![]() Already without air conditioning, and with overflowing toilets and leaks in the roof, the 65,000-capacity downtown stadium became a festering hellhole for 10,000 people who had taken refuge there before Katrina's arrival Monday.Įven as the floodwaters rose, looters roamed the city, sacking department stores and grocery stores and floating their spoils away in plastic garbage cans, watched unmolested in many cases by patrolling police and National Guardsmen. Several feet of water surrounded the relief center at the Louisiana Superdome, squelching emergency lighting. Tulane University Hospital officials told CNN that they had lost a generator around midday, and floodwaters were causing the hospital to evacuate patients in helicopters that landed on the hospital parking garage. "Within some sections of our city, the water is as deep as 20 feet."Īs floodwaters rose, emergency generators began to drown and fail throughout the city. "We probably have 80 percent of our city" submerged, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told television station WWL early Tuesday. In New Orleans, floodwaters breached the city's storied levees to flood entire districts in a swamp of dirty water. Seven offshore drilling platforms lost their moorings off the Louisiana coast, and oil companies were sending tugs to corral them before they smashed into production platforms, said Nelson Robinson, a weather consultant for the companies. Oil prices rose above $70 a barrel for the second day in a row in markets nervous about the future of the Gulf's refineries and oil rigs. Interstates across Lake Pontchartrain were battered, buckled and broken, and most other roads also were impassable more than a day after Katrina had passed by as a Category 4 hurricane - one of the strongest ever to hit the continental United States.Īlthough Katrina's winds had fallen to 35 mph Tuesday, downgrading the storm to a tropical depression, forecasters predicted it could drop as much as eight inches of rain in Tennessee and the Ohio Valley as it headed north. Nearly 3 million people were without electricity and drinking water. The devastation stretched across three states, with the hurricane shredding waterfront hotels, toppling concrete bridges and injuring countless people.Ĭommunication was sporadic or nonexistent. An oil platform, torn from its moorings in the Gulf, beached near Dauphin Island, Ala. While Katrina flooded the bowl that is New Orleans, its winds and 25-foot storm surge killed an estimated 110 people in Mississippi. Rescuers in boats pushed aside the dead floating in the brown, churning waves to reach survivors trapped on rooftops as authorities urged residents to flee. The flooding showed that the damage from the historic hurricane that hit early Monday with 145-mph winds was only just beginning. Two levees burst Tuesday, flooding the city of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which had already leveled much of the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Alabama in one of the nation's worst natural disasters.
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