44 found dead in New Orleans hospital
FEMA chief quits; Bush views city
NEW ORLEANS -- Forty-four bodies have been recovered in an evacuated hospital, officials announced yesterday, as the federal official in charge of the initial response to Hurricane Katrina resigned under fire, and as President Bush took a firsthand look at flood damage in parts of the city.
The bodies of the 44 patients, the largest group found so far, were removed Sunday from the Memorial Medical Center, a state health official and hospital representatives said yesterday.
The hospital, in the Mid-City neighborhood had been surrounded by water, stranding patients and staff inside for four days after the hurricane struck.
Dave Goodson, the Memorial's director of support services, said that none of the patients had drowned. ''It was over 106 degrees in the hospital after we lost power, and many of them were elderly," Goodson said.
Water marks that were visible on the hospital's signs indicated that the water from Katrina's floods had risen as high as five feet around the hospital building.
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Other patients died while in a long-term care facility that had leased several floors of the hospital from Tenet, Harry Anderson, a Tenet spokesman, said from the company's headquarters in Dallas. Still others died in wards run by Memorial.
Anderson said bodies of patients who had died during the storm and its aftermath were placed either in the hospital's chapel or morgue. ''We treated all of the dead with dignity," he said.
Anderson indicated that authorities had been informed about the bodies some time ago.
State officials said 45 bodies had been recovered at or near the hospital, but hospital officials insisted yesterday that the bodies of 44 patients were inside.
The death toll in all of Louisiana rose to 279 as flood waters receded further, allowing recovery workers to enter more buildings.
In Washington, the Bush administration official who was in charge of the initial response to Katrina, Michael D. Brown, resigned as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Associated Press quoted him as saying that he had done so ''in the best interest of the agency and the best interest of the president."
Brown, a political appointee who was general counsel to an equestrian association before joining the Bush administration in 2003, came under heavy criticism from officials in Louisiana and Washington after a slow FEMA response to Katrina and the rising flood waters that inundated New Orleans after breaches opened in levees protecting the city.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff replaced Brown Friday as director of the federal response in the Gulf Coast region with Vice Admiral Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, after media outlets reported that Brown had also padded his resume.
Bush appeared to be surprised by Brown's resignation. Asked about it at an impromptu news conference in Gulfport, Miss., Bush told a reporter: ''Maybe you know more than I do."
Bush said he had not talked to Brown. Later, aboard Air Force One, Bush discussed Brown's resignation with Chertoff.
''The president appreciates Mike Brown's service," the president's spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters.
The administration announced that R. David Paulison, FEMA's head of emergency preparedness force, will lead the agency. Paulison is a career firefighter from Miami who was among emergency workers responding to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 in the Florida Everglades in 1996, according to a biography on FEMA's website.
This was Bush's third visit to the storm-battered Gulf region but his first into the center of New Orleans. He took note of the pumping operations that continue to shrink flood waters and said: ''We got a lot of work to do." In response to a question, he denied assertions that there was any racial component to who was left behind when most residents evacuated before the hurricane struck.
''The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort," Bush said. ''The rescue efforts were comprehensive. The recovery will be comprehensive."
Bush acknowledged that ''there was a sense of relaxation at a critical moment" in the federal response after the hurricane hit. But he defended his actions, standing by a statement that ''no one anticipated a breach of the levees."
Asked whether he was misinformed when he said the breaching of levees was not anticipated, Bush said, ''No, what I was referring to is this: When that storm came by, a lot of people said, 'We dodged a bullet.' And that storm came through, people at first said, 'Whew!' There was a sense of relaxation. That is what I was referring to. I myself thought we had dodged a bullet, and you know, because I was listening to people, probably over the airwaves, that a bullet has been dodged. And that is what I was referring to. Of course there were plans in case the levees had been breached. There was a sense of relaxation at a critical moment."
Later, in Gulfport, Bush said he had talked with a woman who said she been denied an insurance claim because the company said she suffered flood, not wind, damage.
Bush said that if that had happened to him, ''I would not like it," and he promised to look into the problem.
As part of the region's planning for a long-term recovery, FEMA said it is prepared to house up to 200,000 people in mobile homes and has identified space in Louisiana to park 15,000 of them.
''Our number one mission is to get people into something safe, sanitary, private, and out of public shelters as soon as we can," said Brad Gair, a FEMA official responsible for housing.
Gair was responding to criticisms by state officials Sunday that FEMA had failed to get temporary housing into the state fast enough. He said FEMA would house people on cruise ships, in hotels, and in the trailers and mobile homes.
The agency, he said, is buying these in the tens of thousands. Part of the challenge, he said, is in identifying sites on which to put the new communities of up to 25,000 people in temporary homes, complete with schools, security, and other services.
Congress has approved more than $62 billion in aid, but the size and scope of the full government relief program have not been determined. Bush pledged ''billions of dollars" in aid as the state issued a plea to dislocated business leaders to not give up on Louisiana. A state delegation planned to travel to Washington today to begin making the case for tax-breaks and low-interest government investment bonds similar to the ''freedom bonds" the government issued after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York.
State and federal officials said they plan to maintain the New Orleans tourist economy by putting up workers in hotels and restaurants. The workers will be deployed in a massive reconstruction; jobs will be given to as many displaced New Orleans residents as possible, said Michael Olivier, Louisiana's secretary of economic development. ''We have to put some money into the hands of these men and women so they can live," Olivier said.
The enormity of the job ahead was clear for a pizza shop owner, who was among business operators allowed to enter the city temporarily yesterday. Haluk Dogru and his brother-in-law, Reggie Ozel, parked their black Mercedes outside Cafe Roma in the Lower Garden District about 1:30 p.m. and braced themselves for what they would find.
They opened the wooden and glass door to the restaurant and gasped. The air inside was rancid. Empty soda cans were on tables and the floor. On one table, there was an amber-colored glass container that once held a brand of cinnamon schnapps. ''I don't know what to say," Dogru said, quietly. ''They broke the bottles, everything."
He clambered up a twisting flight of stairs to his office. The lock had not been broken; records, cash, and his trove of family pictures were safe. Dogru slumped on a sofa. Then he sobbed.
Dogru came to the United States from Turkey in 1980. ''I came with $20 to the states," Dogru said. ''It can all be replaced."
His bar across the street, the Half Moon, had also been ransacked. He estimated that $10,000 had probably been stolen from the poker machine.
Dogru opened Cafe Roma, in a location down the street, in 1985. Since then, he has built a small empire of pizza shops, all named Cafe Roma. The others are in spots flush in flood waters. Those, he figures, are all lost.
Michael Kranish and Yvonne Abraham of the Globe staff contributed to this article. 