A Door-to-Door Search for the Living and Dead

Navy crews in rubber boats and DEA agents carrying battering rams combed through neighborhoods east of downtown New Orleans on Thursday, searching for residents trapped in partially submerged homes and trying to convince a few defiant stragglers that they had to leave.

Navy officials said they had searched all 125 blocks of the city’s 9th Ward and believed that there were three people left in the impoverished area: a couple in their 60s and their 21-year-old son, who have rebuffed repeated attempts to persuade them to abandon their Lizardi Street home.

Douglas Winslow, a Navy electronics technician taking part in the search, said he had visited Hazzert and Rita Gillette at least 15 times in the past three days, trying to talk them out of the home they have occupied for decades.

But, he said, they are more afraid of what awaits them if they leave than they are of the hazards of staying put.

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

Navy and Drug Enforcement Administration officials said that as of Thursday, their orders were merely to do their best to persuade residents to leave, not to employ force.

“We advise them how dangerous it is to be there -- the health hazards that are there,” said a senior DEA agent who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. That, he said, was as far as DEA officials were allowed to go.

DEA teams were largely focused on going block by block, door to door, inspecting residences in the 9th Ward to make sure that they were empty, and using red spray paint to mark the front of dwellings to show that they had been searched.

In midafternoon, two DEA teams linked up to inspect a five-story convalescent home blocks from the Mississippi River. Special agents using battering rams, crowbars and sledgehammers popped opened door after door, working methodically along the tiled hallways and searching every room.

The abandoned rooms reflected the interrupted lives of the building’s elderly residents: pictures of grandchildren taped to the walls, a leather satchel marked “important documents,” an unread copy of the local newspaper on the dining table with the headline warning “Katrina Takes Aim.”

As DEA agents left each apartment, they scrawled large zeros on the outside walls, meaning that no one, living or dead, was found inside.

A special agent leading one team said that earlier in the day, his crew had found one survivor in the 9th Ward, an 82-year-old man who was in need of medical help; the man was evacuated with the assistance of Army medics.

Agents said they had not seen any bodies in their two days of searching. If they did make such a discovery, they were only to note the location and report it to New Orleans authorities.

Down river from the 9th Ward, in St. Bernard Parish, Navy crews spent much of the day navigating still-submerged streets and shouting, “U.S. Navy, anybody home?” By the end of the day, they had not had a single reply.

Aside from the sound of oars dipping into water rendered a viscous black by petroleum and sewage, the neighborhood of brick, ranch-style homes was eerily quiet.

“I haven’t seen a living soul, a bird or anything out here,” Navy Senior Chief Skip Henning said aboard one of four rubber rafts being used to search the neighborhood.

“What’s kind of scary is you look at these dwellings and see a lot of vehicles still parked out front,” he said, raising the possibility that residents had tried to ride out the storm and may have been caught in the subsequent flood.

The Navy crews were not entering residences unless they had some indication that someone was inside.

There were dozens of vehicles in the neighborhood, water lapping against their fenders. Stains showed that water had reached the rooftops of most homes. But by Thursday, the water was two or three feet deep in most areas. The Navy crews had to use oars, rather than outboards, in shallow stretches.

Ordinary items in the neighborhood took on a ghastly aspect: a bag of Christmas bows snagged in the boughs of a tree, a children’s tree fort with a green plastic slide that now plunges into muck.