Tears Fall as Water Rises Again

Rescue boats and helicopters plucked scores of terrified residents from flooded homes Saturday as hurricane-swollen waters breached levees along the bayous south of the city and continued to fill low-lying wards of New Orleans.

About 500 people were pulled from second-story rooms, roofs and patches of high ground in Jefferson Parish after Hurricane Rita brought pounding rains and tree-bending gusts to southeastern Louisiana.

Wind-driven water topped levees and quickly inundated neighborhoods of Lafitte and Crown Point, spilling into homes during the dark hours of early morning.

“I was so scared,” said Alice Rexwinkle, who had scrambled up to her second-floor landing to jump into a police boat about 4 a.m., the water rising behind her. “We saw this snake in the water. I was crying.”

A neighbor who was also rescued, Amanda Rome, held her hand to just below her throat, and said, “The water was up to here.... I lost everything.”

National Guard, Navy and Coast Guard crews worked into the night to save more of the stranded in Jefferson Parish.

No deaths were reported.

In New Orleans, officials grimly took stock of the second round of flooding and regrouped, as the Army Corps of Engineers began shoring up a breach in the Industrial Canal that re-flooded the Lower 9th Ward.

Helicopters flew in 150 sandbags, each weighing 7,000 pounds, to raise the canal’s degraded wall and stop water pouring into the ward. Twenty-ton trucks ferried in stone to bolster the canal’s west side.

Rainfall and leaks from another major canal, at London Avenue, left the Gentilly neighborhood in the northern part of the city sitting in 6 to 8 inches of water.

“We expected minor leakage, and that’s what we got,” corps spokeswoman Susan Jackson said of the London Avenue canal.

Army Corps officials said it would take two to three weeks to pump the city dry again, but that work can begin only after Lake Pontchartrain subsides to its normal levels.

The corps had sealed off the top of the London Avenue and 17th Street canals with steel pilings to protect the city from Rita-driven flood surges. Once lake levels subside, the corps will pull out the pilings. Then it will be able to pump water out of the city and into the canals.

Asked when that might happen, Jackson said: “That’s up to Mother Nature, because the winds are so high right now.”

While the corps worked on the breach, Army and state officials surveyed and photographed the flooded area to create hydrology reports.

These reports help the Army find out where Rita’s damage is, how it differs from Katrina’s, and how far it extends.

“This exercise helps us determine what our needs are, what kinds of vehicles we’ll need to respond to different areas, for instance,” said an officer who would not give his name.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass’ most immediate task, once Rita had blown over, was to look for holdouts in the city’s Lower 9th Ward.

Three passes through the drowned neighborhood by a police boat revealed nothing -- not a surprise, Compass said, because he was sure people heeded warnings to get out this time.

“People were brought to the real world by Katrina,” he said. “They understand the power of mother nature now, and they weren’t going the challenge that.”

City Council members were taking stock of Rita’s damage, getting ready to plan the recovery. Jaquelyn Clarkson, a council member whose district encompasses the French Quarter, was out early doing a scouting run in the harder-hit parts of her constituency.

“I’m trying to identify the progress of each part of my district to identify the most damaged areas,” Clarkson said.

The seven-member council controls the city’s finances and met two weeks ago to authorize the mayor to borrow reserve funds to pay essential personnel.

Clarkson was photographing her district for another meeting next Tuesday in which the council members will give updates on their districts and discuss rebuilding and whether they need to pass more legislation to help the mayor.

In Jefferson Parish, the flooding appeared to be worst in Lafitte, where scores of homes were in 4 or 5 feet of water.

Ernest Adams, 47, said the surging water woke him at 2 a.m. He told of slogging to a neighbor’s boat and later helping to rescue dozens of people.

“My house is done,” Adams said. “It’s in 3 feet of water.”

Gabriele Bridges, 16, and her family evacuated their Lafitte home on an airboat. But she and her brother got separated from their parents.

Gabriele was frantic until her mother called later in the day, after the teenagers had been bused to an evacuation center at a nearby school.

“We never thought the water would get that high,” Gabriele said.

In Crown Point, residents waded through knee- and then thigh-deep flood currents for much of the day, carrying furniture and other belongings upstairs and moving cars to dry rises in the road. Water lapped onto porches and into living rooms.

Residents said high tides in the bayous frequently flood the area, but not like this.

“This house was built in the ‘20s, and now I’m going to lose it,” said Torie Ali, 25, who was crying as she and her husband slogged through the water that had begun to seep into their carpets. “My grandparents lived here. My mom grew up here.”

Like others in Crown Point, Ali complained that political representatives had ignored their pleas to build more levees.

“It’s just the government is so corrupt, they put the money in their own pockets,” Ali said.

Down the road, Peter and Janella Jackson, brother and sister, stood on their porch and watched the water swamp their yard and start to swallow their mother’s car, which they could not move because she had taken the keys with her when she evacuated.

“We’ve got busted levees up here, and nobody does anything,” said Peter Jackson, 49.

But parish President Aaron Broussard said he and other local political leaders had lobbied for years to get federal funding for more levees, only to have Congress turn them down.

“We desperately need more protection from hurricanes,” he said.