More troops to New Orleans as refugees flee chaos

After days of broken promises, US troops started moving emergency supplies into New Orleans and were trying to halt widespread looting and horrific violence even as they fed evacuees and moved them to shelters in Texas.

Thousands of survivors were evacuated from the two major shelters in New Orleans—the Superdome arena and a convention center—where they endured brutal conditions.

Chinook helicopters holding upwards of 20 people took off and landed as fast as National Guard troops could load people at the convention center. And dozens of buses loaded up with 50 people at a time on streets nearby.

Tens of thousands of evacuees have already been taken to stadiums and other shelters in Texas and northern Louisiana. But military officials said up to 80,000 people were still stranded in New Orleans.

Many at the convention center described nights at the mercy of rapists and murderers. They complained security forces sent to guard them were trigger happy and killed innocent people.

‘‘They killed a man here last night,’’ Steve Banka (28), said. ‘‘A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and he jumped up on the truck’s windscreen and they shot him dead.’’

Those who fled the city and found shelter elsewhere described horrific scenes in New Orleans’ neighborhoods before they escaped.

‘‘There were bodies floating everywhere. Lots of them. Some had bullets in them,’’ said Michael Davis (18), as he described his escape from a neighborhood that was immersed in more than 10 feet of water earlier this week. He ultimately found refuge at a domed arena in Lafayette, Louisiana

There was blistering criticism at home and abroad of the slow, badly organised response to one of the worst natural catastrophes to hit the world’s richest and most powerful country. The administration was to send Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region on Sunday.

Some suggested Washington would have moved more quickly if rich Whites were in danger. ‘‘George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,’’ Black rapper Kanye West alleged during an NBC benefit concert on Friday night for Hurricane Katrina victims. The Bush administration has rejected accusations of racial bias in the response to the hurricane.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said rescue teams were collecting bodies and sending them to morgues, but declined to discuss a body count. ‘‘We are starting the collection of bodies, treating them with respect, getting them into morgues and tagging them,’’ he said.

The US Army Corps of Engineers said it would take between 36 and 80 days to remove floodwaters that swamped New Orleans. Work crews gained control over one of the breaches in the levee and expected to have another major gap closed on Sunday, said Brig. Gen. Robert Crear. —Reuters

‘Katrina claims at $40 bn’

LONDON: The Lloyd’s of London insurance market estimates hurricane Katrina will cost insurers $40 billion, Britain’s Observer newspaper reported on Sunday, citing sources within Lloyd’s. The paper said insurers’ customers faced a huge hike in insurance premiums following Katrina, and which some in the industry, such as German reinsurance company Hannover Re, expect to be the most costly natural disaster in history. The Observer said a document circulating the market’s syndicates, written by a secretive department at Lloyd’s, predicted destruction had been as bad as its worse-case scenario. Forecasters produced the study two years ago to model the effect of a major hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico—where Katrina struck last Monday. REUTERS