Enlarge imageBy Paul Simao
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The dead of New Orleans, uncounted and uncollected while the ruined city fought to save Hurricane Katrina’s survivors, were the top concern on Saturday amid hope that their numbers may be fewer than once feared.
As police and soldiers prepared to resume removing the bodies -- many in homes marked with paint to identify their presence when floodwaters were high -- the political storm which followed Katrina swept from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Washington.
After unrelenting criticism that U.S. President George W. Bush and his team had failed to respond quickly and adequately to the disaster, Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown was recalled to Washington on Friday. His role overseeing Katrina recovery efforts was handed to Vice Admiral Thad Allen, chief of staff of the U.S. Coast Guard.
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The White House continued its string of up-close looks at the disaster area. Vice President Dick Cheney was scheduled to visit survivors in Texas on Saturday, and Bush was to travel to the region for a third time on Sunday.
New Orleans officials said rescuing the stranded and the helpless, an effort that began after the August 29 storm breached the city’s levees, had ended and efforts were now turned entirely to finding bodies. Until that is completed, they said, there was no hurry to oust those who have refused to quit the city despite an evacuation order.
More than 300 deaths have been confirmed in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, though much higher totals have been feared. About a million people were displaced by the destruction.
"There’s some encouragement in the initial sweeps ... The numbers (of dead) so far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," said Col. Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans.
"The search for living individuals across the city has been conducted," he said on Friday. "What we are starting today ... is a recovery operation, a recovery operation to search by street, by grid, for the remains of any individuals who have passed away."
HOLDOUTS
It appeared that some people who had refused to leave the city -- once thought to number in the thousands -- were now more willing to depart. Provisions to take pets along may have changed some minds. Rescue workers said they had retrieved hundreds of cats and dogs and reunited some with their owners.
But there were holdouts.
On Bourbon Street, the general manager of Big Daddy’s strip club was trying to reopen, as soon as water, electricity and dancers are available.
The last of those, manager Saint James said, "shouldn’t be too hard. Everyone’s going to come back in town and want to work."
Jean Brad Lacy left the city but came back. Sweeping leaves and dried sewage from the pavement outside of a $200-a-month (108 pounds), one-room home that had been knee-deep in water, he said he changed his mind when National Guard troops tried to put him on an aeroplane.
"I can’t stand no heights," he said. "I love this place, this is my home."
City business leaders were trying to organise a comeback, the New York Times reported in its Saturday edition. It said the executives were aiming to reopen the French Quarter tourist mecca within 90 days and hold a scaled-down Mardi Gras carnival in late February.
Most of the ghostly city, which once boasted 450,000 residents, is in tatters. However, military pilots flying over it said the water was visibly receding.
"Over in the western areas you don’t see the standing water, you see the mud. It’s every bit as nasty as the water, and it’s going to take a long time to clean up but at least the water is gone," said chief warrant officer Robert Osborn, a pilot with the U.S. 1st Cavalry.
"Today we’re seeing cars that are able to drive around. The causeway is open. Folks are out trying to put plastic on their roofs," he said.
In the nearby town of Slidell survivors were numbed by the devastation.
Robert Quick, 41, rode out the storm with his wife and two small children but wound up retreating to the attic of their home as a tree crashed into the roof and his children watched their toys float away. He had no flood insurance.
"I rolled the dice. Everybody goes to the casino, I decided to roll it on flood insurance, you know, 1,200 bucks a year, this neighbourhood never flooded," he said.
The U.S. Postal Service resumed limited mail service in the region but officials said it had lost contact with hundreds of its employees in the three states.
The political fall-out was likely to continue.
In the U.S. Senate, four top Democrats urged Bush to fire Brown, on a day new questions emerged over his job history and qualifications.
Whoever runs the agency, they said, "must inspire confidence and be able to coordinate hundreds of federal, state and local resources. Mr. Brown simply doesn’t have the ability or the experience to oversee a coordinated federal response of this magnitude."
Sen. Trent Lott, a Republican who lost his Mississippi home in the storm, said Brown "has been acting like a private, instead of a general."
Congressional investigations into the speed of the government’s storm response were also in the offing.
