Many Evacuated, but Thousands Still Waiting

In New Orleans on Saturday, smoke from several fires that have burned for days swirled over the French Quarter. Outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the stench and heat worsened the long wait of the thousands of evacuees lining up for buses. Many of them said they had no idea where they would go.

Columbus Lawrence, 43, a landscaper, shambled down St. Joseph Avenue searching for the end of the line. He pushed a cart piled with packets of dry, chicken-flavored noodles. "It's like a chip," he said hopefully, putting another handful into his mouth.

Others have been here since the day of the storm, the early part of the week made increasingly awful because there were no toilets, no water, no food.

Herbert J. Freeman arrived in a neighbor's boat with his mother, Ethel M. Freeman, 91, frail and sick, but with an active mind. She kept asking him for a doctor, for a nurse, for anyone who could help her. Police told Freeman there was nothing they could do. She died in her wheelchair, next to her son, on Thursday morning.

It was half a day before he could find someone to take away her body, he said. "She wasn't senile or nothing," he said. "She knew what was going on. . . . I kept saying, 'Mom, I can't help you.' "

Next to Freeman, Kenny Lason, 45, a dishwasher at Pat O'Brien's, a French Quarter restaurant famous for its signature "Hurricane" cocktail, took a long slurp out of a bottle of Korbel extra-dry champagne. He broke a store window to get it, and he is not ashamed. "They wasn't giving us nothing," he said. "You got to live off the land."

Outside New Orleans, frustration boiled over among the boatmen who spontaneously left their homes in central Louisiana to rescue stranded residents in the first hours after reports of flooding hit the airwaves. For the past two days, many have been turned away because of security concerns in a city that had turned violent and chaotic.

"It's a tragedy that's unfolding now," said Moose Billeaud, a former New Orleans prosecutor who is now in private practice in Lafayette, La. "It is not organized at all."

The boatmen who made it in came back with harrowing memories. Kenny, who did not want to disclose his last name, said friends were shot at by stranded people who wanted to steal their boats. "It's total chaos," he said.

Isaac Kelly, the last to depart from the Superdome, said "it feels good" as he boarded the bus. A young guardsman put an arm around the stooped Kelly and said, "Good luck and God bless."

The dome, which once housed more than 20,000 evacuees, became a symbol of the chaos that gripped New Orleans, with television network cameras capturing scenes of filth and misery.

Just before Kelly stepped aboard, Isaiah Bennett, leaning heavily on a wooden cane, was helped onto the bus. "It was hell," said Bennett. "I don't like this kind of mess," he said. "I never thought it would be this bad.