Date Posted: Friday, September 02, 2005

The National Guard arrived in New Orleans four days after a devastating hurricane to help residents and refugees trapped in the city.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, Sep 2 (MASNET & News Agencies) - National Guardsmen, buoyed by Iraq-tested reinforcements, started to wrest control of New Orleans from armed thugs and looters who have run wild since Hurricane Katrina swamped the city four day ago.

Thousands of fresh troops poured into the southern jazz capital scrambling to reverse a tide of anarchy and bolster relief efforts that President George W. Bush acknowledged were unacceptably slow, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

A long military convoy of emergency supplies rolled into the flooded city on Friday morning, the first sign of significant relief after days of delays, reports Reuters news agency.

They arrived as authorities labored to evacuate thousands of survivors from the city devastated by the storm that left thousands feared dead. A U.S. senator said Friday the toll could top 10,000.

The military said its first priority was delivering food and water, after which it would begin evacuating people - something that could take days, reports the Associated Press (AP).

The trucks rolled through muddy water up to their axles to reach the convention center, where 15,000 to 20,000 hungry and desperate refugees had taken shelter - many of them seething with anger so intense that it seemed ready to erupt in violence at any moment, the news agency reports.

National Guardsmen chased gun-toting gangs from the convention center to deliver the first large-scale relief supplies to up to 20,000 survivors huddling in fear and filth.

They also emptied out the nearby Superdome sports stadium that also descended into a squalid, violent hell with an equal number of desperate residents awaiting rescue.

Captain James Rauls of the local sheriff's department said the city was improving "very slowly" each day. Cathy Flincham, of the Louisiana State Police, said reports suggested mob violence was "starting to lessen."

Lieutenant General Carl Strock, the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said water levels had stabilized but it would take weeks or longer to drain the city which is 80 percent submerged.

In a positive sign, commercial aircraft flew in and out of New Orleans International Airport at an improved rate of four an hour to drop off supplies and evacuate displaced residents, many of them seriously ill, reports Reuters.

But officials spoke of pockets of mayhem, including violence at a major hospital that forced suspension of evacuation operations with many of the remaining 100 patients facing death if not transferred.

A senior Army officer said the number of troops deployed in New Orleans would be nearly doubled by late Friday to 7,000, patrolling alongside hundreds of civilian police also moving in.

He said half of them had just returned from assignments overseas and are "highly proficient in the use of lethal force." He pledged to "put down" the violence "in a quick and efficient manner."

"I am confident that within the next 24 hours we will see a dramatic improvement" in the security situation, Lieutenant General Steven Blum told reporters in the nearby Louisiana state capital of Baton Rouge.

Guardsmen were deployed at strategic intersections, and armed personnel carriers patrolled the streets while helicopters whirred above. "Oh, Lord have mercy, they have finally come," exulted one resident.

Overnight gunfire and pre-dawn explosions had heightened the panic in New Orleans where tens of thousands remained trapped amid fetid floodwaters, rotting corpses, armed gangs and troops with shoot-to-kill orders.

There was no word on casualties or the cause of the blasts, including one that erupted at a chemical storage depot near the French Quarter. Flames at a fast-food restaurant threatened to burn down a neighboring hotel.

Survivors of Katrina's fury recounted horrific tales of bodies piling up, gunbattles, fistfights, rapes, carjackings and widespread looting since the storm struck Monday.

On Thursday, at the convention center, corpses lay abandoned outside the building, and many storm refugees complained bitterly that they had been forsaken by the government. And at the Superdome, fights and fires broke out and storm victims battled for seats on the buses taking them to the Houston Astrodome, reports the AP.

Local officials stepped up their criticism of Washington's failure to speed troops and relief to the greater New Orleans area, where up to 300,000 people were still believed stranded.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he was furious at the lack of help his historic city had received, reports Reuters.

"I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man," he said in a rambling interview in which he cursed, yelled and ultimately burst into tears. "Now get off you’re a***s and fix this. Let's do something and let's fix the biggest g***mn crisis in the history of this country."

At one point he said: "Excuse my French - everybody in America - but I am p**s*d."

Nagin questioned why troops had not come sooner. "People are dying, people have lost their homes, people have lost their jobs. The city of New Orleans will never be the same."

Terry Ebbert, the chief of New Orleans's emergency operations, branded the delays a "national disgrace" and moaned, "We can send massive amounts of aid to [Asian] tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans."

Bush, accused by critics of a belated response to one of the country's worst national disasters, agreed the situation was "not acceptable" as he set out on an inspection tour of hurricane damage in three states.

"My attitude is, if it's not going exactly right, we're going to make it go exactly right," the president said in Mobile, AL. "If there's problems, then we'll address the problems."

The U.S. House of Representatives gave final passage to a $10.5 billion emergency-aid bill that Bush was expected to sign later in the day, reports Reuters.

U.S. authorities had said they would have 22,000 troops on the ground in Louisiana by Friday. But Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco said she told Bush earlier this week she needed 40,000.

Officials also brought in some 300 battle-hardened members of the Arkansas National Guard, just back from Iraq and authorized to open fire on hoodlums profiting from the destruction.

"They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded," Blanco said. "These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will."

But Bush rejected calls to pull more personnel from the war in Iraq to handle Hurricane Katrina, saying: "We've got plenty of resources to do both."

The spectacle of the superpower struggling with a natural catastrophe and a growing refugee problem more common to the developing world shocked U.S. allies and foes abroad as officials here counted up the cost.

Most of the victims were poor and black, largely because they have no cars and so were unable to flee the city before Katrina pounded the U.S. Gulf Coast on Monday. The disaster has highlighted the racial and class divides in a city and a country where the gap between rich and poor is vast, reports Reuters.

The U.S. response would be a moral test, said U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, the news agency reports.

"Many of those now in such dire circumstances were already living in poverty and destitution even before the hurricane came. They had no ability to evacuate and now their very survival depends upon the response of this country," he said.

Refugees were bused out of New Orleans to shelters in the neighboring state of Texas and as far away as the southeastern state of Florida. Officials said it could be months before they returned.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) deplored the fact that the poorest residents, those unable to flee the hurricane, bore the brunt of the disaster. It said 300,000 to 400,000 children were left homeless.

The consulting firm Risk Management Solutions (RMS) estimated economic losses would likely top $100 billion and called the situation in New Orleans "the most damaging flood in U.S. history."

Katrina forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and shut refineries along the Gulf Coast shut, sending gasoline prices at the pump soaring to new records of well over $3 a gallon in most parts of the country, reports Reuters.

No comprehensive death toll was available from Katrina, but officials estimated it would be in the thousands. David Vitter, the junior senator from Louisiana, said it could go even higher.

"My guess is that it will start at 10,000, but that is only a guess," Vitter said, adding he was not basing his remarks on any official death toll or body count.