Katrina Death Toll May Not Hit 10,000
By ERIN McCLAM, AP National Writer ***Sat Sep 10, 6:37 AM ET

NEW ORLEANS - Authorities said the first street-by-street sweep of this swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than originally feared, a glimmer of encouraging news amid the toxic floodwaters.

The mayor and others had predicted up to 10,000 deaths, but that number appeared less likely after Friday's count, said retired Marine Col. Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief.

"Some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," Ebbert said.

He declined to give a revised estimate, but said: "Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000."

.................

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050910/ap_on_re_us/hurricane_katrina

Reuters - Sat Sep 10, 9:26 AM ET
A dog hides under the seat of a military truck at a processing center after evacuees got off the vehicle in New Orleans September 9, 2005. Tens of thousands of pets have been left behind in the swamped city by their evacuated owners. Recovering the dead took priority over coaxing the living out of New Orleans on Friday as the Bush Administration replaced the head of its emergency management team in a political storm following Hurricane Katrina. Holdouts remain while rescue units search for those wishing to evacuate. REUTERS/Lee Celano

AFP/Getty Images - Sat Sep 10, 8:36 AM ET
The steeple is all that remains of a church destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi. Police in New Orleans continued the grisly search for those killed in Hurricane Katrina after a top federal official in charge of disaster relief fell casualty of mounting criticism of the operation.(AFP/Getty Images/Marianne Todd)

Katrina May Cost U.S. As Much As Two Wars

By DONNA CASSATA, Associated Press Writer ***Sat Sep 10, 9:27 PM ET

WASHINGTON - One storm could end up costing almost as much as two wars. Although estimates of Hurricane Katrina's staggering toll on the treasury are highly imprecise, costs are certain to climb to $200 billion in the coming weeks. The final accounting could approach the more than $300 billion spent in four years to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Analysts inside and outside government agree that the $62 billion that Washington has spent so far was merely the first installment of perhaps an unparalleled sum.

"I cannot put a cost figure on it," Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday in a visit to the hard-hit states.

The government never has dealt with a disaster of this scale: 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast affected, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and an entire metropolitan area under water.

In 1992, the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in Florida and Louisiana cost $35 billion. The price for the 6.7-magnitude temblor in the Northridge area of Los Angeles in 1994 was $15 billion to $20 billion.

Members of the Louisiana congressional delegation say it could cost $100 billion just in New Orleans.

As for the overall toll, G. William Hoagland, the top budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said: "We're obviously over $100 billion. I just don't know how much over."

As the House approved President Bush's second spending request Thursday, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee predicted that lawmakers would repeat the effort in a few weeks. "It will be the greatest appropriations outlay for a disaster in the history of doing this," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif.

The imprecision in calculating the costs reflects a Washington process of handling a crisis and the uncertainty of when the furious spending in the immediate aftermath will slow significantly.

Sounding like engineers, number crunchers talked of the "burn rate" — how much and how fast money was being spent.

The weekend after the hurricane hit Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the government still was writing checks for close to $2 billion per day on items such as the 17 million meals ready to eat, tens of thousands of trailers to house refugees, and contracts to rebuild highways and bridges.

That amount slowed to about $1 billion per day last week and was expected to drop off in the weeks ahead.

At first, Congress decided to give the Bush administration the money it requested, comparing the situation to that in days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Now, the Office of Management and Budget and the appropriations committees in the House and Senate are contacting government agencies to find out what they need for relief, recovery and rebuilding.

They may get mind-boggling answers because Katrina has shattered all the models on picking up the pieces.

Insurers and actuaries have dealt with the wind damage from hurricanes, but not the impact on buildings and roads of an entire city engulfed in bacteria-laced, sewage-tainted water, possibly for weeks.

"An entire metropolitan area flooded is something we don't have a lot of experience with," said Rade Musulin, an actuary with the Florida Farm Bureau.

Among the lingering questions are what will be rebuilt and who does the work; in writing the insurance checks, is it the government or private companies; how long do food stamps and other assistance last; and how much do federal officials provide.

Homes, levees and even the two new light-rail systems in New Orleans have to be repaired or razed.

"It depends on how this proceeds," said Dan Crippen, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "The compensation costs for refugees, you can't keep them in sports stadiums forever. It depends on how quickly they're employed, have homes, how much public assistance. There are so many unknowns here."

The various states and the District of Columbia that have provided a safe haven for evacuees will be sending their bills to Washington. Texas' two senators, in a letter to Bush, asked about reimbursement for enrolling refugees in Medicaid. The city of New Haven, Conn., has estimated that caring for 100 families that is has offered to house would cost $80,000 each, a bill of $8 million.

Mississippi signed a contract for $5.1 million to repair the Interstate Highway 10 bridge in Columbia. If the contractor can finish the work ahead of schedule, a $100,000-a-day bonus is promised.

The images from New Orleans underscore another question.

"Who would pay to replace the Superdome?" asked Scott Lilly, a former appropriations staffer, now a senior consultant with the Center for American Progress.

Robert Lichter, a statistician who studies the use and misuse of numbers in public policy, cautioned against reading too much into the early figures.

"Assume that all estimates are self-interested and all estimates are too low," Lichter said, especially those coming out of Washington. "The government is like a contractor — whatever it says, triple."

___

Associated Press writers Mary Dalrymple, Andrew Taylor and David Pace contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050911/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/katrina_calculating_costs

Reuters - Sat Sep 10,11:07 PM ET
Thad Allen, Vice Admiral of Coast Guard and head at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) operation in New Orleans, leaves a news conference next to the convention center of New Orleans September 10, 2005. Emergency workers collected the dead of New Orleans on Saturday, as hopes rose that the toll from Hurricane Katrina would fall short of the calamity once feared. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Searches, Cleanup Continue in New Orleans
AP - 9 minutes ago
NEW ORLEANS - Forensic workers and cadaver dogs searched the city in earnest for corpses as crews cleared away mounds of trash and debris left behind by residents fleeing Hurricane Katrina.
Officials working to identify remains processed bodies around the clock at a field morgue set up in St. Gabriel, a small community between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. A chain link fence covered in black plastic hid the operation from onlookers.

"The ability to capture useful information from that body diminishes from week to week, month to month," Terry Edwards, the morgue's director, said Saturday.

The confirmed death toll in Louisiana stood at 154 people, including some patients on life support who died when power went out, but the toll was expected to climb as crews collected bodies trapped in houses and floating in murky water.

Police and military officials have been marking the location of bodies with global positioning devices and paint on the outside of houses.

At the convention center, the chaotic site where thousands initially took refuge before being evacuated a week ago, bulldozers pushed heaps of chairs, sleeping bags and other discarded items into giant piles. Dump trucks were hauling the debris away.

Tow truck drivers started picking up scores of abandoned cars littering the streets while other workers unloaded food and supplies for employees working in Bell South's downtown office.

At the Parc St. Charles hotel, workers went floor to floor cleaning up: "There's a lot of spoiled meat, a lot of bacteria that needs to be cleaned up," said Bob Allen, who was supervising the job.

At the Superdome, where thousands first sought shelter only to be trapped inside by the floodwaters, water levels had dropped markedly. Water that once submerged cars parked around the dome had dropped to about a foot high.

A group of police, doctors and National Guardsmen inspected Charity Hospital, where doctors and patients had been stranded in rising flood waters.

Doctors hoped to be able to reopen it to help treat skin infections, dehydration and other illnesses, said Dr. Jeffrey Kochan, who is overseeing medical services in New Orleans. But they found the basement full of water, meaning electricity couldn't be restored. Kochan said they would inspect the city's other hospitals.

Thousands of residents continue to defy orders to leave the city, but security forces were not forcing anyone to go. Mayor Ray Nagin warned earlier that residents could be forcibly removed, but authorities have not taken that step.

Police Chief Eddie Compass said that 200 arrests had been made since the hurricane despite the 300 officers missing from his 1,750-strong force. "We've been almost crime-free for the last four days," he said.

Searchers were picking up bodies throughout the city.

A team in white protective suits pulled at least eight body bags from Bethany Home, a century-old center for senior citizens.

At the grand stone entrance of City Park, in the heart of New Orleans, workers took out two bodies: one partially submerged in water and another covered in a blanket and marked with orange paint indicating searchers had previously reported it. A walker, a bag of clothes and life jacket were nearby.

Crews from Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, a group of volunteer medical professionals called in by the federal government for disasters, processed the bodies and took them away in refrigerated trucks.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said most of the city could be drained within a month. Power and other utilities remain out in most of the affected region.

Associated Press writers Don Babwin, Erin McClam, Kevin McGill, Jessica Bujol and Mary Foster contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms

AFP/Pool - Sun Sep 11, 9:12 AM ET
A helicopter drops a sandbag as repair work on a levee in New Orleans. President George W. Bush was to tour parts of the southern United States still struggling in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as the nation marked four years since the September 11 attacks.(AFP/Pool/David J. Phillip)

Architects say Katrina can make for Better Easy
Web Posted: 09/17/2005 12:00 AM CDT

Mike Greenberg
Express-News

President Bush's pledge Thursday night to help the people ravaged by Hurricane Katrina to "rebuild their communities" raises some particularly sensitive design questions in the case of New Orleans. Special Section
Hurricane Katrina: News, video, multimedia, information for victims and volunteers


Although the French Quarter and other widely familiar historic areas survived the storm more or less intact, much of the more modest urban fabric that made New Orleans one of America's most distinctive large cities was washed away or rendered uninhabitable.

"If it's gone, it's gone. The last thing you want to do is replace really good 19th-century architecture with a bad 21st-century imitation," said Reed Kroloff, dean of New Orleans' vaunted Tulane School of Architecture.

With Tulane closed for the fall semester, Kroloff divides his time between New York, near the East Coast universities to which most of his students have dispersed, and Arizona State University in Tempe, where Tulane's fifth-year and graduate studios have been reassembled for the duration.

"A lot of what gives New Orleans its character is not only the beautiful Victorian architecture," Kroloff said by phone from New York.

"Underlying the architecture is an exceptional urban structure that doesn't exist in other cities.

"Most lots are 30 feet or under, and many are 15 feet wide or smaller. The house fills pretty much the whole thing.

"There's real diversity in that set of numbers, but in general it's a city full of long, skinny houses really close together."

Kroloff cites a recent residential enclave in New Orleans as an example of how not to rebuild.

"It's awful, a cheap reproduction of a New Orleans-style house bloated to 3,500 square feet. They look goofy."

Kroloff advocates "reimagining" the city's traditional long, narrow lots with contemporary architecture.

"This is an opportunity to merge the two, to syncopate the rhythms, to have a jazz architecture. The underlying tempo should remain — that fine-grained urban plan — but it can be cross-cut with the new.

"I get very excited when I think of a city that has these large historic neighborhoods, which are largely intact, punctuated with new areas and new architecture that are sensitive to the urban character of New Orleans."

Wellington Reiter, a Tulane graduate who is now Kroloff's host as dean of ASU's college of design, envisions a rebuilding program that "responds to New Orleans' climate with a new vernacular," just as Chicago developed a new vernacular style in its rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871.

Widely respected Austin architect Larry Speck, in San Antonio for this week's Texas Society of Architects convention, observed that New Orleans owes much of its distinctive character to "patina" and "a quality of decay that was absolutely beautiful."

"You can't rebuild patina," he lamented.

Speck also said that recent times have given New Orleans "a whole lot of buildings that nobody is going to be sorry are gone" — among them, vast housing projects.

"Now there's the opportunity to not make the mistakes of the past," he added.

John Selmer of Slack Alost & Associates, who is a Tulane graduate and an architect in Shreveport, La., looked beyond architecture to cite a characteristic of New Orleans urbanism.

"You can go a block and be in a very affluent neighborhood and go two blocks in the other direction and it's very different," Selmer said by phone from Shreveport, shortly before flying to San Antonio to attend the TSA convention.

Selmer was one of a handful of Louisiana architects who accepted the TSA's invitation to attend.

Whether the economic range of New Orleans' neighborhoods will be reproduced will depend in part on the outcome of insurance claims and on what happens with public housing, he said.

Selmer also notes that New Orleans' traditional shotgun houses, many of which have stood for 150 years, are typically elevated 3 to 6 feet above grade.

"Pre-manufactured houses could still get the same effect," Selmer said.

Some government officials and other observers, including Reiter, question how much of New Orleans, most of which lies below sea level, should be rebuilt.

Reiter and ASU business school dean Robert E. Mittelstaedt — a New Orleans native and Tulane graduate — proposed in a paper dated last Sunday that a large swath of the existing city be permanently flooded and the lost housing replaced in a new city on higher ground to the west or across Lake Pontchartrain to the north.

Selmer, however, said, "It's ridiculous not to rebuild," despite the city's problematic site.

"With strengthened levees, that would not be an issue," Selmer said.

Austin's Speck argued against the relocation idea.

In devastated neighborhoods such as the 9th Ward, Speck said, "There's an infrastructure of love and family and community relationships. That fabric is still there and unbroken.

"The physical fabric is so tied to the social fabric. You just don't replace something like that."

mgreenberg@express-news.net

Katrina Evacuees Return Home to La. Suburb

By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 47 minutes ago



METAIRIE, La. - Thousands of residents began returning to their homes in this New Orleans suburb on Sunday after local officials gave the all-clear, finding debris-strewn yards and homes without power or working sewers.

Gas stations were open, along with a handful of coffee shops and burger joints. One pharmacy was busy with residents stocking up on supplies before heading home for the first time since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29.

"We thought with the influx of people, it might be a lot more challenging to get food and water," said Joseph Dreher, 57, who stopped at the store for milk. "A few days ago, you didn't have a lot of competition."

Rolita Smith, 38, stayed home through the storm. She was at the Rite Aid buying her cousin a bottle of whiskey for his birthday.

"It feels good to come out again," she said.

A few miles away, crews were still searching flooded neighborhoods by boat and recovering the dead.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced plans to allow residents back into the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, starting Monday with Algiers, a residential area across the Mississippi River from downtown.

People would start coming back to sections of uptown New Orleans, including the Garden District, on Wednesday. But some areas remained uninhabitable and were likely to remain so for months, if not years.

Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen has expressed doubts about whether the city is ready for residents to return, citing concerns about tap water, most of which remains unfit for drinking and bathing. He plans to meet with Nagin on Monday and develop a plan to repopulate the city.

In Jefferson Parish, some 15,000 homes were still without power. Others still lacked sewer service as pumping stations continued to be brought online.

Several stores remained closed, plywood over their windows. Katrina's winds tore off roofs and scattered tree limbs, signs and rubbish. The stench of sewage and rotting trash still lingered. But a coffee shop down the road had a steady stream of contractors.

Gloria Jee, 79, stood outside her son's Metairie home, where she's been staying for several days.

Her own home in the Lakeview section of New Orleans was destroyed by the flood and she has no flood insurance. She evacuated and headed for Selma, Ala., where she has friends, but got stuck in the storm and wound up in a Hattiesburg, Miss., shelter for two weeks. She said she kept her .38-caliber pistol by her side the whole time.

"At least I've got this," she said, gesturing to her son's house. "I'm strong. And I trust in God. He will see me through."

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050919/ap_on_re_us/katrina_coming_home

AP - Tue Sep 20, 7:44 PM ET
A corpse lies draped over a fence in the Ninth Ward Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, in New Orleans. Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans bodies are still being retrieved. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

AP - Tue Sep 20, 8:08 PM ET
NOAA animal rescue expert, Blair Mase, wets down Gulfport Marine Oceanarium's dolphin, Eli, on the transport boat in Gulfport Miss., Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005 The dolphins were washed out of the Oceanarium's tank during hurricane Katrina. NOAA staff along with the Oceanarium's staff recovered all the remaining dolphins. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

The dolphins were washed out

New Orleans Facing More Flooding by Rita
AP - 2 hours, 54 minutes ago
NEW ORLEANS - As rain from Hurricane Rita threatened to once again flood the city, the Army Corps of Engineers was racing to patch New Orleans' fractured levee system while residents were forced to decide yet again whether to stay or go. Forecasters said the storm that swiped Florida on Tuesday could strengthen to a Category 4 and hit Texas by the end of the week. But a slight turn to the right was possible and engineers feared additional rain could swamp the city's levees.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms

Heavy Rains Threaten to Flood New Orleans

By ALLEN G. BREED, Associated Press Writer
9 minutes ago



NEW ORLEANS - Sheets of rain from Hurricane Rita drenched parts of New Orleans on Saturday, straining an already damaged levee system and threatening to spread flooding throughout the devastated but largely abandoned city.

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The rain was periodic but heavy, coming down in waves that lasted a few minutes before letting up. The National Weather Service said New Orleans was expected to get bands of rain dropping 3 to 4 inches per hour.

The rain threatened to increase flooding after parts of the city were submerged again Friday as hurricane-driven storm surges topped one levee, and another levee began to leak.

Floodwaters submerged the city's Ninth Ward, which was slammed by Hurricane Katrina last month and has been all but abandoned ever since. The water covered piles of rubble and mud-caked cars, rising swiftly to the top of first-floor windows.

"It's like looking at a murder," Quentrell Jefferson of the Ninth Ward said Friday as he watched news of the flooding at a church in Lafayette, 125 miles west of New Orleans. "The first time is bad. After that, you numb up."

It was unclear Saturday whether additional areas of the city were under water. A phone call to the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing repairs to New Orleans' levee system, was not immediately returned.

Rita made landfall early Saturday as a Category 3 storm just east of Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana line, more than 275 miles from New Orleans. Despite the flooding in New Orleans, meteorologists said the gravest concern was in southwestern Louisiana communities, particularly the port city of Lake Charles.

"I know we're all concerned about New Orleans, but I'm more focused on these other communities right now," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "That's where people are going to die."

Lake Charles was a virtual ghost town, its residents among up to 500,000 people in southwestern Louisiana who headed north. The hurricane center had no information about conditions in Lake Charles at landfall.

"Those sensors went down" hours earlier, meteorologist Dave Roberts said.

In New Orleans, water poured through gaps in the Industrial Canal levee, which engineers had tried to repair after Katrina's floodwaters left 80 percent of the city under water. The rushing water spilled east into St. Bernard Parish, where ducks swam down Judge Perez Drive.

The storm surge was both stronger and earlier than expected, apparently coming through waterways southeast of the city, said Col. Richard Wagenaar, the Army Corps of Engineers' district chief in New Orleans. Water poured over piles of gravel and sandbags in the damaged Industrial Canal levee despite efforts to build it up.

"We believed the 8-foot elevation was sufficient" to protect the Ninth Ward, Wagenaar said.

Farther north, water 6 to 8 inches deep was streaming into homes south of Lake Pontchartrain, spouting from beneath two gravel-and-rock patches on the London Avenue Canal levee. Corps engineers said they expected the leaks.

The problems would set back levee repairs at least three weeks, Wagenaar said, but June is still the target for getting them back to pre-Katrina strength.

The additional flooding brought by Hurricane Rita also would complicate the search for the dead left by Hurricane Katrina.

"It's going to make it a lot tougher," said Richard Dier, a FEMA group supervisor who oversees hundreds of people searching for bodies. "We'd like to start where we left off, but my men don't submerge or go into houses with deep water."

On Friday, Katrina's death toll stood at 841 in Louisiana and 1,078 across the Gulf Coast.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050924/ap_on_re_us/rita_new_orleans_hk2

AFP/File - Sat Sep 24, 7:09 AM ET
Vehicles are partly covered by flood waters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Floodwaters powered by Hurricane Rita have overwhelmed New Orleans' fragile defenses, inflicting new damage on the devastated city still counting its dead.(AFP/File/Robert Galbraith)

New Areas of New Orleans Re-Opening

By ADAM NOSSITER, Associated Press Writer
31 minutes ago

BATON ROUGE, La. - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, eager to welcome back his city's residents, says he's fighting a national impression "that we're tainted, we're not ready."

His re-entry plan was to continue Thursday, with business owners returning to some of the historic New Orleans neighborhoods best known to tourists.

The French Quarter, the Central Business district and Uptown, which includes the historic Garden District, were to be formally reopened to residents a day later.

"People are saying it's too early to bring back jazz, the gumbo and the red beans," Nagin said Wednesday in Baton Rouge. "If it's too early, when is the right time?"

Nagin complained that state opposition to reopening the city was feeding a misperception about New Orleans, saying: "We're fighting this national impression that we're tainted, we're not ready."

The areas being repopulated largely escaped flooding after Hurricane Katrina struck one month ago and many people have returned ahead of the mayor's timeline.

Still, a handout from Nagin's office struck a cautious note.

"You are entering the city of New Orleans at your own risk," it reads, before going on to detail potential health hazards from water, soil and air, and advising residents to bring in food.

Electricity has been restored to some dry parts of the city, although Entergy Corp. said only about 17 percent of the city has power.

The mayor has disagreed with the head of the state's health department about the condition of the city's water, insisting residents could now wash in it, though they cannot drink it.

"The two things that are absolutely necessary to ensure public health — clean drinking water and proper sewage systems — simply are not available in the East Bank area of New Orleans at this time," said Dr. Fred Cerise, secretary for the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

"People who re-enter the city may be exposed to diseases such as E. coli, salmonella or diarrhea illness if they do not allow time for the necessary inspections to ensure public health and safety."

Earlier this week, Nagin formally opened the Algiers neighborhood, which has electricity and clean water. Nagin told legislators Wednesday that "everything you hoped to happen is happening. Algiers is alive and well and breathing."

If all goes well, as of Oct. 5 only the Lower Ninth Ward, which was hit especially hard by the flooding, will remain cordoned off, Nagin said.

Louisiana's official death toll from Katrina rose to 896 on Wednesday. Only 32 bodies have been positively identified and released to funeral homes chosen by their families, said Dr. Louis Cataldie, who heads the body recovery process in Louisiana.

Mayor of New Orleans Announces Layoffs

AP - 29 minutes ago
NEW ORLEANS - Mayor Ray Nagin said Tuesday the city is laying off as many as 3,000 employees - or about half the city's workforce - because of the damage done to New Orleans' finances by Hurricane Katrina. Nagin announced with "great sadness" that he had been unable to find the money to keep the workers on the payroll. He said only non-essential workers would be laid off and that no firefighters or police would be among those let go.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/us/hurricane_katrina

Thursday, 29 December 2005, 18:51 GMT

Bosnia lab to test Katrina bodies




A Bosnian laboratory which pioneered new techniques to identify victims of the Balkan wars is to help identify the unknown dead of Hurricane Katrina.
The Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) will seek to extract DNA profiles from 350 samples provided by US authorities.

Katrina killed more than 1,200 people when it hit in August, and four months on, many bodies remain unidentified.

The southern state of Louisiana, which requested the help, was hardest hit.

Asian tsunami

The ICMP was set up by the international community in 1996, in the aftermath of the Bosnian conflict, to identify about 30,000 people missing from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.




It developed specialist large-scale DNA extraction techniques and has helped name 6,000 of the 12,500 Bosnian war dead who have been identified.

It has also worked with the Thai authorities to help identify people killed in the Asian tsunami, as well as those investigating the attacks on the World Trade Center and people missing in Iraq.

ICMP chair, James Kimsey, said the organisation was hopeful of a high success rate in naming unidentified Hurricane Katrina victims.

"Hurricane Katrina is a relatively recent disaster and in this case the quantity of DNA is much higher than in older bones," he said.

Many of the bodies retrieved from the aftermath of Katrina were so decomposed that standard identification was impossible.

Dental records, often used in such cases, had been washed away in the storm, making DNA analysis the only viable option.

After a DNA profile is extracted from the bone samples provided, the ICMP will return the information to the US where it will be matched with the DNA profiles of family members.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4567442.stm

Talk radio gives powerful voice to Katrina anger

By Stuart Grudgings
Thu Feb 16, 1:14 PM ET


BATON ROUGE (Reuters) - Something is rotten in the state of Louisiana and John from New Orleans' Metairie suburb thinks he knows what it is.

"The same people are protecting the same power and money," he raged. "We have no statesmen in this state -- none!"

Charlie, another morning caller to WWL-AM talk radio, agreed: "I encourage everybody to just vote everyone out."

When Hurricane Katrina struck in August, knocking out television, phones, and computers, it was old-fashioned AM radio that kept thousands of flood-stranded people in New Orleans connected and even saved lives.

Nearly six months on, it has turned from emergency rescue service into a powerful voice of frustration at the slow pace of recovery from the disaster and the perception that federal and state politicians have let residents down.

Callers flood the line every day with complaints and questions that reflect the daily grind of life after Katrina, from mold on the walls to delays in getting promised federal trailers.

At the state capital in Baton Rouge, WWL has effectively become part of the lawmaking process, broadcasting just down a flight of stairs from where legislators are struggling to agree on reforms to clean up Louisiana's tainted political image.

A steady flow of lawmakers passed through host Garland Robinette's makeshift studio on Wednesday afternoon to pitch for a spot on his show or swap political gossip with the booming-voiced Vietnam War veteran.

"SURREAL"

A self-confessed "old retired fart" until shortly before Katrina, Robinette and other WWL hosts have become the exasperated voice of southern Louisiana residents still waiting for a clear plan of recovery from America's worst natural disaster.

"This whole thing seems surreal, incredibly bizarre," the 63-year-old former TV news reporter said after his three-hour long show. "More so than at any time in this country's history, right on the surface is extreme anger."

Robinette, a Cajun and an accomplished portrait artist, is painfully aware that some people trapped by floodwaters died after calling him on air to beg for help after the city's levees burst. After Katrina's winds smashed the windows in WWL's New Orleans studio, he continued broadcasting from a closet with the city in ruins around him.

"That was Vietnam all over again."

WWL's parent company, Entercom Communications Corp., kept going by joining forces with rival ClearChannel Communications Corp. shortly after the disaster, merging 18 local stations into one in an arrangement that continues today.

As a gadfly at the state capital, Robinette has accused lawmakers of failing to appreciate the gravity of the crisis. Reforms such as the creation of a single levee board in New Orleans to replace the multiple boards that failed to protect the city have become bogged down in local turf battles.

"It would be helpful if there were some sort of moderator who knew the facts," said Julie Quinn, a New Orleans area state senator, adding that the issues were often more complex than callers realized.

Hours later, she was on the show urging listeners to e-mail their representatives in support of a bill she is pushing on flood insurance.

Robinette acknowledged the message from his show could be simplistic, but said the result could turn out to be equally simple for the politicians.

"This legislature doesn't know it's the dodo and my guess is that most of them will be voted out of office," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060216/us_nm/hurricanes_talkradio_dc

White House Issues Its Own Katrina Report

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer
2 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A White House report concluded Thursday that inexperienced disaster response managers and a lack of planning, discipline and leadership contributed to vast federal failures during Hurricane Katrina.

The 228-page report by White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend urges changes in 11 key areas — mainly in better disaster relief coordination among federal agencies — before the next hurricane season begins June 1. It also found "significant flaws" in the national response plan issued last year by the Homeland Security Department.

"Though there will be tragedies we cannot prevent, we can improve our preparedness and response to reduce future loss and preserve life," Townsend wrote in a letter to President Bush included in the report.

She said the transformation envisioned by the report "will require a sustained commitment over time by the federal government as well as by state and local governments that have essential duties in responding to disasters."

Bush ordered the "lessons learned" review days after the Aug. 29 storm revealed federal disaster response gaps that kept the government from quickly sending relief to the devastated Gulf Coast. More than 1,300 Gulf Coast residents died after Katrina hit, and hundreds of thousands more were forced from their destroyed homes.

Currently, the Homeland Security Department coordinates federal disaster relief missions under a national response plan it issued last year.

Though some agencies, like the Coast Guard, successfully rescued tens of thousands of storm victims, "there are other areas where all levels of government fell short — the federal, the state and the local," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters on Wednesday.

"What we want to do is take a close look at what worked and what didn't work and apply those lessons to the future," he said.

The report was expected to be less scathing than a House report issued last week.

The House review blamed all levels of government for indifference toward disaster preparations that contributed to deaths and suffering in Katrina's aftermath. That study, by a Republican-led House committee, also found that earlier involvement by President Bush could have spurred a faster response.

Bush has accepted responsibility for the government's halting response to the Aug. 29 storm. The hurricane killed 1,300 people and forced hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents to abandon their damaged or destroyed homes.

The review offers solutions to only some of the government's shortfalls, according to a senior administration official familiar with a draft of the 125 recommendations. It does not call for any resignations, despite recent demands — mostly by Democrats — for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to step down. It also recommends keeping the beleaguered Federal Emergency Management Agency under Chertoff's control, according to a Bush administration official. Critics have called for the agency to be removed from Homeland Security and answer directly to the president.

Bush will host a Cabinet meeting Thursday morning to discuss the review, which will be released shortly afterward.

The Senate is finishing its own investigation of the failed response, due next month.

__

On the Net:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060223/ap_on_go_pr_wh/katrina_washington

AFP/Getty Images/File - Thu Feb 16, 8:11 PM ET US Congressional aids listen as the House Select Hurricane Katrina Committee presents its report on Capitol Hill 15 February, in Washington, DC. President George W. Bush sought almost 20 billion dollars in extra funding to pay for Hurricane Katrina rebuilding around New Orleans.(AFP/Getty Images/File/Joshua Roberts)

Video Shows Bush Warned Before Katrina Hit


By MARGARET EBRAHIM and JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writers
1 hour, 18 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - On the eve of Hurricane Katrina's fateful landfall, President Bush was confident. His homeland security chief appeared relaxed. And warnings of the coming destruction — breached or overrun levees, deaths at the New Orleans Superdome and overwhelming needs for post-storm rescues — were delivered in dramatic terms to all involved. All of it was captured on videotape.

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The Associated Press obtained the confidential government video and made it public Wednesday, offering Americans their own inside glimpse into the government's fateful final Katrina preparations after months of fingerpointing and political recriminations.

"My gut tells me ... this is a bad one and a big one," then-federal disaster chief Michael Brown told the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29.

The president didn't ask a single question during the briefing but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."

The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by AP — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and Brown, then the Federal Emergency Management Agency chief, told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

"I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

The White House and Homeland Security Department urged the public Wednesday not to read too much into the footage.

"I hope people don't draw conclusions from the president getting a single briefing," Bush spokesman Trent Duffy said, citing a variety of orders and disaster declarations Bush signed before the storm made landfall. "He received multiple briefings from multiple officials, and he was completely engaged at all times."

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said his department would not release the full set of videotaped briefings, saying most transcripts — though not the videotapes — from the sessions were provided to congressional investigators months ago.

"There's nothing new or insightful on these tapes," Knocke said. "We actively participated in the lessons-learned review and we continue to participate in the Senate's review and are working with them on their recommendation."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, a critic of the administration's Katrina response, had a different take after watching the footage from an AP reporter's camera.

"I have kind a sinking feeling in my gut right now," Nagin said. "I was listening to what people were saying — they didn't know, so therefore it was an issue of a learning curve. You know, from this tape it looks like everybody was fully aware."

Some of the footage and transcripts from briefings Aug. 25-31 conflicts with the defenses that federal, state and local officials have made in trying to deflect blame and minimize the political fallout from the failed Katrina response:

• Homeland Security officials have said the "fog of war" blinded them early on to the magnitude of the disaster. But the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. "I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done," National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.

"I don't buy the `fog of war' defense," Brown told the AP in an interview Wednesday. "It was a fog of bureaucracy."

• Bush declared four days after the storm, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" that gushed deadly flood waters into New Orleans. He later clarified, saying officials believed, wrongly, after the storm passed that the levees had survived. But the transcripts and video show there was plenty of talk about that possibility even before the storm — and Bush was worried too.

White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Brown discussed fears of a levee breach the day the storm hit.

"I talked to the president twice today, once in Crawford and then again on Air Force One," Brown said. "He's obviously watching the television a lot, and he had some questions about the Dome, he's asking questions about reports of breaches."

• Louisiana officials angrily blamed the federal government for not being prepared but the transcripts shows they were still praising FEMA as the storm roared toward the Gulf Coast and even two days afterward. "I think a lot of the planning FEMA has done with us the past year has really paid off," Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director, said during the Aug. 28 briefing.

It wasn't long before Smith and other state officials sounded overwhelmed.

"We appreciate everything that you all are doing for us, and all I would ask is that you realize that what's going on and the sense of urgency needs to be ratcheted up," Smith said Aug. 30.

Mississippi begged for more attention in that same briefing.

"We know that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that need to be rescued, but we would just ask you, we desperately need to get our share of assets because we'll have people dying — not because of water coming up, but because we can't get them medical treatment in our affected counties," said a Mississippi state official whose name was not mentioned on the tape.

Video footage of the Aug. 28 briefing, the final one before Katrina struck, showed an intense Brown voicing concerns from the government's disaster operation center and imploring colleagues to do whatever was necessary to help victims.

"Go ahead and do it," Brown said. "I'll figure out some way to justify it. ... Just let them yell at me."

Bush appeared from a narrow, windowless room at his vacation ranch in Texas, with his elbows on a table. Hagin was sitting alongside him.

"I want to assure the folks at the state level that we are fully prepared to not only help you during the storm, but we will move in whatever resources and assets we have at our disposal after the storm," the president said.

A relaxed Chertoff, sporting a polo shirt, weighed in from Washington at Homeland Security's operations center. He would later fly to Atlanta, outside of Katrina's reach, for a bird flu event. Officials say he was frequently updated on the road about Katrina.

One snippet captures a missed opportunity on Aug. 28 for the government to have dispatched active-duty military troops to the region to augment the National Guard.

Chertoff: "Are there any DOD assets that might be available? Have we reached out to them?"

Brown: "We have DOD assets over here at EOC (emergency operations center). They are fully engaged. And we are having those discussions with them now."

Chertoff: "Good job."

In fact, active duty troops weren't dispatched until days after the storm. And many states' National Guards had yet to be deployed to the region despite offers of assistance, and it took days before the Pentagon deployed active-duty personnel to help overwhelmed Guardsmen.

The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun.

"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern," Mayfield told the briefing.

Other officials expressed concerns about the large number of New Orleans residents who had not evacuated.

"They're not taking patients out of hospitals, taking prisoners out of prisons and they're leaving hotels open in downtown New Orleans. So I'm very concerned about that," Brown said.

Despite the concerns, it ultimately took days for search and rescue teams to reach some hospitals and nursing homes.

Brown also told colleagues one of his top concerns was whether evacuees who went to the New Orleans Superdome — which became a symbol of the failed Katrina response — would be safe and have adequate medical care.

"The Superdome is about 12 feet below sea level.... I don't know whether the roof is designed to stand, withstand a Category Five hurricane," he said.

Brown also wanted to know whether there were enough federal medical teams in place to treat evacuees and the dead in the Superdome.

"Not to be (missing) kind of gross here," Brown interjected, "but I'm concerned" about the medical and mortuary resources "and their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe."

___

Associated Press writers Ron Fournier and Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report.

On the Net:

Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov

Federal Emergency Management Agency: http://www.fema.gov

Video Shows Blanco Saying Levees Intact

BY LARA JAKES JORDAN and MARGARET EBRAHIM, Associated Press Writers
2 hours, 13 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - As Hurricane Katrina loomed over the Gulf Coast, federal and state officials agonized over the threat to levees and lives. Hours after the catastrophic storm hit, Louisiana's governor believed New Orleans' crucial floodwalls were still intact.

"We keep getting reports in some places that maybe water is coming over the levees," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said shortly after noon on Aug. 29 — the day the storm hit the Gulf coast.

"We heard a report unconfirmed, I think, we have not breached the levee," she said on a video of the day's disaster briefing that was obtained Thursday night by The Associated Press. "I think we have not breached the levee at this time."

In fact, the National Weather Service received a report of a levee breach and issued a flash-flood warning as early as 9:12 a.m. that day, according to the White House's formal recounting of events the day Katrina struck.

Not until the day after Katrina roared ashore did the White House confirm that its surge had, in fact, breached the levees — a delay that critics charge held up repair efforts and allowed the deadly flooding to worsen.

The rampant confusion is highlighted in the two Federal Emergency Management Agency video briefings, obtained this week by the AP, revealing disaster plans and damage reports detailed by officials as the storm smashed into the coast.

The tapes — and particularly the pre-storm Aug. 28 video that includes an appearance by President Bush — prompted widespread criticism by Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike who said the government should have been better prepared for the storm that flooded New Orleans and killed more than 1,300 people.

That video "makes it perfectly clear once again that this disaster was not out of the blue or unforeseeable," Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said Thursday. "It was not only predictable, it was actually predicted. That's what made the failures in response — at the local, state and federal level — all the more outrageous."

After AP's broadcast this week showing some of the Katrina briefings, the Homeland Security Department refused Thursday to release videos from five other days immediately before and after Katrina hit. The agency insisted last year — in response to AP's requests under the Freedom of Information Act — there were no such tapes. Now it acknowledges more tapes exist.

"We do have tapes," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "We have the tapes from the v-tels (video teleconferences), and we've provided the transcripts — they've been in the public domain for months."

In the Aug. 29 video, Blanco is not shown in the video but is heard as a disembodied voice speaking from an emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La., to 11 people sitting around a table at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington. She sounds uncertain about the reliability of her information and cautioned that the situation "could change."

Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said Thursday that "our people on the ground were telling us that there could be overtopping and breaching, but it was hard to tell" by the noon briefing.

Another official who was heard but not seen on the video was then-Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, who was at the federal emergency operations center in Baton Rouge, La. He implored officials to "push the envelope as far as you can," noting that he had already spoken to Bush twice that day and described the president as "very, very interested in this situation."

Brown has criticized the White House for miscommunications that led to some delays. But he said in an interview Thursday he never blamed Bush. He also said there was confusion among officials over whether levees were breached at the time of the noon video conference call. But he said he was convinced of the breach by 1 p.m.

The video shows weather forecasters predicting the storm's path and also briefly cuts to White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin asking Blanco about the status of the levees and the situation at the Superdome in New Orleans.

By that time, an estimated 15,000 evacuees had gathered at the stadium, where food and water was beginning to run out, said Col. Jeff Smith, Louisiana's emergency preparedness deputy director. Smith also reported up to 10 feet of flooding in neighboring St. Bernard Parish and that there were 45 patients on life-support at one area hospital that lost its power.

Still, "the coordination and support we are getting from FEMA has just been outstanding," Smith said.

Mississippi officials were less complimentary, reporting significant damage to hospitals, flooded and collapsed emergency operations centers and people trapped on the roofs or in the attacks who were begging for help.

The Homeland Security Department played down the new video. Knocke said it "reveals nothing new because the transcript had previously been released."

The new video came to light a day after the AP obtained footage of an Aug. 28 briefing — the day before Katrina hit — that showed officials warning the storm might breach levees, put lives at risk in the Superdome and overwhelm rescuers. Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff were among those on the videotaped call.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said it "confirms what we have suspected all along," charging that Bush administration officials have "systematically misled the American people."

Reid and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California renewed their calls for an independent commission to investigate the federal response to the hurricane. The House and Senate have conducted separate investigations of the federal response, and the White House did its own investigation.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060303/ap_on_go_pr_wh/katrina_video

Katrina victim found in New Orleans house

Sun May 28, 6:47 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS - Less than a week before the next hurricane season starts, firefighters still searching for those missing after Hurricane Katrina have found another body.

A DNA test will be needed to identify the body; the only certainty is that it was an adult male, said John Gagliano, chief coroner's investigator in New Orleans.

It was found Saturday in the rear laundry room of a house in Mid-City, where most houses are raised several feet but floods still reached the attached mailboxes, nearly chest-high.

The house was fifth to be checked of 47 addresses given to the search team Friday, said Capt. Kenneth Kirsch of the New Orleans Fire Department.

The addresses came from the Louisiana Family Assistance Center, a state agency that has a list of 226 people missing since the 2005 hurricanes.

A state Health and Hospitals Department list of missing people shows Huey Hughes, 76, at the address where the body was found, but authorities could not confirm that Saturday. The mailbox shows a different name.

The agency this month raised the number of Louisiana residents killed by Katrina by 281, to 1,577, after more reports of out-of-state deaths came in. Several states have yet to file reports of possible Katrina deaths. More than 80 percent of the missing are from Orleans Parish, and 66 percent are African-American.

FEMA this month announced that its list of people missing from the 2005 hurricane season had fallen from 12,000 shortly after Katrina to fewer than 300.

"Now, eight months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it's likely that many of the lost will not be found," FEMA said May 18 in a statement. "Some may have been swept away forever in the floodwaters, and some may not want to be found."

The Louisiana Family Assistance Center handles an ever-changing list of addresses of people missing since Katrina hit Aug. 29. The list, last updated May 2, has 481 names.

The New Orleans firefighters are working as part of Southeast Louisiana Task Force One — 16 firefighters, most working on a day off and paid by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Since FEMA began the 90-day contract on March 2, the team has found at least a dozen bodies, mostly in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Cadaver dogs, canines trained to locate the scent of dead bodies, are still part of the search effort, said Kirsch, particularly when teams search the Lower Ninth, where instead of homes they often must sift through huge debris piles.

"In debris, it's the dogs that lead us," Kirsch said. "We can't find anything in a pile of debris without a dog hitting on something to lead us in that direction."

Financial and logistical obstacles have often stopped or slowed the search crews since Katrina, Kirsch said. The recovery mission started shortly after the storm but temporarily shut down Dec. 10 because of lack of money, he said.

Search crews directed by the Army Corps of Engineers also checked the 2,100 flood-battered houses on the city's list for demolition. "We completed that two to three weeks ago," Kirsch said of the list, which includes about 1,600 homes in the Lower Ninth alone.

In the future, more money will be needed to send out search teams if houses are added to the demolition list, he said. "I know the fire department can't afford to fund it right now," he said.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially starts June 1 and ends Nov. 30.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060528/ap_on_re_us/katrina_body

Andrew Charles



Andrew is a Louisiana National Guardsman who is called up to be part of the Special Reaction Team for hurricane duty in the Superdome, after three weeks of training abroad. He joined the National Guard so his mother would not have to work two jobs to pay for his college tuition. He loves the National Guard and feels good about serving his state.

His is a near-impossible job as the situation in the Superdome spirals out of control. As people become desperate, they vent their anger on him. He is so personally affected by what he sees that he tells his commander he needs to do something and takes matters into his own hands. He commandeers two trucks, loads them up with water and military rations and drives them through the crowd. Appalled that this can happen in the U.S. to his people, he continues to help in any way he can. At one point he has to carry a lost little girl around the Superdome, looking for her family.

Since the Hurricane: Now back at Southern University, Andrew continues life with a positive outlook, despite the memories of what he experienced at the Louisiana Superdome. Andrew is still in the National Guard, which is allowing him to fund his studies.

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/katrina/meet/charles.html

Surviving Katrina uncovers the personal stories of ordinary people who became heroes during one of the worst natural catastrophes in U.S. history. Learn more about a few of the people who took destiny into their own hands amidst tragedy and chaos.


Andrew Charles
The National Guardsman called up after three weeks of training.


Dr. Ben de Boisblanc
The doctor faced with keeping 11 critically ill patients alive.


Dr. Greg Henderson
The doctor who has returned home to New Orleans to start a new job.


Roxie McCovin
The sister who embarks on a rescue mission from New York to New Orleans to save her family.


Tina McCovin
The granddaughter who stays to care for her disabled grandmother.


Dimetrius and Regina Prout
The wife who stays despite misgivings. Her husband had never evacuated for a storm before.


Dorothy Stukes
As a child she remembers her family throwing a hurricane party during Hurricane Betsey.


Celeste Waddell
The hospital caregiver who forms an unbreakable bond with a patient.

http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/katrina/meet/meet.html?clik=fanmain_leftnav

Alexandria crime slightly increases after Hurricane Katrina


By Mandy M. Goodnight
mgoodnight@thetowntalk.com
(318) 487-6465

Like many cities that took in Hurricane Katrina and Rita evacuees, Alexandria saw an increase in crime.

The greater the population the greater the opportunities for crime, especially assaults and burglaries, said Police Chief Daren Coutee.


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Rapides Parish's population has grown by about 5,000 people since Katrina hit, according to the Department of Health and Hospitals and Louisiana Tech University's business department.

The Police Department investigated more homicides, assaults and burglaries between the months of September and December in 2005 than during the same months in 2004.
Homicides, in general, went up throughout 2005 in comparison with 2004. There were 11 homicides in 2005 and three in 2004, police records show.

The rise in crime in 2005 seems to be carrying over into this year, Coutee said.

Calls for service to the department have gone from 26,996 through Aug. 24 of 2005 to 28,605 through the same period this year, Coutee said.

Adding to the problem, the Police Department has three officers on duty in New Orleans as National Guardsmen, called up to security duty in the city.

"Three officers doesn't sound like a lot, but it is for this department," the chief said.

Coutee said he doesn't know when they might return to work for the city.

"I know New Orleans is hurting, but we need our guys here on the streets," Coutee said.

Coutee said he knows that at any time, he could have as many as 12 officers called up to National Guard duty.

Throughout Central Louisiana, law enforcement agencies said they saw a slight increase, if any, in crime following the hurricanes.

"You couldn't tell there was any difference," Rapides Parish Sheriff William Earl Hilton said.

Grant Parish also reported not having any increases, and in Vernon Parish crime increased in spurts after evacuees flooded into the parish, officials said.

Grant Parish Sheriff's Chief Deputy Preston Mosley said the parish didn't have the influx of evacuees other parishes faced.

While the agencies did not see a an increase in crime, they did have to handle security details at shelters, and Rapides Parish sent officers to help in New Orleans in the days following Katrina's landfall on Aug. 29, 2005.

Like many agencies and individuals, Hilton continues to wait for repayment for those services. He said the department is owed an estimated $1 million for its response following Hurricane Katrina.

The figure includes manpower and equipment.

As to preparing for the next storm, Hilton said his officers know to have their equipment ready and to be on alert if another storm "even looks like it might head this way."

For the Alexandria Police Department, Coutee said officers are making sure they have a stockpile of Meals Ready to Eat and water. He said officers also know to get their medications and prepare to be away from home for 45 days if there is another storm.

"We learned a lot from the last ones," Coutee said.

Besides local response, Coutee said his department has joined a joint task force formed by state sheriffs and chiefs of police to respond to each other's communities if a disaster hits.

Originally published August 27, 2006

http://www.thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060827/NEWS01/608270336