Bush Plans Speech; Death Toll Rises

As the death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed to 710 on Wednesday, White House aides said President Bush’s address to the nation tonight would call for reconstructing the Gulf Coast using conservative blueprints and private-sector initiatives.

In preparing for his speech to be delivered from New Orleans, the president consulted widely with Republican leaders and conservative thinkers.

With damage estimates as high as $200 billion, massive federal spending appears inevitable. Late Wednesday, the Senate passed a $3.5-billion measure that would provide emergency housing vouchers to more than 350,000 families. That is in addition to nearly $60 billion in emergency aid already authorized.

A day after Bush accepted blame for breakdowns in federal disaster efforts, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco took “full responsibility” for her own mistakes. Blanco did not specify those errors in her televised speech from the statehouse in Baton Rouge. City and federal officials have questioned preparations made by state officials before Katrina struck.

“We must take a careful look at what went wrong and make sure it never happens again,” Blanco said.

Earlier in the day, officials said that Blanco and Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen had repaired splintering relations over management of the body retrieval effort in New Orleans, where corpses have floated for days in floodwaters and accumulated in houses and evacuated buildings.

Louisiana officials said they had taken over a lapsed federal contract with a Houston mortuary firm. The arrangement would allow the private company’s crews to continue collecting the bodies of flood victims scattered across southern Louisiana.

Blanco had lashed out at the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday, arguing that its failure to come to terms with Kenyon International Emergency Services Inc. had threatened the operation. Allen, the agency’s new point man in the flood-swept Gulf Coast region, at first responded that the state, not FEMA, had full authority for the recovery of bodies.

The conflict centered on who would pay for Kenyon’s contract. State officials insisted that FEMA had hired Kenyon and needed to guarantee that Louisiana would be compensated for future costs. FEMA replied that the decision was the state’s to make.

After the two officials spoke by phone late Tuesday, Blanco and Allen said Wednesday that they were satisfied with the results. Neither of them provided details, but during her address, Blanco pointedly said that she had asked the federal government to cover all of the state’s massive disaster expenses, “just as was done after 9/11.”

State officials said that Kenyon had been rehired by Louisiana and that its team of 115 mortuary specialists would stay on through November at a cost of nearly $119,000 a day. State officials would not say if FEMA had agreed to defray any of those expenses.

“To date,” Allen said during a news briefing in Baton Rouge, “we’ve had a well-running organization.”

As he defended the pace of the body recovery operation, Allen acknowledged it had started off slowly because “access was made difficult by weather and lack of communication.”

Dr. Louis Cataldie, Louisiana’s medical incident commander for the disaster, agreed that “things are getting better.” He added that “as long as there’s one body in the water, we need to be doing a better job.”

Officials expect that hundreds -- if not thousands -- more corpses are lying beneath the floodwaters still covering about 40% of the city.

Wednesday, the official death toll from the hurricane stood at 474 in Louisiana, 218 in Mississippi, 14 in Florida, and two each in Alabama and Georgia.

“This is going to be long, arduous process,” Cataldie said. “And it’s going to be even longer and more arduous to do the identifications. That’s going to take months, maybe years.”

The discovery of 34 bodies left in St. Rita’s Nursing Home and scores more in several New Orleans hospitals has provoked a widening state inquiry. Louisiana Atty. Gen. Charles C. Foti Jr. filed involuntary manslaughter charges against a couple who owns the St. Bernard Parish nursing home for allegedly failing to evacuate patients..

Foti also said he would look into the circumstances surrounding 45 bodies found inside Memorial Medical Center and an unknown number of corpses left at Charity Hospital. CNN reported that as many as 50 bodies were still at Charity on Wednesday, waiting processing by mortuary teams.

Officials from both hospitals have said that many of the bodies left behind were critically ill patients who died during chaotic evacuations after the facilities were isolated by high water. Both hospitals evacuated hundreds of other patients by boat and by helicopter.

Harry Anderson, a spokesman for Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp., which operated Memorial, said Wednesday that between 10 and 12 of the patients who died were “very sick or frail.” Ten more were patients who had died at the hospital before the storm struck.

The remaining corpses, Anderson said, were those of patients from a long-term care facility operated by another firm, LifeCare Holdings Inc., on the hospital’s seventh floor. LifeCare officials did not return several calls. But Anderson said many of those patients relied on electric respirators and could not be saved despite efforts by nurses to manually ventilate their breathing.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Wednesday that he hoped to allow as many as 180,000 New Orleans residents to return to their homes “in a week or two” in city neighborhoods that were not devastated by Katrina’s floods. More than 80% of the city’s 500,000 residents fled before the hurricane struck, and about 50,000 were evacuated in Katrina’s immediate aftermath.

A federal emergency bill passed Wednesday night in the Senate would provide emergency housing vouchers averaging $600 a month for as many as six months for more than 350,000 displaced Gulf Coast families.

The measure offered by Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.) was attached on a voice vote to an unrelated spending bill. The Senate is slated to pass the overall bill today, but a final version needs to be worked out with the House, which passed its own version in June.

Congress also moved Wednesday to reinforce the health and welfare safety net for Katrina’s evacuees, promising speedy action on a new bill that would significantly expand Medicaid, unemployment and welfare benefits. The proposal has the support of Senate leaders and could go to the floor as early as today. It would cost an estimated $5 billion to $7 billion through 2006.

While a Senate panel launched the first formal inquiry into the government’s much-criticized response to the hurricane, the Senate Republican majority defeated a bid by Democrats to establish an independent commission to investigate the disaster effort.

In a strict party-line vote, Republicans blocked a bid by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to establish the independent panel. After the vote, Clinton said she called for the independent probe because “it is simply not appropriate for government to investigate itself.”

At the White House, officials readied for Bush’ national address from New Orleans. Aides billed the speech as Bush’s chance to recover from lost political momentum and wed conservative ideals to the pressing need to redesign the broken city. The televised speech, to be delivered at 6 p.m. PDT, is expected to last about 30 minutes.

“The president wants people to think big,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “Most importantly, he believes that it should be driven locally, in terms of the vision and the planning, with the full support of the federal government.”

Advisors also want the speech to hew to conservative notions of small government and ample business opportunities. Aides have broached ideas with Republican leaders in Congress and analysts at conservative think tanks.

Ideas they discussed include a strong role for the private sector and charitable organizations along with a package of housing and education vouchers and tax breaks to encourage business activity in the region.

“Bush has a very well defined vision of what government should do and how it should do it,” said Michael Franc, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization consulted by the White House. “This is a moment to teach or explain to the American people how his values apply to this catastrophic situation.”

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Hart reported from Baton Rouge and Hook from Washington. Times staff writers Stephen Braun, Mary Curtius, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Richard Simon contributed to this story from Washington and Paul Pringle from New Orleans.