NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 2 -- The National Guard arrived here in force Friday and mobilized to speed the evacuation of tens of thousands of desperate people trapped since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast.
Armed with water and food -- and with M-16 rifles in clear view -- the troops deployed in the flooded streets to aid residents and control the violence that has gripped the besieged city. The convoys of troops began to provide badly needed security for the thousands of refugees gathered at the city's convention center and the Louisiana Superdome, but much of New Orleans remained under no authority.
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Growing Despair Amid the Ruins
Federal, state and local officials struggle to provide relief to New Orleans, where tens of thousands of refugees from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina remain stranded with rapidly diminishing supplies of food and drinking water. Meanwhile, the official death toll in Mississippi climbed above 100.
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Fires broke out sporadically throughout the day; some were left to burn. Plumes of smoke from a fire and morning explosions at a riverfront chemical depot billowed across the sky.
Amid warnings and pleas by local and state officials that people were dying by the hour, President Bush flew here and saw firsthand an airport turned partially into a large field hospital. For much of the day the tarmac was home to the injured and infirm, brought there for triage or treatment. Some walked or staggered, glassy-eyed. Others waited in wheelchairs or on stretchers.
Bush also visited Biloxi, Miss., where officials said fuel and medical personnel are running dangerously low statewide and housing along a 50-mile stretch of coastal communities is nearly nonexistent.
Early in the day Bush said the federal response since the hurricane landed Monday was "not acceptable," and later, in Mobile, Ala., he promised that "what is not working right, we're going to make right." His assurances were backed by congressional approval of a $10.5 billion federal relief bill. The emergency legislation, which Bush signed Friday night, constitutes the largest undertaking of its kind in U.S. history.
During afternoon briefings at the emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., Federal Emergency Management Agency official Bill Lockey acknowledged that FEMA had been caught unprepared by the scope of the disaster.
"It seems our planning was inadequate," said Lockey, the agency's coordinating officer in the Louisiana disaster area. "We worked on it, we exercised for it, but the reality of it -- we've been working as hard as we can do. I've yet to be in a disaster where it went right."
The sun set again on scenes of unimaginable misery. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin despaired that "the people of our city are holding on by a thread. Time has run out," he said in a statement to CNN. "Can we survive another night? And who can we depend on? Only God knows."
Don Smithburg, chief executive officer of the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, which oversees eight public hospitals in the city, predicted many patients would die if not moved within the next 24 hours from grim conditions. Some hospital staff were suffering from dehydration and had resorted to giving themselves intravenous fluids so they could continue working, he said.
The director of the jammed Louis Armstrong International Airport said that facility could not cope with the several thousand evacuees delivered Friday by helicopter, far faster than the limited contingent of commercial and cargo planes could fly them out. Roy Williams blamed FEMA, which he said was bogged down in details.
"The approach of FEMA over the last few days," Williams said, "has not met the basic standard for an effective evacuation."
