Everyone Must Leave New Orleans

[QueEx]

<font size="6"><center>Governor:
Everyone Must Leave New Orleans</font size></center>

<center>

Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina cover a portion of New Orleans, La.,
Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005, a day after Katrina passed through the city. (AP
Photo/David J. Phillip)</center>

Associated Press
Aug 31, 12:33 PM (ET)
By BRETT MARTEL

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The governor of Louisiana says everyone needs to leave New Orleans due to flooding from Hurricane Katrina. "We've sent buses in. We will be either loading them by boat, helicopter, anything that is necessary," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. Army engineers trying to plug New Orleans' breached levees struggled to move giant sandbags and concrete barriers into place, and the governor said Wednesday the situation was growing more desperate and there was no choice but to abandon the flooded city.

"The challenge is an engineering nightmare," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

As the waters continued to rise in New Orleans, the Pentagon began mounting one of the biggest search-and-rescue operations in U.S. history, sending four Navy ships to the Gulf Coast with drinking water and other emergency supplies, along with the hospital ship USNS Comfort, search helicopters and eight swift-water rescue teams. Red Cross workers from across the country converged on the devastated region.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags Wednesday into the 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall. But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.

Officials said they were also looking at a more audacious plan: finding a barge to plug the 500-foot hole.

The death toll from Hurricane Katrina reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone, while Louisiana put aside the counting of the dead to concentrate on rescuing the living, many of whom were still trapped on rooftops and in attics.

The Red Cross reported it had about 40,000 people in 200 shelters across the area in one of the biggest urban disasters the nation has ever seen.

A full day after the Big Easy thought it had escaped Katrina's full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months.

"We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," Mayor Ray Nagin said on ABC's "Good Morning America, "and the other issue that's concerning me is we have dead bodies in the water. At some point in time the dead bodies are going to start to create a serious disease issue."

Blanco said she wanted the Superdome - which had become a shelter of last resort for about 20,000 people - evacuated within two days, along with other gathering points for storm refugees. The situation inside the dank and sweltering Superdome was becoming desperate: The water was rising, the air conditioning was out, toilets were broken, and tempers were rising.

At the same time, sections of Interstate 10, the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east, lay shattered, dozens of huge slabs of concrete floating in the floodwaters. I-10 is the only route for commercial trucking across southern Louisiana.

The sweltering city of 480,000 people - an estimated 80 percent of whom obeyed orders to evacuate as Katrina closed in over the weekend - also had no drinkable water, the electricity could be out for weeks, and looters were ransacking stores around town.

"The logistical problems are impossible and we have to evacuate people in shelters," the governor said. "It's becoming untenable. There's no power. It's getting more difficult to get food and water supplies in, just basic essentials."

She gave no details on exactly where the refugees would be taken. But in Houston, Rusty Cornelius, a county emergency official, said at least 25,000 of them would travel in a bus convoy to Houston starting Wednesday and would be sheltered at the 40-year-old Astrodome, which is no longer used for professional sporting events.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency was considering putting people on cruise ships, in tent cities, mobile home parks, and so-called floating dormitories - boats the agency uses to house its own employees.

Once the levees are fixed, Maj. Gen. Don Riley of the Army Corps of Engineers said, it could take close to a month to get the water out of the city. If the water rises a few feet higher, it could also wipe out the water system for the whole city, said New Orleans' homeland security chief, Terry Ebbert.

A helicopter view of the devastation over Louisiana and Mississippi revealed people standing on black rooftops, baking in the sunshine while waiting for rescue boats.

"I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago," said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour after touring the destruction by air Tuesday.

All day long, rescuers in boats and helicopters plucked bedraggled flood refugees from rooftops and attics. Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said 3,000 people have been rescued by boat and air, some placed shivering and wet into helicopter baskets. They were brought by the truckload into shelters, some in wheelchairs and some carrying babies, with stories of survival and of those who didn't make it.

"Oh my God, it was hell," said Kioka Williams, who had to hack through the ceiling of the beauty shop where she worked as floodwaters rose in New Orleans' low-lying Ninth Ward. "We were screaming, hollering, flashing lights. It was complete chaos."

Looting broke out in some New Orleans neighborhoods, prompting authorities to send more than 70 additional officers and an armed personnel carrier into the city. One police officer was shot in the head by a looter but was expected to recover, authorities said.

A giant new Wal-Mart in New Orleans was looted, and the entire gun collection was taken, The Times-Picayune newspaper reported. "There are gangs of armed men in the city moving around the city," said Ebbert, the city's homeland security chief. Also, looters tried to break into Children's Hospital, the governor's office said.

On New Orleans' Canal Street, dozens of looters ripped open the steel gates on clothing and jewelry stores and grabbed merchandise. In Biloxi, Miss., people picked through casino slot machines for coins and ransacked other businesses. In some cases, the looting took place in full view of police and National Guardsmen.

Blanco acknowledged that looting was a severe problem but said that officials had to focus on survivors. "We don't like looters one bit, but first and foremost is search and rescue," she said.

Officials said it was simply too early to estimate a death toll. One Mississippi county alone said it had suffered at least 100 deaths, and officials are "very, very worried that this is going to go a lot higher," said Joe Spraggins, civil defense director for Harrison County, home to Biloxi and Gulfport. In neighboring Jackson County, officials said at least 10 deaths were blamed on the storm.

Several of the dead in Harrison County were from a beachfront apartment building that collapsed under a 25-foot wall of water as Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds Monday. Louisiana officials said many were feared dead there, too, making Katrina one of the most punishing storms to hit the United States in decades.

Blanco asked residents to spend Wednesday in prayer.

"That would be the best thing to calm our spirits and thank our Lord that we are survivors," she said. "Slowly, gradually, we will recover; we will survive; we will rebuild."

Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, more than 1 million residents remained without electricity, some without clean drinking water. Officials said it could be weeks, if not months, before most evacuees will be able to return.

Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage.

Also, the Bush administration decided to release crude oil from federal petroleum reserves to help refiners whose supply was disrupted by Katrina. The announcement helped push oil prices lower.

Katrina, which was downgraded to a tropical depression, packed winds around 30 mph as it moved through the Ohio Valley early Wednesday, with the potential to dump 8 inches of rain and spin off deadly tornadoes.

The remnants of Katrina spawned bands of storms and tornadoes across Georgia that caused at least two deaths, multiple injuries and leveled dozens of buildings. A tornado damaged 13 homes near Marshall, Va.

---

Associated Press reporters Holbrook Mohr, Mary Foster, Allen G. Breed, Adam Nossiter and Jay Reeves contributed to this report.

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20050831/D8CATNA80.html?PG=home&SEC=news

 

[QueEx]

<font size="6"><center>Katrina Refugees Will Go to Astrodome</font size></center>

Aug 31, 1:24 PM (ET)
Associated Press
By MARY FOSTER

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - At least 25,000 of Hurricane Katrina's refugees, a majority of them at the New Orleans Superdome, will travel in a bus convoy to Houston and will be sheltered at the Astrodome, which hasn't been used for professional sporting events in years.

Evacuees with special problems already have been evacuated to hospitals in other Louisiana cities, but the 23,000 people now confined to the stuffy, smelly Superdome, as well as some other refugees will go to Houston, about 350 miles away.

The marathon bus convoy should take two days, officials said.

"Our view is the move to the Astrodome is temporary," said William Lokey, chief coordinator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "We're buying time until we can figure something out."

Ann Williamson, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Social Services who is working on the evacuation plans, said, "The remarkable offer from Texas did not have an end date."

FEMA will provide 475 buses for the transfer, and the Astrodome's schedule has been cleared through December for housing evacuees, said Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

The situation inside the dank and sweltering Superdome was becoming desperate: The water was rising, the air conditioning was out, toilets were broken, and tempers were rising.

Word of the move - a logistical nightmare at best - had not reached the Superdome when The Associated Press told administrators about it.

The dome is still surrounded by flooded streets, and getting buses to the ramps will be difficult, if not impossible. The floodwaters are threatening the generators which are providing electricity for the remaining lighting. There has been no air conditioning and only limited lights since city power went out during the hurricane arrived Monday.

National Guardsmen sandbagged a small area around the generator, but the underground fuel tank was covered with water so it could not be refilled until National Guard mechanics and engineers devised a way to bypass the fuel tank and run fuel directly from a truck

"We were down to an hour-and-a-half of fuel." Thornton said.

The generator is now being monitored around the clock. Wednesday morning, it was only 11 1/2 inches above the level of the flood waters.

Power and air-conditioning would be no problem in the Astrodome, although there would be few comforts of home in the stadium seating.

"We want to accommodate those people as quickly as possible for the simple reason they have been through a horrible ordeal," said Rusty Cornelius, administrative coordinator for the Harris County (Texas) Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Cornelius said the refugees would be bused to Houston, but all would not necessarily be on the road at the same time. Specifics of the transport and housing for the refugees were still being worked out with Red Cross and state government officials, he said.

Texas also is looking at the possibility of using the Ford Center in Beaumont for some long-term housing for other evacuees from Louisiana who may be staying in hotels, motels and campgrounds.

"Obviously from Governor Perry's standpoint, Texas is going to lend a helping hand and take care of those who have been devastated," Walt said.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said she wanted the Superdome - which had become a shelter of last resort - evacuated within two days, along with other gathering points for storm refugees.

The Astrodome helped put Houston on the map four decades ago. It still stands but is dwarfed by Reliant Stadium, the newly constructed home of the NFL's Houston Texans.

The Astrodome opened in 1965, 10 years before the Superdome in New Orleans.

---

Associated Press writers Kelley Shannon in Austin, Texas, and Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge contributed to this story.

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20050831/D8CAUF4G1.html?PG=home&SEC=news

 

[Merc]

d a m n

 

[Greed]

Budget cuts delayed New Orleans flood control work

Budget cuts delayed New Orleans flood control work
By Andy Sullivan
2 hours, 47 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration funding cuts forced federal engineers to delay improvements on the levees, floodgates and pumping stations that failed to protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, agency documents showed on Thursday.

The former head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that handles the infrastructure of the nation's waterways, said the damage in New Orleans probably would have been much less extensive had flood-control efforts been fully funded over the years.

"Levees would have been higher, levees would have been bigger, there would have been other pumps put in," said Mike Parker, a former Mississippi congressman who headed the engineering agency from 2001 to 2002.

"I'm not saying it would have been totally alleviated but it would have been less than the damage that we have got now."

Eighty percent of New Orleans was under water after Katrina blew through with much of the flooding coming after two levees broke.

A May 2005 Corps memo said that funding levels for fiscal years 2005 and 2006 would not be enough to pay for new construction on the levees.

Agency officials said on Thursday in a conference call that delayed work was not related to the breakdown in the levee system and Parker told Reuters the funding problems could not be blamed on the Bush administration alone.

Parker said a project dating to 1965 remains unfinished and that any recent projects would not have been in place by the time the hurricane struck even if they had been fully funded.

"If we do stuff now it's not going to have an effect tomorrow," Parker said. "These projects are huge, they're expensive and they're not sexy."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration had funded flood control efforts adequately.

Tensions over funding for the New Orleans levees emerged more than a year ago when a local official asserted money had been diverted to pay for the Iraq war. In early 2002, Parker told the U.S. Congress that the war on terrorism required spending cuts elsewhere in government.

Situated below sea level, New Orleans relied on a 300-mile

network of levees, floodgates and pumps to hold back the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.

Levees were fortified after floods in 1927 and 1965, and Congress approved another ambitious upgrade after a 1995 flood killed six people.

Since 2001, the Army Corps has requested $496 million for that project but the Bush administration only budgeted $166 million, according to figures provided by the office of Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record).

Congress ultimately approved $250 million for the project during that time period.

Another project designed to shore up defenses along Lake Pontchartrain was similarly underfunded, as the administration budgeted $22 million of the $99 million requested by the Corps between 2001 and 2005. Congress boosted spending on that project to $42.5 million, according to Landrieu's office.

"It's clear that we didn't do everything we could to safeguard ourselves from this hurricane or from a natural disaster such as Katrina but hopefully we will learn and be more prepared next time," said Landrieu spokesman Brian Richardson.

The levee defenses had been designed to withstand a milder Category Three hurricane and simply were overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina, said senior project manager Al Naomi.

"The design was not adequate to protect against a storm of this nature because we were not authorized to provide a Category Four or Five protection design," he said.

A study examining a possible upgrade is under way, he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050901/pl_nm/weather_katrina_funding_dc

 

[Greed]

New Orleans Mayor Orders Forced Evacuation

New Orleans Mayor Orders Forced Evacuation
By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
11 minutes ago

NEW ORLEANS - As flood waters receded inch by inch Tuesday, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin authorized law enforcement officers and the U.S. military to force the evacuation of all residents who refuse to heed orders to leave the dark, dangerous city.

Nagin's emergency declaration released late Tuesday targets those still in the city unless they have been designated by government officials as helping with the relief effort.

The move comes after some citizens bluntly told authorities who had come to deliver them from the flooded metropolis that they would not leave their homes and property. An estimated 10,000 residents are believed to still be in New Orleans, and some have been holed up in their homes for more than a week.

While acknowledging the emergency declaration, police Capt. Marlon Defillo said late Tuesday that forced removal of citizens had not yet begun. He said that officers who were visiting homes were still reminding people that police may not be able to rescue them if they stay.

"That would be a P.R. nightmare for us," Defillo said of any forced evacuations. "That's an absolute last resort."

Repeated telephone calls to Nagin's spokeswoman, Tami Frazier, seeking comment were not returned.

Meanwhile, engineers struggled to drain the saucer of a city of billions of gallons of water, a Herculean task that could take weeks — if they are lucky.

The Army Corps of Engineers said the timetable ranges from three weeks to nearly three months, depending on a string of variables, including rainfall, the still-unknown condition of the pumps abandoned to Hurricane Katrina, and whether the system can withstand the flotsam of broken buildings, trees, trash and corpses.

Work has also been impeded by sporadic gunfire coming from "criminals with guns," said Col. Richard Wagenaar, the Corps' chief district engineer.

The contractors are "getting used to it and that's pretty scary," Wagenaar said.

Despite complications, "we have to get the water out of the city or the nightmare will continue," said Louisiana Environmental Secretary Mike McDaniel. He said the water will be pumped into Lake Pontchartrain even though it is fouled with sewage, heavy metals, gasoline and other dangerous substances.

The pumping began after the Corps used hundreds of sandbags and rocks over the Labor Day weekend to close a 200-foot gap in the 17th Street Canal levee that burst in the aftermath of the storm and swamped 80 percent of this below sea-level city.

Following an aerial tour Tuesday, Nagin said the water was dropping ever so slightly, and he estimated that it covered only 60 percent of the city.

"Even in areas where the water was as high as the rooftops, I started to see parts of the buildings," he said, adding, "I'm starting to see rays of light."

But he also warned of the horrors that could be revealed when the waters recede. "It's going to be awful and it's going to wake the nation up again," said Nagin, who a day earlier upped his estimate of the death toll in his city to as much as 10,000.

The job to rid the city of water got off to a woefully slow start.

Once all of the city's pumping stations are running, they can move water at a rate of 29 billion gallons a day and lower the water level a half-inch per hour, or about a foot per day. But by late Tuesday afternoon, Corps officials said only three of New Orleans' normal contingent of 148 drainage pumps were operating.

With the water dropping, military and police turned their attention to evacuating the streets. Among those refusing to leave was 69-year-old John Ebanks, who waved off would-be rescuers from a porch stocked with food, mosquito spray and other supplies.

"You've got to protect your property, that's the main thing," Ebanks said. "This is all I've got. I'm pretty damn old to start over."

In St. Bernard Parish, 38-year-old Dennis Rizzuto took a break from a Monopoly game with his family to emerge from the second-floor window of his home.

He said he had plenty of water, food to last a month and a generator powering his home. "They're going to have to drag me" out, Rizzuto said.

In a plea to holdouts who might be listening to portable radios in the powerless city, Nagin warned that the fetid water could carry disease and that natural gas was leaking all over town.

"This is not a safe environment," Nagin said. "I understand the spirit that's basically, `I don't want to abandon my city.' It's OK. Leave for a little while. Let us get you to a better place. Let us clean the city up."

To that end, the Pentagon began sending 5,000 paratroopers from the Army's storied 82nd Airborne Division to use small boats, including inflatable Zodiac craft, to launch a new search-and-rescue effort in flooded sections of the city.

Some National Guardsmen and helicopters were diverted from their search missions Tuesday to fight fires, an emerging threat in a city that is still at least a day and a half away from restoring the first running water since the storm.

A candle was blamed for starting one major blaze in the lower Garden District — a historic neighborhood of mostly wooden homes. The flames started in an abandoned brick building and spread to a neighboring apartment house. The blazes burned for hours before Chinook helicopters with water pouches were brought in to fight the blaze.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass said lawlessness in the city "has subsided tremendously," and officers warned that those caught looting in an area where the governor has declared an emergency can get up to 15 years in prison. About 124 prisoners filled a downtown jail set up at the city's train and bus terminal.

"We continue to get better day by day," Compass said.

The signs of hope came against increasingly angry rhetoric over the federal response as too little too late. In Washington, congressional leaders planned hearings into the aftermath of the storm.

"We need to rebuild the confidence of the American people ... in our government's ability to protect them from attack, whether it comes from nature or from terrorists," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman (news, bio, voting record), D-Conn. "The government simply did not act quickly and effectively enough."

Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard was even more blunt.

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area," he said on CBS' "Early Show." "Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

Five of the 13 sub-basins in New Orleans were still seriously flooded, and barges and crews were getting into place to fix levee breaches at two other spots — the London Avenue canal and the Industrial canal. The London Avenue canal is in the northwestern section of the city, the Industrial canal in the east.

The Corps is concentrating on the London Avenue canal, where workers will spend at least two weeks filling a 45-foot hole with rocks and sandbags, Wagenaar said. Once that drainage canal is fixed, then more pumps can start running.

Before work can even begin on the Industrial canal two barges pushed onto a bridge by Katrina and a sunken barge need to be removed. The Coast Guard has said 110 barges, ships and boats sank or ran aground during the storm — 67 of them in the Mississippi River, and another 43 along the coast.

The levees were deliberately breached in some spots to let the water flow back out into Lake Pontchartrain, where the water level had dropped below that inside the city.

How long it takes to drain the city could depend on the condition of the pumps — especially whether they were submerged and damaged, the Corps said. Also, the water is full of debris, and while there are screens on the pumps, it may be necessary to stop and clean them from time to time.

"We're working every avenue to do whatever we can to get things back in order," said Walter Baumy, Corps manager for the project. "We're going to accomplish the mission of getting the water out of the city."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050907/ap_on_re_us/hurricane_katrina

 

[Agallah005]

the Victims

After Welcoming Evacuees, Houston Handles Spike in Crime
Population Swell Fills Apartments and Strains Police Force

By Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 6, 2006; A03



HOUSTON -- The southwest corner of this city is one sprawling low-rise apartment complex after the next, a once-hot real estate area that died with the 1980s oil bust only to be reborn in the '90s as a low-income, high-crime neighborhood. Now it's Katrina turf.

New Tony's Express, a neighborhood convenience store, is sold out of T-shirts and caps stenciled with the numbers 504, 985 and 337 -- the area codes for New Orleans and southern Louisiana. The emergency room of West Houston Medical Center is so busy treating Hurricane Katrina evacuees the staff jokingly calls itself "Charity West," a reference to New Orleans's venerable Charity Hospital.

And now, police say that southwest Houston, long recognized as a problem area, is facing another manifestation of the Louisiana exodus: Katrina crime.

Since Sept. 1, when an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Louisianans resettled in Houston after Hurricane Katrina, evacuees are believed to have been involved in 26 slayings, or nearly 17 percent of all homicides. The cases, according to Houston police, involved 34 evacuees -- 19 of them victims and 15 of them suspects.

Late last month, investigators in the Houston Police Department's Gang Murder Squad announced the arrests of eight of 11 suspects believed linked to nine homicides in the city's southwest side and two others in nearby Pasadena, Tex. The slayings occurred since November, and all the suspects are displaced New Orleanians who landed in Houston after the hurricane.

"We did not initiate this effort with the intention of singling out New Orleans or Louisiana people," said Lt. Robert Manza, a police department spokesman. "It just so happens that every single one we arrested and three we're looking for are New Orleans residents."

"The message is clear: We're going to relocate these men from apartments in Houston to a prison in Texas," Manza said. "That's going to be their next home."

An increase in violent crime since Sept. 1 and a spate of homicides over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend involving Katrina evacuees have elicited urgent pleas from Mayor Bill White and Police Chief Harold L. Hurtt to the federal government to help pay the cost of providing increased security and to hire more officers. Hurtt is taking the request to Washington next week as part of a meeting of police chiefs. White is also in negotiations with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Both officials are careful not to blame Houston's recent rise in violent crime solely on Katrina evacuees, saying such statistics were rising last year before the hurricane. They point to what they call the majority of law-abiding Louisianans now living in the city and say the crime rate per thousand for the evacuee population is not greater than it was among Houstonians before the influx of Katrina survivors.

But the issue facing the city, officials said, is that Houston's 2 million population grew by about 10 percent virtually overnight, straining all key city services such as schools, hospitals, emergency services and, particularly, public safety. The addition of the evacuee population has dropped the ratio of police officers per thousand Houstonians to 1.9, compared with 2.3 before Katrina and with the national average of 2.8.

"We should not be penalized for opening up our city to folks who lost their homes," Hurtt said in an interview last week. "We are just trying to help them get back to normal as soon as possible."

Late last month, the police announced two initiatives targeting three "hot spots" in the city made up largely of apartment complexes, many of them with concentrations of Katrina evacuees. The Gang Murder Squad was created, and the 4,800-member police force, depleted by about 700 retirements in recent years, started overtime programs to increase plainclothes and undercover patrols, conduct warrant sweeps and respond more quickly to calls for service. In the first 19 days of this year, a new Neighborhood Enforcement Team Taskforce had responded to calls involving complaints by 110 Katrina evacuees. Of the suspects apprehended, 229 were evacuees, police said.

Officials are asking FEMA for $6.5 million to reimburse those overtime costs and for federal aid to help beef up the force, starting with the addition of at least one police cadet class of 70 officers.

"We have a much larger population, and that's the rationale," the mayor said. "If we would not have stepped up and taken in the Americans made homeless by Katrina, we wouldn't have a [larger] population to protect. We also have some people engaged in criminal activities in Louisiana which they've continued here. So we have a larger criminal population to deal with, too."

Although overall crime in Houston dropped 2 percent last year, homicides jumped by 23.5 percent, police say. Three of the city's police districts, which started experiencing an increase in homicides before the last quarter of 2005, have seen a spike in homicides since the influx of Katrina evacuees. Those districts -- two on the southwest side and one in north-central Houston -- are almost exclusively made up of apartment complexes, many of which were 10 to 30 percent vacant in recent years.

Two factors spurred the almost overnight occupation of almost all the city's apartment complexes: the influx of hurricane evacuees and Houston's generous apartment voucher program, which paid for a year's worth of rent for displaced Louisianans, the cost of which the city will be reimbursed by FEMA. Apartment buildings in southwest Houston and certain north-central neighborhoods, with their low rents and high vacancy rates, became the new homes for almost 30,000 Katrina evacuees, according to a recent analysis by the Houston Chronicle.

Jessie Brown, who started a community center for children in one southwest-side complex and worked with local police to clean up crime in recent years, has seen progress slip. "Houston had a problem before Katrina, but when the poorest neighborhood from New Orleans came here, it just intensified and magnified things," she said. "You're going to have good and bad, no matter what. But I noticed things have changed. I don't feel comfortable walking around at night anymore."

Most of the homicides that occurred in the last quarter of 2005 occurred in the city's apartment complexes. But there are not just homicides. Police said they have seen a significant increase in calls for service across the board. The first indication of such change became evident several months ago in the number of "calls holding," or calls for police service that one shift had to take on when a previous shift of officers went off duty.

"We used to have five calls holding, then it was 30, 40, 50, 60 calls holding or left over," said Officer John M. Trevino of the 19th District, which covers one of the new crime hot spots in southwest Houston. "It's crazy. The board was full of calls."

In announcing the arrests of the eight Louisiana murder suspects Friday, police said the men -- members of rival New Orleans housing project gangs -- were also responsible for 18 other crimes in Houston in recent months, including three aggravated robberies, three aggravated assaults, aggravated kidnapping, drug sales and car theft.

"We literally opened up our city and you would think the persons you're opening up to would be on their very best behavior," said Officer Ray Hunt, also of the 19th District. "Eighty-five percent are. But the 15 percent we're dealing with are not." Hunt figures that a similar percentage of Houstonians are prone to cause trouble, "so now it's double the problem," he said.

Hunt's recent night shift in the 19th began with 23 calls holding -- "a good night," Hunt said. Within four hours he would respond to a high-speed chase that started at an apartment complex in southwest Houston and ended at the intersection of two major highways several miles away. It involved three vehicles and nine people from New Orleans, according to their driver's licenses. One man carried his license in a leather binder that identified him as the brother of a New Orleans police officer. Two weapons and $8,000 in cash were found in two of the cars.

Not all police calls involving New Orleans evacuees involve violent or serious crime, but they all take up officers' time and put pressure on the force.

After the chase, Hunt would join four other police officers in answering a call about a burglary in progress at another complex, where they found a mentally ill man from New Orleans who had used a brick to break a window to enter an apartment. He said he lived there with his brother, but he had no keys, no identification and no idea where his brother was. Inside the sparsely furnished unit was a FEMA guide on how to apply for aid, and an eviction notice dated Jan. 20 for "Prohibited conduct, behaving in a disturbing manner, threatening the health, comfort and safety of others."

He spoke slowly and was largely incoherent, but he made sense when he talked about New Orleans. "It was hard, you know. Bus. The helicopter came and brought me to the Galleria," he said as he sat on a dirty couch, his hands handcuffed behind his back. "Lot of my friends drowned. Sad, bro'."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company


----------------------------------


This shit is just too sad, I'm sorry, but I bet some wish they didn't help them now. these mothas make the good ones look bad.

 

[Fuckallyall]

Re: the Victims

You won't get much of a response to this article, as many on this board have a "blame whitey, and blacks are never wrong [except when they criticize blacks])" mindframe. It is sad that Houston has to put up with this.

 

[QueEx]

Re: the Victims

<font size="4">
Related Thread:</font size>
<font size="3">
Houston - New Orleans students rumble

http://64.255.174.200/board/showthread.php?t=59865&highlight=katrina+houston

</font size>.

 

[ibobby]

bump