New leader on aid vows faster effort
Search for bodies called primary task
NEW ORLEANS -- In his first full day at the helm of the massive recovery effort, Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad W. Allen pledged yesterday to speed up relief for this devastated region as authorities shifted their attention to the systematic search for the dead.
Allen told eight local parish presidents gathered aboard the USS Iwo Jima, a Navy warship in the Mississippi River, that he would create a ''single coordinating mechanism" that would eliminate confusing and overlapping bureaucracies that critics say have bogged down relief work.
''We know how to move forward from here," Allen said after the meeting.
Allen said coordination between the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Defense, National Guard, and other relief groups needs to be streamlined to meet the challenge of cleaning up and rebuilding the region and to care for the 233,000 evacuees living in shelters.
''A great decision has been made . . . to put a military commander with military experience in charge," said Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard, who has condemned the recovery effort.
Allen took over Friday for Michael D. Brown, the embattled FEMA director, who faced daunting criticism for the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, which state officials and residents described as too little and too late.
In addition to his promise of better management, Allen said he was intensely focused on engineering issues.
''Quite clearly, the number one challenge now is pumping capacity," he said. Fewer than one-quarter of the water pumps in New Orleans are functioning, but officials said yesterday that they expect all the water to be out of the city by early October.
The rebuilding effort still faces months of hard, grueling work. But reports of progress are increasing.
The Army Corps of Engineers said New Orleans should be drained by Oct. 2, St. Bernard's Parish by Oct. 8, and Plaquemines Parish, the worst-flooded area, by Oct. 18. The estimate for Plaquemines Parish now is half of what the engineers had initially predicted.
Dan Hitchings, a regional manager for the Corps of Engineers, said that, during an aerial survey of the area yesterday, he ''was astounded at how much land area was exposed." Thirty-nine permanent pumps and 39 portable pumps were operating, Hitchings said.
Fewer arrests were reported, fewer survivors needed to be evacuated, and cleanup efforts were accelerating throughout the dry areas of New Orleans, authorities said.
The recovery of bodies has begun in earnest, however, and the grim search for the dead is now the primary focus of emergency personnel. ''We have no clue how many dead bodies are there," said New Orleans police Lieutenant David Benelli. ''But we're going to look our hardest."
At the stone entrance of City Park in the heart of the city, workers took out two bodies: one partially submerged in water and another covered in a blanket and marked with orange paint, which indicated that searchers had previously reported the body. A walker, a bag of clothes, and life jacket were nearby.
State officials said yesterday morning that 154 hurricane-related deaths had been confirmed in Louisiana. The toll, which includes patients on life support who died when the power went out, is expected to climb as crews collect bodies trapped in houses and floating in the murky water outside. Police and military officials are marking the location of bodies with global positioning devices and paint on the exterior of houses.
Although officials are focusing on finding bodies, the laborious task of locating and evacuating the living continued in hard-to-reach areas of metropolitan New Orleans, particularly badly flooded St. Bernard's Parish. State Police did not provide rescue statistics, but Trooper Johnnie Brown said the number is decreasing daily.
The streets of New Orleans appear calmer by the day. National Guard troops said they had evacuated fewer than 50 people in a 24-hour period ending yesterday afternoon. Just three days ago, National Guardsmen said, they were evacuating that number every hour.
Thousands of residents remained in the city, defying a mandatory evacuation order that New Orleans officials are not yet enforcing.
Saint Charles, a major boulevard through the middle of the city, was filled with utility workers and cleanup crews. Tree limbs and other debris, once scattered over the road, lay in neat piles along the sidewalk.
At the Ernest Morial Convention Center, the cleanup was even more dramatic. For the first week after the storm, the convention center served as an evacuation point for an estimated 15,000 evacuees who left food, human waste, and mountainous heaps of trash. But yesterday, about half of the sidewalk in front of the lengthy building was clean, with the other half nearing that point as work crews bulldozed and swept away trash.
Tow-truck drivers began removing scores of abandoned vehicles; other workers unloaded food and supplies for employees at
The amount of work that remains to be done, however, is so staggering that the American Red Cross yesterday issued an unprecedented plea for 40,000 volunteers in the Gulf Coast. The current Red Cross contingent of 4,000 volunteers in Louisiana is scheduled to leave in two weeks and will need replacements for the short and long term, said John Degnan, a Red Cross spokesman.
Health authorities fear that as more residents return to neighborhoods ravaged by the storm, the number of injuries will increase, as people fall off roofs, trip over debris, and hurt themselves with power tools.
Those authorities are also increasingly concerned about mosquito-borne diseases, including West Nile virus. The millions of gallons of standing water provide an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Starting this evening, the Air Force will spray insecticide across a broad swath of the region, stretching from Kenner in the west to Chalmette in the east.
''We are aware there were mosquito-borne diseases that were present before the hurricane and that will be present after the hurricane," said Dr. Nicki Pesik, a senior medical officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Bush, in his weekly radio address, said Americans will come together and make the Gulf Coast ''more vibrant than ever," similar to their response to the terrorist attacks four years ago today. Bush's plans to attend a memorial service and to observe a moment of silence at the White House before he makes his fourth trip to the states hit by Hurricane Katrina.
''Our greatest resource in such times is the compassionate character of the American people, because even the most destructive storm cannot weaken the heart and soul of our nation," the president said in his weekly radio address.
Stephen Smith of the Globe staff contributed to this report, and material from the Associated Press was used in this story.
