrina, admitted the extent of the devastation damage had caught him and other military planners off guard.
"All last week, we were collaborating on developing options," he said in a briefing to Pentagon reporters last week. "None of us -- nobody -- was clairvoyant enough to perceive the damage that was going to be brought by this storm."
But if one person has become a focus for the growing anger in the last 24 hours, it is Bush himself, for his apparent inability to recognize the seriousness of the situation. Worryingly for the White House, it is not just the usual suspects who have turned on him but Republicans too, while news anchors dropped any pretence of impartiality to blast the government. Political analysts now argue that a week of Katrina may have tarnished Bush's legacy in the way it took Iraq three years to do.
John Zogby of Zogby International, the respected pollster, told the Observer: "This came at a time when Bush was already wounded by Iraq. I am sure that you will see his approval numbers plummet because you are seeing criticism coming from Republicans. I think he is going to lose his bedrock support. In terms of his legacy, he was not able to reach the benchmark that he established for crisis leadership after 9/11."
Even before Katrina, Bush's approval ratings had slipped to 43 percent, unusually low for a president at this stage of his tenure.
And although Bush attempted last Friday to regain his poise by visiting the disaster zone and comforting victims, Zogby says this may prove inadequate.
"There were these images of him -- earlier in the week -- doing a 30-minute flyover then going home. By virtually all accounts he then gave the worst speech of his presidency. First impressions may very well be the lasting ones," he said.
News coverage became steadily harder over the week, moving from praise for emergency workers and vague talk of compassion to outright hostility. On CNN, newsman Jack Cafferty said: "I'm 62. I remember the riots in Watts, I remember the earthquake in San Francisco. I have never, ever seen anything as bungled and as poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans. Where the hell is the water for these people? Why can't sandwiches be dropped to the Superdome? What is going on? This is a disgrace."
Bush, who tends not to admit failure and famously couldn't remember a single mistake he had made when asked by a reporter, agreed last Friday that the relief efforts are "not acceptable."
And for a wider US public, the disaster in New Orleans coming a week ahead of the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11, has a far wider national meaning than simply the Katrina catastrophe itself.
Crucially it calls into doubt Bush's electoral promise that he was the best candidate to protect the nation from a terrorist attack.
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, is among those who have asked whether Bush's Department of Homeland Security is up to the job.
"If we can't respond faster than this, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" he pointedly asked.
The depth of anger has permeated even some of Bush's most loyal supporters, including Rich Lowry, a right-wing commentator, who admitted to being "embarrassed and ashamed" by the government's failure to keep order.
It has been as much about Bush's style as the reality on the ground that has rebounded on him. As he prepared to make his visit to New Orleans, he told reporters that he was "looking forward to his trip" before changing his mind and decided that he wasn't looking forward to it after all. The president tried to use the fact that Senator Trent Lott, a senior Republican, had his own house destroyed to display his celebrated folksy charm.
"Out of the rubble of Trent Lott's house, there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch," he said.
Commentators were quick to note that Lott has at least one other house, unlike the poor who are stranded in New Orleans.
And to many, the talk of rebuilding and the concern about looting seemed to miss the point: that people are dying in massive numbers.
The obvious reality that those suffering worst are poor and black put the deep inequalities in US society on center stage in an unusual way, throwing a harsh spotlight on Bush's social policies.
Jeff Johnson at the University of Maryland said: "These people had been abandoned by our society and by our government long before Katrina. The differences between classes and races in the US are getting worse, because the entire social welfare system is being intentionally dismantled. We have an enormous concentration of poverty and poor housing in the inner cities. Poor black people are not visible in this country until they start rioting."
And the violence has raised other issues that go far beyond the war on terror, to the fragile nature of the US's unequal society. As the looting and rioting escalated, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, was forced to order 1,500 police on to the streets to quell the looting.
But still the chaos ensued. Carjackers forced the driver of a bus owned by a nursing home to surrender his vehicle. Guns were stolen from stores. Entire shops were stripped clean. One looter used a forklift to rip the metal security doors off a drugstore. At the Sports Authority in Riverside Marketplace, police had removed guns and ammunition and boarded up the place. But looters broke through and stole all the knives.
Few parts of New Orleans remained untouched by the looters. On Webster Street, in the "uptown" part of the city, a sign has been scrawled: "Do Not Enter. Trespassers will be shot." By last Thursday, Nagin, a popular mayor in a city not keen on its politicians, was desperate, issuing an urgent SOS, an admission the city was effectively dying and a clear reproach to the president and the federal government.
The chaos begot chaos. The 6,000 power line workers assembled in the south-eastern corner of Louisiana to help restore power to the 990,000 utility customers still without electricity in New Orleans, were unable to enter the city.
"We can't send workers out and put their lives in jeopardy," said Arthur Wiese Jr, vice president of corporate communications for Entergy, the state's largest power supplier said. "Once we have facilities back operating, we have to know that our workers can get to work safely."
Twisted stories circulated: a SWAT team had been sent in to restrain prisoners from the local jail, who had overpowered their guards and had gone on the rampage; private boat owners were charging US$700 to ferry people out of the city up the Mississippi; God was angry with New Orleans.
The latter is an observation repeated regularly by those fleeing the city. In the southern states, where people wear their religion on bumper stickers and T-shirts, and Pro Life is the only voice in the abortion debate, God is everywhere.
"God is tired of New Orleans," said Barbara Windsor, who fled the city on Sunday with her family shortly before Katrina hit. "He sees the murders every day and he's talking to us; he's tired of us and he's destroyed everything."
How long Hurricane Katrina's impact will linger in New Orleans' psyche is incalculable.
Harry Goldgar is 84 years old and has lived in the city for 30 years. He likes literature and the humanities. On Sunday his New Orleans home was stuffed full of books, representing a lifetime searching for knowledge. Last week, lying on the floor of the First Pentecostal church in Zachary, Goldgar's remaining worldly possessions were contained in one plastic bag.
"It's the books I'll miss. I hope to go back to see if anything can be saved," he said.
He is aware that it will be months before anyone is allowed back in the city.
By then his stage, his library -- like much of New Orleans -- will be little more than pulp.
This is the second part of a two-part article. Part one appeared in the Taipei Times on Wednesday.
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