Searchers smashed through doors in New Orleans, bringing their hunt for the dead to homes that had been locked and to blocks hardest hit by Katrina's flooding. Behind those doors, officials said they expected a sharply escalating body count even as the overall death toll passed 1,000.
"There still could be quite a few, especially in the deepest flooded areas," US Coast Guard Captain Jeffrey Pettitt, who is overseeing the retrieval of bodies, said on Wednesday. "Some of the houses, they haven't been in yet." Officials said searchers are beginning to find more children.
The death toll in Louisiana stood at 799 on Wednesday, an increase of 153 bodies since the weekend and nearly 80 percent of the 1,036 deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina across the Gulf Coast region. Pettitt and other officials would not speculate on what the final tally could be. They said the effort could last another four to six weeks.
PHOTO: AP
About 500 people are involved in the search of locked homes, the third and most intense phase of the recovery effort. Initially, authorities made a hasty sweep through neighborhoods to identify the living and dead. That was followed by a door-to-door search, though locked doors were off-limits.
Previously, they had not entered unless they saw a body or heard someone inside. Now, even a high water mark on the side of a home was enough to allow them to go in.
At one home, Captain Edan Jacobs of the Miami-Dade Fire Department kicked at a door a dozen times, then used a sledgehammer. The searchers, wearing special masks to ward off the mold and stench, sometimes have to go to three different entrances before they find one not blocked by refrigerators or couches.
Police officers and National Guardsmen stood by, weapons ready, as emaciated dogs circled.
"We try not to destroy the homes, but we have to get inside," said fire department Lieutenant Eric Baum. "Drastic circumstances call for drastic measures."
Many homes are unsafe to enter, while others lay under piles of muck and debris. Some homes are so structurally unsound they are marked, "Do not enter," and seemingly every house has mold growing from every surface.
The difficulty of gauging the number of dead in those neighborhoods will delay a final count for weeks, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, medical incident commander for Louisiana.
"There's some folks out there we can't retrieve," he said.
He said the elderly appear to make up the bulk of the dead but that searchers also are beginning to find more children.
"That's tough," he said.
As the body retrieval from Katrina accelerated, the city prepared for a new threat from Hurricane Rita, which was barreling across the Gulf of Mexico toward Texas. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin renewed his plea for residents to get out of the city.
A mandatory evacuation order was in effect for the entire east bank of the Mississippi, and some 500 buses were standing by at the convention center, but few seemed to be taking advantage. Only one person showed up to be evacuated on Wednesday morning.
The Army Corps of Engineers continued pumping the water left behind by Katrina and readying the city's fractured levee system, in case the new storm took a sharp turn and targeted Louisiana. Engineers warned residents that the patched-up levees can only handle up to 15cm of rain and a storm surge of 3m to 3.6m.
On Tuesday, Pettitt's team gave the mayor's office a map of the areas where the more intensive phase of the search for bodies should be conducted. On Wednesday, emergency crews hacked their way into houses in the Ninth Ward, an impoverished section of the city notable for being the birthplace of Fats Domino and other black musicians.
As the weeks pass, the urgency of the task increases because bodies are decomposing rapidly. Bodies are still found scattered around homes and in streets. On Tuesday, a badly decomposed corpse in the Ninth Ward lay draped over a fence, its nearly skeletized head resting on the ground and one leg jutting in the air. There was no outward indication it had been marked for removal by the search crews.
Pettitt, the Coast Guard official in charge of retrieval, acknowledged frustration with the process and with trying to coordinate with Kenyon International Emergency Services, the private company that has contracted with the state to remove the bodies.
Nagin last week acknowledged there had been problems with the body removal, partly because Kenyon workers were having trouble with the conditions.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of