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Police State USA
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09/08/05, New York Times
New
Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes
By
ALEX
BERENSON and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 8 - Waters were
receding across this flood-beaten city today as police
officers began confiscating weapons, including legally
registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass
forced evacuation of the residents still living here.
No
civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols,
shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the
superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are
allowed to have weapons," he said.
But that order
apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired
by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect
property. The guards, employees of private security companies
like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles.
Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but
that the police had no plans to make them give up their
weapons.
Nearly two weeks after the floods began, New
Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands
of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, as well
as National Guard troops and active-duty soldiers. While armed
looters roamed unchecked last week, the city is now calm. No
arrests were made on Wednesday night or this morning, and the
police received only 10 calls for service, a police spokesman
said.
The city's slow recovery is continuing on other
fronts as well, local officials said at a news conference.
Pumping stations are now operating across much of the city,
and many taps and fire hydrants have water pressure. Tests
have shown no evidence of cholera or other dangerous diseases
in flooded areas, though health officials have said the waters
contain unsafe levels of E. coli bacteria and lead.
Efforts
to recover corpses have also started.
But there were
still signs of confusion and uncertainty over government
plans. FEMA's director, Michael D. Brown, had said his agency
would begin issuing debit cards, worth at least $2,000 each,
to allow hurricane victims to buy supplies for immediate
needs. More than 319,000 people have already applied for
federal disaster relief, and many evacuees began lining up at
the Astrodome, in Houston, early today in hope of getting
cards.
"The concept is to get them some cash in
hand," Mr. Brown had said, "which allows them,
empowers them, to make their own decisions about what they
need to have to restart their lives."
But this
afternoon, FEMA announced that it no longer planned to issue
the cards. An agency spokesman, David G. Passey, said that he
did not know why the program was scrapped but that now
"we believe that our normal methods of delivery - checks
and electronic funds transfer - will suffice."
In
Washington, the House an Senate overwhelmingly approved $51.8
billion for relief efforts, the second disbursement since the
storm devastated the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. The funds include
$50 billion for FEMA, $1.4 billion for the Department of
Defense and an additional $400 million for the Army Corps of
Engineers. The request follows a $10.5 billion package that
President Bush signed on Friday and that is intended to
address the immediate needs of survivors.
Hundreds of miles to the east, Ophelia, a tropical
storm off the Florida coast, was upgraded to hurricane status
this afternoon after its winds reached speeds of 75 miles per
hour. Forecasters have predicted that Ophelia will turn east
into the Atlantic Ocean during the next few days, although its
path remains unclear.
With pumps running and the
weather here remaining hot and dry, water has receded across
much of New Orleans. Formerly flooded streets are now
passable, although covered with leaves, tree branches and mud.
A
spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, Dan Hitchings, said
37 of the city's 174 permanent pumps were working this
afternoon, removing about 11,000 cubic feet of flood water per
second. The city's 174 pumps have the capacity to remove about
81,000 cubic feet of water each second when they are all
operational.
While Mr. Hitchings would not try to
quantify how much the water level in the city had dropped, he
did say that "it's going down."
The Army
Corps of Engineers continues to try to plug two levee breaks,
Mr. Hitchings said, on London Avenue, and at the end of the
Harbor Navigation Canal.
Many neighborhoods in the
northern half of New Orleans remain under 10 feet of water,
and Mr. Compass said today that the city's plans for a forced
evacuation remained in effect because of the danger of disease
and fires.
Mr. Compass said he could not disclose when
New Orleans residents might be forced to leave en masse, but
other police officers and law enforcement officials said the
city planned to start as early as tonight.
The city's
Police Department and federal law enforcement officers from
agencies like the United States Marshals Service will lead the
evacuation, Mr. Compass said. Officers will search houses in
both dry and flooded neighborhoods, and no one will be allowed
to stay, he said.
Many of the residents still in the
city said they did not understand why the city remained intent
on forcing them out.
"I know the risks," said
Renee de Pontchieux, as she sat on a stool outside Kajun's Pub
in the working-class Bywater neighborhood east of downtown.
"We used to think we lived in America - now we're not so
sure. Why should we allow this government to chase us out and
allow people from outside to rebuild our homes? We want to
rebuild our homes."
But Ms. De Pontchieux said she
was resigned to being evacuated if the police insisted.
"It would be foolish" to fight, she said.
This
afternoon, President Bush announced a series of measures
intended to make it easier for evacuees to receive state and
federal assistance, like Medicaid and food stamps, to make the
aid as "simple as possible to collect."
"There
will be many difficult days ahead, especially as we recover
those who did not survive the storm," he said, adding
that he was declaring Sept. 16, next Friday, a National Day of
Prayer and Remembrance.
Vice President Dick Cheney,
accompanied by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the
secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, surveyed
damaged neighborhoods in the Gulf Coast region today, and
pledged that the federal government would help rebuild the
devastated area.
Mr. Cheney visited Gulfport, Miss.,
and New Orleans, where flood waters are growing increasingly
fetid and thousands of people are still insisting on staying,
despite the evacuation order.
"The president asked
me to come down to take a look at things, and to begin to
focus on the longer term, in terms of making certain obviously
that we're getting the search-and-rescue missions done and all
those other immediate things," Mr. Cheney said after
touring a neighborhood in Gulfport. "The progress we're
making is significant."
Mr. Cheney's visit follows
a visit earlier this week by President Bush, his second since
the storm hit, following much criticism last week that the
administration and federal agencies had been slow in
responding to the disaster.
An estimated 5,000 to
10,000 people remain inside New Orleans more than a week after
Hurricane Katrina hit, many in neighborhoods that are on high
ground near the Mississippi River.
But the number of
dead still remained a looming and disturbing question.
In
the first indication of how many deaths Louisiana alone might
expect, a spokesman for the State Department of Health and
Hospitals, Robert Johannessen, said on Wednesday that the
Federal Emergency Management Agency had ordered 25,000 body
bags. The official death toll remains under 100.
In
Washington, House and Senate leaders announced a joint
investigation into the government's response to the crisis.
"Americans deserve answers," said a statement by the
two top-ranking Republicans, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and
Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader. "We must do all
we can to learn from this tragedy, improve the system and
protect all of our citizens."
Democratic leaders,
however, said they would not participate, citing a preference
for an independent inquiry.
The government continued
its efforts to help evacuees. At the Astrodome in Houston,
where an estimated 15,000 New Orleans evacuees found shelter
over the weekend, the number had dwindled to only about 3,000
on Wednesday as people were rapidly placed in apartments,
volunteers' homes and hotels that had been promised
reimbursement by FEMA.
With the overall death toll
highly uncertain, Mr. Brown, the FEMA director, said in Baton
Rouge that the formal house-to-house search for bodies had
begun at midmorning. He said the temporary mortuary set up in
St. Gabriel, La., was prepared to receive 500 to 1,000 bodies
a day, with refrigeration trucks on site to hold the corpses.
"They
will be processed as rapidly as possible," Mr. Brown
said.
As it worked to remove the water inundating the
city, the Corps of Engineers said that one additional pumping
station, No. 6, at the head of the 17th Street Canal, had
started up, and that about 10 percent of the city's total
pumping capacity was in operation. But the corps added that it
was dealing with a new problem: how to prevent corpses from
being sucked to the grates at the pump inlets.
"We're expending every effort to try to ensure
that we protect the integrity of remains as we get this water
out of the city," said John S. Rickey, chief of public
affairs for the corps. "We're taking this very
personally. This is a very deep emotional aspect of our work
down there."
Officials emphasized that as testing
of the flood waters continued, substances in addition to E.
coli bacteria and lead were likely to be found at harmful
levels, especially from water taken near industrial sites.
"Human contact with the floodwater should be
avoided as much as possible," the environmental agency's
administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said.
A spokesman
for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
said state and local officials had reported three deaths in
Mississippi and one in Texas from exposure to Vibrio
vulnificus, a choleralike bacterium found in salt water, which
poses special risks for people with chronic liver problems.
At
a news conference this morning, officials in New Orleans
cautioned people to decontaminate themselves as best as
possible when entering homes after wading through the
floodwater.
Among the authorities, though, some
confusion lingered about how a widespread evacuation by force
would work, and how much support it would get at the federal
and state level. Mayor C. Ray Nagin told the police and the
military on Tuesday to remove all residents for their own
safety, and on Wednesday, the police superintendent, Mr.
Compass, said state laws give the mayor the authority to
declare martial law and order the evacuations.
"There's
a martial law declaration in place that gives us legal
authority for mandatory evacuations," Mr. Compass said.
"We'll use the minimum amount of force necessary."
But
because the New Orleans Police Department has only about 1,000
working officers, the city is largely in the hands of National
Guard troops and active-duty soldiers.
State officials
said Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco could tell the Guard to
carry out the forced removals, but they stopped short of a
commitment to do so. In Washington, Lt. Gen. Joseph R. Inge,
deputy commander of the United States Northern Command, said
regular troops "would not be used" in any forced
evacuation.
The state disaster law does not supersede
either the state or federal Constitutions, said Kenneth M.
Murchison, a law professor at Louisiana State University. But
even so, Mr. Nagin's decision could be a smart strategy that
does not violate fundamental rights, Professor Murchison said.
When police officers came to Billie Moore's 3,000
square foot Victorian to warn her of the health risks of
remaining in the city, she pushed her identification tag from
the hospital where she works as a nurse through slats in the
door.
"I guess you know the health risks
then," the officer said as he walked away.
Ms.
Moore and her husband, Richard Robinson, who do not drive and
use bicycles for the 5-mile ride to their jobs at the
still-functioning Ochsner Hospital in suburban Jefferson
Parish, have no plans to leave. Their circa-1895 home, on the
city's southwest flank, suffered virtually no damage in the
hurricane or its aftermath. They have been lighting an old gas
stove with a match to cook pasta and rice, dumping cans of
peas on top for flavor.
"We try to be normal and
sit down and eat," Ms. Moore, 52, explained as she showed
off the expansive, well-kept home where they have lived for 10
years. "I think that's how we'll stay healthy is if I
keep the house clean."
Ms. Moore said she had not
worked since the hurricane because there are few babies left
at the hospital, but that she remains on standby; her husband
has been on duty the past five days.
"I don't
want to go, I don't want to lose my job," she said.
"Who's going to take care of the patients if all the
nurses go away?"
Alex Berenson reported from New
Orleans for this article, and Timothy Williams from New York.
Reporting was contributed by John Broder from New Orleans,
Sewell Chan from Baton Rouge, La; Christine Hauser from New
York, and Matthew L. Wald from Vicksburg, Miss.
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