Guardsmen Arrive in New Orleans; Pace of Evacuations Is Stepped Up

National Guard troops arrived in this broken city Friday, rolling through floodwaters to aid thousands of frayed evacuees and confront snipers still moving freely through unguarded streets.

The show of military force came as President Bush toured New Orleans and cities in Mississippi and Alabama that had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Bush used the visits, four days after Katrina came ashore, to defend his administration after the mayor of New Orleans angrily accused it of responding slowly and with inadequate resources -- charges echoed by other political leaders, including the Congressional Black Caucus and Louisiana’s Republican senator.

Despite his criticism, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said Friday he hoped the city could be emptied of its remaining stranded population of 50,000 within five days. He said the quickened pace of evacuations was moving people out at a rate of 1,600 an hour.

The city, its levees breached, remains mostly underwater and without power or drinking water.

As flatbed trucks unloaded pallets of supplies, soldiers moved to restore calm among throngs camped out near the city’s convention center and on highway overpasses. Troops handing out food and water were both praised as heroes and confronted about their delayed arrival.

“Lord, I thank you for getting us out of here,” welcomed Leschia Radford, who spent hellish nights inside the tomb-like convention center, where corpses lay in sheets and some evacuees were raped and beaten.

But Walter Favoroth, 49, who treaded water for 18 hours before he was hauled into a boat by rescuers in the 9th Ward on Tuesday, said: “They waited too long. Every day they waited -- every hour -- more people died. This is a crime -- a crime of the heart.”

Blocks away, armed civilians still held sway in the city’s inundated neighborhoods, blasting at firefighters who retreated while trying to contain a rash of blazes in buildings across the ghostly skyline.

Dozens of Chinook helicopters darted overhead, transporting desperately ill patients from hospitals that were being evacuated by doctors and nurses under sporadic gunfire. By day’s end, evacuations were underway at Charity Hospital, which had to suspend its airlift Thursday because of sniper fire. The copters were taking patients miles away to a field hospital set up by National Guard medics at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in suburban Kenner.

Bush flew into the heavily guarded airfield Friday on a tour to reassure the hundreds of thousands left homeless across the stricken Gulf Coast.

“I am satisfied with the response,” Bush said near the refuse-blown beachfront in Biloxi, Miss. “But I’m not satisfied with the results.”

In Biloxi and in Mobile, Ala., Bush hailed public officials and consoled storm victims in tightly controlled public stops. He toured New Orleans only by helicopter and met privately at the Kenner airport with the city’s mayor, who openly accused the administration of jeopardizing lives by acting too slowly in sending troops, supplies and transport buses.

Lashing out in a radio interview replayed repeatedly on national television, an incensed Nagin said that federal officials should have moved days earlier to help flood survivors. The lost time, Nagin said in scathing language, may have cost lives.

“If they are not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay a price,” Nagin said. “Because every day that we delay, people are dying, and they’re dying by the hundreds.”

After the meeting with Bush, Nagin said the president “was very attentive, very serious and very determined.” He said Bush tried to reassure him about the government’s effort. But Nagin said he remained frustrated that “resources were not flown in as quickly as it needed to be.”

“I feel like we’ve gotten everyone’s attention,” the mayor said. “I want to see it happen tomorrow and happen the next day and happen the next week. When I see consistency, I will feel like there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus said the administration’s response was slow in New Orleans because many of those affected were poor. But some of the toughest critiques came from Louisiana’s Republican senator, David Vitter.

Vitter bluntly castigated the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “FEMA has been completely dysfunctional and is completely overwhelmed, and I don’t know why,” he said. “It seems like there was no coherent plan, which I don’t understand because this precise scenario has been predicted for 20 years.”

Under fire for days, FEMA’s director, Michael D. Brown, said: “We’re still dealing with a catastrophe.” But he acknowledged that he had not known about perilous conditions around the city’s convention center until Thursday morning. “That shows how difficult communications are,” he explained.

Congress passed a $10.5-billion disaster aid package Friday, and Bush quickly signed the measure. Economic losses from Hurricane Katrina are likely to reach $100 billion, an insurance consulting firm estimated Friday. That would make the crisis the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Nagin had only praise for Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, the cigar-chomping Louisiana native son who led National Guard units into the city center Friday morning.

Honore hopped out on a street corner to direct the three dozen trucks and troop vehicles by cellphone. As troops filed by, he barked at them repeatedly to keep their rifles aimed toward the ground, cautioning some troops recently returned from Iraq that they were not in a war zone, but in their home country.

“That’s one John Wayne dude down here that can get some stuff done,” Nagin said admiringly. “He came off the doggone chopper and he started cussing and people started moving.”

There were quick successes. Minutes after the military convoy halted near the convention center, Guard members were hiking up the ramp to where thousands were waiting -- some cheering, some cursing. The soldiers set up mess lines for food and water, ladling out pork rib lunches and bottled water to the famished refugees.

“Something is better than nothing,” Diane Sylvester, 49, said. First in line, she emerged with pork ribs and two bottles of water.

As they dug in, a long caravan of air-conditioned coaches and school buses were pulling in nearby. “As fast as we can, we’ll move them out,” said Honore, the commanding general of the First U.S. Army who was appointed head of Task Force Katrina. “Worse things have happened to America. We’re going to overcome this too.”

But on the first day of his risky assignment to return order to a lawless metropolis, Honore also faced daunting pressures.

Fatigued New Orleans police officers perched on rooftops, armed with rifles and shotguns while they scanned for snipers. Others were calling it quits -- some handed in their badges; some simply slipped away.

“They didn’t feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives,” said Louisiana State Police Chief Col. Henry Whitehorn.

At dusk, thousands of homeless were still camped out near the convention center and on stretches of Interstate 10. About 5,000 people remained in the Superdome, Nagin said, their departure from the festering hall slowed by Houston’s inability to accept more flood victims.

Houston Mayor Bill White said Friday that there were already 100,000 flood refugees in his city -- as many as the metropolis could absorb. Houston has 15,000 evacuees in the Astrodome and 3,000 in Reliant Arena, a basketball stadium across the street. Road signs that had directed arriving refugees into Houston now urge them to continue on to Dallas or San Antonio.

To the south of New Orleans, in submerged St. Bernard Parish, evacuees were still trapped in brutal heat on water-lapped rooftops. Many risked dehydration and exposure. State Sen. Walter Boasso said rescue efforts had picked up, with more than 10,000 now evacuated.

But other parish officials said the rescues were all arranged on their own -- and added that they had not yet been contacted by anyone from FEMA, five days after Katrina obliterated their community in deep water.

In the eastern 9th Ward, where currents from Lake Pontchartrain were among the deepest in the city, at least a hundred people still clung together for safety in a flooded elementary school. A corpse lay in the basement, left there because no one had come to take it away, residents said.

On Friday afternoon, a Florida National Guard chopper trolling over the muddy, oil-slicked water that covered New Orleans spotted a woman waving from the doorway of a sunken house. They could not approach, blocked by a tangle of power lines.

But nearby, over the roof of a damaged apartment building, they lowered a hoist and pulled up seven members of the Johnson family, ranging from 5 months to 70 years old.

“This is what we do,” said Sgt. Matthew Leve, whose unit has hoisted to safety more than 100 stranded residents in the last four days.

Hundreds of rescued residents were lining up for military flights at Armstrong airport. Officials said the flights, arranged by FEMA, were speeding up Friday, taking refugees to San Antonio, which had agreed to take in 25,000 homeless.

Kathy McGraw, 37, sat forlornly in an hours-long line of evacuees, waiting for a transport to shelters in San Antonio. There was no electricity and the terminal was hot and fetid. It had been three days since she had seen her three children.

“They put my kids in a helicopter, but didn’t tell me where they were going,” McGraw said, eyes tearing. “But where am I going?” she wondered aloud.

The airport was crowded with National Guard troops from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and other states, all hurrying to trucks and armored vehicles for the new convoys into the waterscape of New Orleans.

The number of soldiers inside New Orleans could total 5,000 within days. Many are recently returned from long deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Guard members fanned out to their first posts in the trash-heaped convention center area Friday, some found themselves thinking about their old mission abroad and their new one at home -- and how similar, and hamstrung, they both were.

“These people are in crisis, and there are only certain things you can do for them as a soldier,” said Arkansas National Guard Sgt. Mike Chenault, who spent a year in Iraq and found himself patrolling near the convention center Friday. “You can get them some water and an MRE [packaged meal], but other than that there’s not much you can do.”

A mile away, at the storm-scarred Superdome, Col. Thomas Beron, a Louisiana National Guard officer in charge of security at the stadium, was more upbeat as he watched over the 5,000 still waiting for the next buses out.

“Now they have some hope,” he said, “some direction.”

Gold and Zarembo reported from New Orleans, Braun from Washington. Times staff writers Ellen Barry, Steve Chawkins and Richard Fausset in New Orleans; Lianne Hart in Baton Rouge; Tony Perry in Houston; Kathy M. Kristof in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Researchers Jenny Jarvie and Lynn Marshall also contributed.