New Orleans mayor sends out ‘desperate SOS’

NEW ORLEANS’ mayor issued an urgent plea for relief of his flooded city on Thursday as gunshots and looting hampered the evacuation of desperate crowds trying to escape Hurricane Katrina’s destruction.

“This is a desperate SOS,” Mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement read by CNN. Some of the thousands of hungry, thirsty storm survivors outside the city’s convention centre chanted similar pleas.

“Right now we are out of resources at the convention centre and don’t anticipate enough buses. Currently the convention centre is unsanitary and unsafe and we are running out of supplies for 15,000 to 25,000 people,” Nagin said.

Congress was expected to cut short its summer break to pass emergency financial aid for hurricane victims, according to congressional aides who said an initial package could be around $10 billion (e8bn).

Shell-shocked New Orleans officials tried to clamp down on looting in the historic jazz city reduced to a swampy ruin. Bodies floated in the streets, attackers armed with axes stripped hospitals of medicine and authorities said they could still only guess at how many people had died.

“We don’t have numbers. It could be in the hundreds, or the thousands,” US Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana said of the statewide death toll. “I think it’s going to be shocking.”

Federal disaster declarations covered 90,000 square miles along the US Gulf Coast, an area roughly the size of Britain. As many as 400,000 people had been forced to leave their homes.

Violence broke out in pockets of New Orleans among wandering crowds desperate to escape the flooded city and hellish 90-degree (32 C) temperatures. “We want help,” people chanted outside the convention centre.

Boat rescues were delayed because of the danger and police rescuers shifted their focus to fighting looting and other crime.

A National Guard official said up to 60,000 people had gathered at the increasingly squalid Superdome for evacuation.

But the operation was suspended after reports that someone fired at a military helicopter sent to ferry out survivors. A National Guard soldier was shot and wounded in the arena on Wednesday.

Nearly 5,000 National Guard troops were mobilised in Louisiana. The military said the number would rise to 21,000 by Friday and 30,000 in the next few days, mostly in Louisiana and Mississippi but also in stricken parts of Alabama and Florida.

Convoys of police and state trooper cars raced down Interstate 10 toward New Orleans with lights flashing.

“We will do what it takes to bring law and order to our area,” an angry Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco told reporters.