Bush Tours Damage; 45 Bodies Found at Hospital

After viewing scenes of devastation from the back of an Army truck, President Bush defended the pace of federal relief efforts Monday, insisting race did not affect the flow of aid to Hurricane Katrina’s victims. Soon after Bush spoke, his beleaguered top emergency aide announced his resignation.

The president’s first close-range visit to the crippled Crescent City coincided with fresh evidence that high water was retreating dramatically in some stretches of once-submerged wards and that vital services were returning.

Stark reminders of Katrina’s destructive swath still surfaced: Morgue workers had received the bodies of 45 patients found at an inundated hospital. And Louisiana’s attorney general launched an investigation into the drowning of at least 20 residents in a St. Bernard Parish nursing home reportedly abandoned by the staff during the height of the floods.

Setting out on his third tour of the battered Gulf Coast region since Katrina raked the southern coast two weeks ago, Bush promised that the government’s recovery effort “will be comprehensive.” His remarks were aimed at deflecting a barrage of criticism that the federal government had moved sluggishly after one of the worst natural disasters in the nation’s history.

“The storm didn’t discriminate and neither will the recovery effort,” Bush said in response to suggestions that aid had been delivered haltingly to the city’s majority black populace. “When those Coast Guard choppers -- many of whom were first on the scene -- were pulling people off roofs, they didn’t check the color of a person’s skin.”

Bush called on Congress “to take a good, close look at what went on” with the government’s performance.

But at a later stop in Gulfport, Miss., he was peppered with questions about the resignation of Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown.

Bush, riding upright in a rumbling military truck convoy, squinted at vacant shotgun shacks and debris-crusted streets, ducking at times to avoid jutting tree branches and power lines. He was joined in the jostling truck by military commanders, federal officials, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.

“My impression of New Orleans is this: that there is a recovery on the way,” Bush said. Behind him lay hulks of immobile cars newly freed from ebbing floodwaters.

Bush also glimpsed the reviving French Quarter, where instead of tourists and strippers, there were grime-stained workers and Red Cross volunteers. But the convoy did not happen upon the humbled city’s saddest sights -- the white-shrouded mortuary teams poking into once-flooded wards, collecting the bodies of Katrina’s victims. Authorities have now confirmed 279 fatalities in Louisiana and 214 in Mississippi.

Until recently, the mortuary operation had been overseen by Brown, who quit as FEMA’s head three days after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff ousted him as point man for the Katrina recovery operation.

White House officials said that R. David Paulison, former head of the U.S. Fire Administration, would be acting director of the agency.

Paulison has a loyal following of firefighters in Florida, where as Miami-Dade County’s fire chief he is remembered for pressing for aid for 400 firefighters whose homes were destroyed or damaged during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

“He got a good baptism with Andrew,” said Dominick Barbera, a vice president of the International Assn. of Firefighters. “He’s going to step into a real hot box now.”

In his letter of resignation to Bush, Brown, 50, said he was leaving “to avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission of FEMA.” Brown had become a pincushion for critics of the Bush administration’s storm response and was accused in recent news reports of exaggerating his emergency experience on his official resume.

Bush declined to comment on Brown’s resignation during his gulf tour. But spokesman Scott McClellan later said aboard Air Force One, “The president appreciates Mike Brown’s service. This was Mike Brown’s decision. This was a decision he made.”

Brown’s departure came as little surprise. Democratic congressional leaders and some Republicans had pressed for his exit -- even after Chertoff recalled Brown to Washington and replaced him in the flood region with Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen.

“Brown should have resigned last Friday and spared the Bush administration an entire weekend of being bashed,” Republican strategist Scott Reed said.

FEMA is still teetering in disarray. Last week, the agency scuttled a plan to provide debit cards to hundreds of thousands of flood victims. And on Sunday, Louisiana and New Orleans officials sniped anew at Brown’s temporary housing plans. The critics -- who included Nagin -- complained FEMA had dawdled on housing plans and showed insensitivity to black flood victims by forcing them to live in a rural tent city far from their urban roots.

The public’s dissatisfaction with the federal storm response dragged Bush’s job approval rating to the lowest level of his presidency at 42%, a Washington Post/ABC News poll reported. Some 57% disapprove of Bush’s performance in office, a double-digit increase since January, the survey found.

Congressional leaders in both parties seemed relieved to see Brown gone, even if Democrats had gained some traction in using Brown’s sinking fortunes to link the Bush administration’s response to Katrina to broader swipes at Bush’s leadership and domestic agenda.

“I’m glad he’s gone, but that doesn’t end the problems of this administration,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said.

Reid and other Democrats have demanded an independent inquiry, but Republican leaders portrayed Brown as the Bush administration’s chief impediment, preferring a congressional investigation that would focus on shared mistakes by federal, state and local governments.

“I hope that Mr. Brown’s decision to step down will help put the focus squarely where it belongs, on relief and recovery efforts,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which oversees FEMA.

On Monday, Brown’s replacement as FEMA’s point man on the Gulf Coast told Bush that the agency’s housing plans were being swiftly overhauled to allow thousands of evacuees to move into newly purchased trailers.

“The ultimate goal is to get them into homes permanently,” Allen said at a briefing aboard the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima, moored at a dock in downtown New Orleans as command center for military operations.

FEMA is barreling ahead with plans to create huge trailer-park cities -- complete with schools and security. “This may not be on the scale of building the pyramids, but it’s close,” said Brad Gair, FEMA’s disaster-area housing chief.

As many as 200,000 people -- most of them in Louisiana -- would be housed in the giant trailer parks for up to five years. The sites, scattered around the state, would vary in size from 5,000 to 25,000 people. About 6,000 FEMA-owned trailers are in Louisiana, and hundreds more are arriving daily, Gair said. In the next few days, FEMA plans to break ground on a 15,000-unit trailer city in the Baton Rouge area, and evacuees could start moving in within 10 days.

But New Orleans and Louisiana officials had yet to react to FEMA’s latest plan, still suspicious after the agency floated plans to move thousands of urban dwellers into tent cities in central Louisiana. Nagin questioned whether the idea was racially insensitive; frustrated state officials said the housing was moving too slowly.

Louisiana officials said the city was 50% flooded, with water levels receding at a rapid rate. Nearly two-thirds of southeastern Louisiana’s water treatment plants were up and running. And 41 of 174 permanent pumps were in operation, officials said, well on pace to help drain the city by Oct. 8.

Water levels had dropped precipitously in some New Orleans and suburban areas that were among the hardest hit. Stretches that were under 6 to 8 feet of water two days ago were bone-dry at dawn Monday, leaving grime smearing the streets and a few marshy puddles.

For the first time in the 8th and 9th wards in New Orleans’ East and in Mid-City neighborhoods, search and rescue crews patrolled on foot. By midday, National Guard troops and Marines said they had found several corpses inside homes that had been inaccessible until Monday.

“The water’s gone down so fast, we can’t keep up with it,” a Guard staff sergeant said on North Claiborne Avenue in the lower 9th Ward. “It’s like the whole place dried up overnight.”

National Guard troops worked at checkpoints as Marines wearing long green rubber gloves went house to house, knocking on doors and shouting for survivors. No one has been found alive in three days in the ward, Lt. Col. Kent Ralston said.

Marines said they found two decaying corpses inside homes in the ward. In the 8th Ward, Oregon National Guard troops said they had found two more bodies, also inside homes. Five corpses discovered by Marines on Saturday remained tethered to fences and trees, swelling in the late-summer sun.

At the corner of Reynes and Marais streets in the lower 9th Ward, three National Guard soldiers waited three hours for a private mortuary contractor working for FEMA to arrive to remove a body.

At the corner of Flood and Johnson streets, the arm and leg bones were visible on the corpse of a man whose ankle was snagged on a tree branch, his torso slung over a fence.

In the 8th Ward, in a home on North Claiborne Avenue, Guard soldiers found the body of a middle-aged man on the living room floor.

Flood marks on the tiny clapboard house showed that water had at one point risen above the front porch, about 5 feet high. A small white terrier, smeared with mud, lay on the porch, panting in the heat.

While bodies were being revealed in small numbers in the eastern wards, 45 were found at Memorial Medical Center, reportedly left in the hospital by doctors and nurses who evacuated dozens of patients from the facility during heavy flooding.

Mortuary teams were processing the bodies after they were removed a day earlier from the shuttered hospital’s halls. But health officials had known since last week that they would find bodies there, informed by doctors who were forced to evacuate after surging floodwaters short-circuited power to vital life-support respirators.

State health officials said many of the dead were elderly, ill patients whose conditions worsened as doctors and nurses struggled with sweltering 106-degree temperatures and shortages of food, water and medicine.

Joanne Lalla, an oncology nurse, said she “couldn’t understand why nobody was coming to help us.”

Dave Goodson, the hospital’s assistant administrator, said that at one point, 500 hospital staff members were there along with 2,000 patients.

“These patients were not abandoned,” Goodson said. Patients at several other New Orleans hospitals also died during evacuations over the same period. At Charity Hospital, several patients died after doctors and nurses trying to evacuate them came under sniper fire and retreated inside.

But in St. Bernard Parish, state officials launched an investigation into the deaths of 20 residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home. The victims perished at the height of intense flooding.

Prosecutors are looking into reports that the facility’s staff fled the premises, leaving behind mostly elderly patients, some trapped in their beds.

“I want answers,” state Atty. Gen. Charles C. Foti Jr. said. “I want to know why those people were trapped and were not evacuated.”

Zucchino and Moore reported from New Orleans and Alonso-Zaldivar from Washington. Times staff writers Stephen Braun, Edwin Chen and Richard Simon in Washington, Lianne Hart in Baton Rouge, and Ellen Barry and Rick Loomis in New Orleans contributed to this report.