Crews Roust Holdouts, Brace for the Body Count

Police and M-16-toting National Guardsmen fanned out through nearly deserted neighborhoods Thursday to track down the last of the city’s holdouts in advance of a mass forced evacuation.

Teams of emergency workers also crisscrossed the city as receding water began to expose more resting places of Hurricane Katrina’s victims.

As of Thursday, Louisiana’s official death toll had risen to 118 and Mississippi’s to 201. Mortuary specialists were carting bodies away from New Orleans’ drying streets, from an abandoned city hospital and a warehouse in the dockside town of Chalmette.

Juliette Saussy, director of emergency medical services for the city of New Orleans, said hundreds of corpses had been removed from the city.

Told by other public health officials that the final death count could approach 10,000, Saussy declined to make her own forecast as long as “the water is obscuring some of the bodies.”

Army Corps of Engineers officials said the city remained 60% flooded, but some areas, like parts of the once-inundated 9th Ward, were now nearly dry. Floodwaters are being pumped back into Lake Pontchartrain, though slowly, with 23 of the city’s normal contingent of 148 pumps in operation along with three portable pumps.

The water in once-inundated St. Bernard Parish had fallen 5 feet.

City officials acknowledge that many of the city’s shrunken populace of about 10,000 remain holed up in French Quarter lofts, flooded mansions and nearly inaccessible housing projects on the city’s east side.

The sight of armed soldiers and city police massing in doorways prodded scores of reluctant stragglers to pack up their belongings and evacuate, officials said. National Guard troops will not participate in the forced evacuations, but they will transport evacuees, said Major Gen. Ron Mason, a commander with the Kansas National Guard assigned to Louisiana.

Guard troops and other military units, Mason insisted, are carrying their M-16s on the neighborhood searches “to protect themselves. The purpose of the weapon is not to use it against American citizens and force them to leave their homes.”

But some residents have reported that the presence of armed soldiers has persuaded them to evacuate.

City dispatchers received 10 assistance calls overnight, said New Orleans Police Supt. Eddie Compass. All were from residents who had decided to evacuate and wanted assistance.

“Officers are seeing progress being made,” Compass said. He added that his officers would try persuasion but were laying plans for using force, if necessary, to compel residents into evacuation vans. That move was expected to come by the end of the week.

A team of Navy divers and federal narcotics agents returned to a house on Lizardi Street in the 9th Ward on Thursday after a thorough search of 125 blocks found no one left. Only Hazzert and Rita Gillette, an elderly couple, and their 21-year-old son, were still holding out.

Navy electronics technician Douglas Winslow has knocked on the Gillettes’ door 15 times over the last three days. They told Winslow they intended to stay, preferring to take their chances with the police rather than with an uncertain world outside.

“They know what they have here,” Winslow said. “The minute they pack up and get in my car, they don’t know.”

A contingent of U.S. Marines had better luck on the city’s east side, corralling mechanic Earl Cephus after days in which he avoided patrols. “I got plenty of food saved up,” Cephus said, as he prepared to leave in an amphibious vehicle. “I could’ve stuck it out a lot longer. I didn’t want to go. They made me go.”

Compass said Thursday that police “are not going to be tough, we’re going to be sensitive,” explaining to stragglers about “the dangers of their health in the water.” Recent environmental tests have found high levels of fecal bacteria and other contaminants in the floodwater.

But at a Thursday briefing, Compass also said police had begun seizing guns, claiming they had the authority under an emergency evacuation order issued this week by New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin.

Although Nagin has not taken the step of formally declaring an explicit martial law, police have interpreted his recent order declaring a state of emergency as allowing the seizure of weapons.

“Only law enforcement is allowed to have weapons,” Compass said.

But in practice, police, military troops and other law enforcement agents are hardly the only ones carrying weapons legally in the city. Private security contractors are scattered through the city, guarding hotels and shipments of water and food. And sporadic sniper fire has led many city engineering and utility crews to tote guns as they go about their emergency repair rounds each day.

Federal mortuary crews circulated in plain sight Thursday among the masses of police, military troops and public officials, bound for areas where corpses had been spotted. Officials had reportedly retrieved at least 14 corpses from Memorial Medical Center in the Uptown section of the city.

CNN broadcast photographs Thursday of bodies reportedly laid out in disarray on the floor of the Convention Center.

At least eight people died outside the building last week, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune has reported that National Guard troops found 30 to 40 bodies decomposing inside a freezer in the convention center. One of the victims, a young girl, reportedly was found with her throat slashed.

Compass confirmed the report to The Times, but he declined to discuss the number of bodies found in the building. Compass told CNN he would investigate several of the deaths as homicides, but was not optimistic about finding the killers.

“We’re going to use all our forensic knowledge to try and bring closure,” he said. But he added that the convention center crime scene was “probably disturbed, the evidence is gone.... They may not be punished in this life, but they will be punished in the next.”

Also Thursday, a Louisiana National Guard official said that the state was unable to provide immediate transportation last week to thousands of evacuees massed in the convention center and the Louisiana Superdome because federal emergency officials failed to provide enough buses.

Col. Jeff Smith, who works with the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said that a day after Katrina struck, alarmed Louisiana officials requested 1,100 buses from Federal Emergency Management Agency to evacuate New Orleans. The state’s first request was for 450 buses, but as water levels kept rising, the state “requested another 150. A day later, we asked for another 500,” Smith said.

FEMA responded within a day of the state’s first request, Smith said. But it provided 200 buses.

“We did have some problems with the buses,” Smith said. The first vehicles “started arriving at a reasonable time, but not in the quantities that we’d requested.” By then, 23,000 people had crowded into the Louisiana Superdome and nearly 30,000 were camped inside the city convention center and on the streets outside.

Marcus Ward, a FEMA spokesman in Washington, said that the agency could not respond until officials had researched a timeline of the agency’s response to Katrina.

As New Orleans police stepped up their pressure on residents who refused to evacuate, Compass expressed concern that scores of police officers reported missing after Hurricane Katrina struck 10 days ago might have perished. About 700 officers were believed to have been at their homes when floodwaters rushed into the city.

At least 500 officers have not returned to their posts. Though some officers are believed to have simply walked away from their jobs, Deputy Supt. Warren Riley said those who quit would have called the department by now to explain their absence. Riley declined to speculate about how many officers might have died, saying: “One is too many.”

Riley said city officials expected that New Orleans’ population would shrink drastically because of Katrina’s hammer blow. Officials forecast that the city’s returning inhabitants will number 350,000 -- about 150,000 fewer than the pre-storm total.

Although that could have serious consequences for a tax base strained even before the storm, Riley took solace where he could find it.

“Some people will probably go places and live better lives,” he said. “New Orleans with a smaller population may be a better city. You take away the tragic loss of life here and maybe there is a silver lining.”

Gold and Miller reported from New Orleans and Braun reported from Washington. Times staff writers David Zucchino and Solomon Moore reported from New Orleans, Julie Cart from Baton Rouge and Jim Gerstenzang from Washington.