President Bush accepted responsibility Tuesday for the government’s feeble initial response to Hurricane Katrina as New Orleans took major steps toward normalcy with the reopening of the city’s airport to passenger traffic and an optimistic announcement by the mayor that up to a third of city residents might be able to return to their homes as soon as next week.
But even as the battered city dared to look forward, the Louisiana attorney general announced the first criminal charges stemming from deaths in the storm, charging the husband-and-wife owners of a nursing home near New Orleans with negligent homicide in the deaths of 34 frail patients who were not evacuated and who succumbed to the floodwaters.
“Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government,” Bush said at the White House. “And to the extent that the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility.”
The acknowledgment by Bush, coming a day after he replaced Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, marked a turning point for an administration that had sought to deflect criticism of relief efforts as a counterproductive “blame game.”
The president, in a joint news conference with the visiting Iraqi president, conceded that the handling of the Katrina disaster raised questions about the nation’s preparedness for terror attacks.
As military helicopters circled overhead and rescue teams combed New Orleans’ flooded neighborhoods in search of remaining survivors, Mayor C. Ray Nagin stood in historic Jackson Square in the city’s fabled French Quarter and announced that air and water testing conducted throughout the city by the Environmental Protection Agency had yielded much more optimistic results than expected.
Tests showed that at least four of the city’s neighborhoods– the French Quarter, the Central Business District, Uptown and Algiers–would soon be safe to occupy again. Those neighborhoods escaped much of the flooding that had covered 80 percent of the city.
“If I had to guess, I’d say by Monday we can open parts of the city,” said Nagin, adding that such a move would be possible only if a written EPA report was as positive as a briefing he had received over the phone earlier in the day.
The city’s death toll from the disaster jumped sharply Tuesday as body-recovery teams began finding some of the hidden victims that officials had been fearing.
The death count rose to 423 from 279 a day earlier.
Louisiana Atty. Gen. Charles Foti, announcing charges in the nursing home deaths, said the couple who owned the facility, Salvador and Mable Mangano, had ignored repeated warnings that the storm was coming. Their failure to evacuate their elderly patients from St. Rita’s Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish “resulted in the deaths of these people,” Foti said.
Foti said the nursing home had a contract with an ambulance company to evacuate residents, but the owners did not summon help and turned down offers from parish officials to send buses.
Elsewhere in the New Orleans area, officials were sounding upbeat as they permitted more business owners into the city center to begin damage assessments and cleanup work, and contractors and utility workers swarmed the streets to reconnect power and water lines.
Nagin said he hoped many residents would be allowed to return to the city soon. Unlike officials in surrounding cities, who so far have allowed residents back in for only brief periods to assess damage and retrieve essential personal items, Nagin said residents of the cleared New Orleans neighborhoods would be allowed back permanently, with a curfew likely after nightfall.
All the neighborhoods that may be reopened are suffering from power outages, but energy officials were predicting power would be restored by next week. Nagin said water, too, would once again be running, though probably not yet safe to drink.
New Orleans can’t pay workers
Nagin noted, however, that the city had run out of cash to pay city employees. He said he hoped New Orleans could avert bankruptcy by securing loans that would allow it to keep paying city employees until at least the end of the year.
Officials said power was being restored across the rest of Louisiana and Mississippi, where more than 70 percent of the 1.1 million customers who had been without electricity since Katrina hit two weeks ago were now back on line.
In other signs of revival, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport reopened to commercial flights Tuesday when Northwest Airlines Flight 947 from Memphis landed around midday with about 30 people aboard.
The New Orleans port, another vital commercial lifeline for the city and the nation, also has reopened, weeks earlier than officials had been predicting. A shipment of steel coils left the port by barge Monday, bound for a Hyundai auto plant in Greenville, Ala., according to port spokesman Chris Bonura.
The pace of rescues across the city slowed Tuesday as about 30 people were evacuated–an “all-time low,” according to Nagin.
Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell, commander of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, said about 3,000 people remained in the city and that all of them had been approached numerous times and asked to leave.
There remained uncertainty, however, about the extent to which authorities were using force to evacuate holdouts.
On Monday, a New Orleans police captain told the Tribune that police were forcibly removing some residents who might be off their medications and couldn’t care for themselves, in some cases using handcuffs when the residents became belligerent.
Forcible evacuations denied
But a Police Department spokesman, Capt. Marlin Defillo, said Tuesday: “We will not force anyone out of their home, period.”
Teams of National Guard soldiers and agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said they were under orders to try to persuade residents to leave but to allow them to stay if they insisted.
In one display of patience and persuasion, an ATF unit from Detroit found a dazed man suffering from skin rashes who agreed to leave his flooded home, but only if rescuers would save his seven cats and dogs as well.
The rescue unit called in a team from the American Humane Society, which showed up after several hours with a boat, cages and promises to care for Paul Baker’s animals. He relented and agreed to be evacuated.
“If you had a dog for 10 years, you wouldn’t just let him die,” said Baker, 53.
One paramedic with the group said that if he came across a resident who was sick or mentally incapacitated, he would evacuate him, even if it meant using force.
“If I saw somebody and they were not with it, not able to get with the program, then yes, I would remove them,” said ATF agent Jean-Marc Behar, adding that he hadn’t yet come across such a situation.
How to help
For a list of groups accepting donations for hurricane relief, go to chicagotribune.com/katrina and select “Fund list.”
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kscharnberg@tribune.com
mdsilva@tribune.com
