NEW ORLEANS, Sept 10: Emergency workers collected the dead of New Orleans on Saturday and the official death toll rose slowly, boosting hopes Hurricane Katrina would claim far fewer lives than the many thousands once feared.
As police and soldiers started to remove the bodies — many in homes marked with paint to identify their presence when floodwaters were high — President George W. Bush invoked the spirit that united the nation after the Sept 11 attacks.
“Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and loss of life. This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.
“America will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it,” he said on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the New York and Washington attacks that killed some 2,700 people.
The Louisiana Dept. of Health and Hospitals raised the official hurricane death toll for the state to 154.
In Mississippi, 211 people were confirmed dead. There was no updated official figure from Alabama, which also sustained considerable damage in the Aug 29 storm. The storm claimed seven lives in Florida.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had warned of a death toll as high as 10,000 in the first chaotic days after the hurricane, which displaced around a million people. Many other officials warned of thousands of deaths.
Police and rescue teams, seeing corpses floating in New Orleans’ flooded streets, feared many more would be discovered trapped in houses when the waters receded. As emergency workers began methodically searching abandoned houses on Friday, they found far fewer bodies than some had feared.
BUSH UNDER FIRE: Bush, who successfully rallied the nation after the Sept. 11 attacks, has faced criticism for the federal government’s performance — described as slow and inadequate — following the hurricane. The president was to travel to the region for a third time on Sunday, the anniversary of 9/11.
Bush’s job approval ratings have hit all-time lows. A Newsweek poll published on Saturday found 52 percent of Americans did not trust him to make the correct decisions during either a foreign or domestic crisis, against 45 percent who did. The president’s overall approval stood at 38 percent.
Mississippi Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson criticized the White House for failing to follow through on its promise after 2001 to ensure the country was prepared for a catastrophe.
“Like that day four Septembers ago, we once again find ourselves asking, ‘How could this have happened?’. The answer is painful, but it must be acknowledged: We simply were unprepared,” he said. “Mothers and grandmothers should not drown in nursing homes because help never arrived.”
Vice President Dick Cheney visited an emergency management centre in Austin, Texas, and said the government was finally gaining control of the situation.
“I think we are in fact on our way to getting on top of the whole Katrina exercise. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” he said.
The Bush administration on Friday recalled widely criticized Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown to Washington, handing his role in coordinating rescue and recovery to Vice Admiral Thad Allen, chief of staff of the US Coast Guard. Just a week ago, the president publicly told Brown he was doing a “heck of a job.”—Reuters
