Alas, contrary to popular belief, I am not “tireless” :) … so I’m going to bed, at least for a few hours. I have a job interview in the morning, and classes as well, so I fear I won’t be able to blog at quite the furious pace of the last three days. But I’ll try to keep the blog as updated as possible, and I’ve enlisted the assistance of some “emergency guestbloggers” who have the ability post via e-mail if there is major breaking news that I’m missing. And of course, if you have any news to report, e-mail me and/or leave a comment. I’ve gotten a lot of crucial news tips from the comments. Also, don’t forget to check the sites linked at left; they’ve got lots of good info, too.

Oh… and please bookmark my backup site, http://66.237.232.84/, in case my main site goes down again because of bandwidth problems.

See you in the morning! (Er, well, it’s already morning, but… you know what I mean. :)

“Water is rising, but not rising that fast,” according to CNN anchor. (This would seem to contradict previous statements by hospital official. But I guess it depends on your definition of “that fast.”) Army Corps of Engineers are meeting to try and figure out what to do. Breach is near 17th and Canal Street.

“The hospital evacuation has now been delayed because the water has slowed, according to CNN,” Mike writes. I missed that report.

Here are some pictures of the 17th Street Canal in happier times.

UPDATE, 3:15 AM: CNN now has confirmation from a New Orleans Fire Department official that “there has been a 200-foot break in the levee that surrounds the 17th Street Canal.”

According to Mike, WWL is reporting that “80% of the city is underwater, up to 20 feet deep” and “both airports are under, the yatch club is gone, water is still entering, houses have broken off their foundations and are floating free.” This is all presumably because of the delayed breach of the 17th Street canal (see below). Lake Pontchartrain is entering the city and become Lake New Orleans. The cable news networks have not really caught on yet to what is happening.

CONFIRMED: From the WWL website: “Mayor Ray Nagin reports the Twin Span Bridge is ‘totally destroyed’ and that 80% of the city is underwater.”

WWL video feed here (does not appear to be working at the moment, though).

There is a two-block-long breach in the Lake Pontchartrain levee, and the water in downtown New Orleans is rising at the rate of one inch every 5 minutes, according to Karen Troyer-Caraway, vice president of the Tulane University Medial Center. She said she got the information about the breach from the state police, having witnessed the rising water herself for the last two hours. The breach is at 17th Street canal (?), she says. “The water is rising so fast, I cannot begin to describe it,” she says. The rate of water rise is increasing.

The hospital is in downtown New Orleans — the central business district. They did not have any substantial street flooding during the storm, but now, they are contemplating an air evacuation because the ground floor is submerged, and the second floor, where the emergency generators are located, will be submerged soon if the water keeps rising at this rate. They have been on emergency generator power since 2:00 AM.

It sounds to me like the worst-case scenario, or something very like it, may happen after all. Is there anything that can stop Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the city, now that there is such a substantial breach? This is a catastrophe, and it’s happening right now.

[Editor’s Note: This is the “lost post” of my Katrina coverage. It appeared on the blog for only a few minutes, then disappeared when the blog went temporarily offline due to server troubles, and then was removed entirely by yours truly because breaking news from New Orleans — that the entire city was flooding — rendered its basic factual premise obsolete, mere minutes after it was abortively published. The full story is told here.]

It is a cruel twist of fate that the 9th Ward is apparently the hardest-hit portion of New Orleans, given that it is also the poorest portion of the city and therefore probably had the greatest number of people who could not and did not evacuate. A flood in a more affluent neighborhood would have threatened fewer lives, as fewer lives were there to threaten.

But let’s stop for a moment and imagine, painful as this is, how much worse it could have been. After all, although some of those trapped people in 9th Ward will probably die, many of them will surely be rescued, and will live. But imagine if Katrina had waited just a few more hours before turning northward, and had made landfall a meteorologically insignificant 30 or 40 miles further west. Those ferocious winds that ravaged Biloxi and Gulfport and Pass Christian would have instead ravaged New Orleans, including the 9th Ward. The city still would have flooded — in fact, the flood would have been far worse — and those attics and rooftops where the stranded victims of Katrina have taken shelter would not exist. At the very least, the roofs would have blown off, exposing the attics to the elements. At worst, the houses would have totally collapsed, sending their occupants into the toxic lake below. Either way, the bottom line is this: those people crying for help would already be dead, almost all of them. (This becomes even more apparent if you imagine Katrina coming ashore at its intensity 6-12 hours before landfall, in which case all of those houses definitely would have collapsed.)

This can no longer be dismissed as some hare-brained hypothetical worst-case scenario dreamed up by LSU researchers to scare the public. It is now something we should all be able to visualize very easily. Simply take the pictures you’re seeing on TV of devastation in New Orleans and combine them in your mind with the pictures you’re seeing on TV of destruction in Mississippi. Both things happening in the same place (plus, the flood being far worse, and citywide) — that’s the worst-case scenario, and it’s not theoretical, it’s not hypothetical, it’s real. It almost happened this morning, and someday, it will.

And what does “someday” mean? It could mean in 30 years, or it could mean in two weeks. As the residents of Florida have recently learned, the law of averages doesn’t always work out neatly. Scientists say the tropics will be extremely active for the next decade or so. Making the people of New Orleans safe — or, as safe as can reasonably be managed without simply abandoning their inevitably vulnerable city — must be an urgent priority for local, state and national authorities. It will be difficult and expensive, but it cannot wait. As I wrote earlier, this must be a wake-up call. Let us not allow the victims of Hurricane Katrina to have died in vain.

(source)

NOLA:

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Mike Brown called Katrina one of the worst disasters he has seen, exceeded only by California wildfires.

“This is a catastrophic storm,” he said. “People will not get back to their homes for several weeks — if not longer.”

Jeanne Meserve is on CNN, talking about stranded people in New Orleans who can’t get help. She’s breaking down. She can barely hold herself together enough to talk to Aaron Brown.

“We [reporters] are wacky thrill-seekers sometimes, but when you stand in the dark, and you hear people yelling for help and no one can get to them, it’s a totally different experience.”

One of the reasons they can’t get to people is because some of the natural-gas and electrical lines are still “live,” and it’s too dangerous to take boats around in those areas, according to CNN photojournalist Mark Biello.

“Could be hundreds of deaths by tomorrow.” –Biello

Water still rising — slowly, not dramatically like before, but still rising.

Lots of dogs and cats also stranded on rooftops, along with humans, Biello says. (An important question: what about the snakes?)

There has been looting in New Orleans. Assholes.

Meanwhile, WSDU is reportedly showing footage of a fire spreading from house to house in Metairie.

Also… CNN is now reporting that conditions at the Superdome are getting “progressively worse.” There is some considerable “tension” among the population inside, according to Ray Bias, an emergency worker at the dome, and he’s not sure how much longer the current situation will remain tenable.

In comments, Chris writes:

People will NOT be going back home for a long long time to much of New Orleans, even if the water drops, which will take a long time because three of the huge pumps are out, there is now sewage, waste, pollution, disease carring agents and vectors of all kinds EVERYWHERE….many of the older houses will have to be condemned, many of the people living in them before will not be able to afford to rebuild, the roads, rail system and infrastructre of all kinds is severely damaged, I heard at least one major bridge on 10 is “comprimised”

That sounds right to me. He also criticizes news anchors for constantly saying “people are asking when they can go home,” as if the big story here is the impatience of the evacuees. “Don’t they realize that this just delays the reality of what all those people must face, they will be in camps or refugees possibly for many months?”

UPDATE: I-10 bridge story confirmed: “Sections of the Interstate 10 twin bridges linking St. Tammany and Orleans parishes over Lake Pontchartrain have been ’severely damaged’ in both directions, some probably knocked out, Louisiana’s highway boss said.”

NOLA: “Jefferson Parish’s Chief Administrative Assistant Tim Whitmer said the damage from Hurricane Katrina was almost equally split between the east bank and the West Bank. ‘We have widespread devastation in the parish,’ he said.” Details, and lots of other good info, on the NOLA breaking-news blog.

Meanwhile, off to the east in Mississippi, “things are very bad” in the Gulfport/Biloxi area, according to the Sun-Herald storm blog:

I’ve gotten several hundred specific queries about friends, families and neighborhoods. I’ve told several people that it is easier to list the things that are undamaged than those that have been pounded. That’s the honest truth.

We’ve got significant loss of life, with around 40 dead in Biloxi alone. We’re trying to glean other information from Coast municipalities and counties, but communications are brutal here at the moment. Shortly, we’ll be posting some stories that will be appearing in tomorrow’s edition, which will be printed in Columbus, Ga., and flown by helicopter for distribution as best we can in the area.

Now CNN is reporting that one, maybe two oil rigs are “adrift” and missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard is aerially searching for them.

“Officials reported at least 55 deaths, with 50 alone in Harrison County, Miss., which includes Gulfport and Biloxi. Emergency workers feared that they would find more dead among people believed to be trapped underwater and in collapsed buildings.”

Also: “Insurance experts said that damage could exceed $9 billion, which would make it one of the costliest storms on record.”

P.S. A commenter notes: “55 . . . that’s a high death toll to start with in the US. Highest starting death toll I’ve heard since 9/11. These natural disaster tolls only tend to go up. Not good.” My thoughts exactly.

Adam Stone speculates via e-mail, “I think the death toll will be in the hundreds.” He comments, “I just talked to my friend in Ocean Springs, MS who works for the city. He told me that they have been pulling bodies out of houses all day. The surge in Ocean Springs (on the east side of Biloxi) was in excess of 20 feet. This is worse than I could imagine ever happening. Lots of missing people.”

This used to be an apartment building:

The New York Times has some great pictures and video, including these shots:

Meanwhile, here’s a picture from AFP of the runaway oil drilling platform that collided with Mobile’s Cochrane-Africatown USA Bridge, which is closed until further notice:

Matt Drachenberg at overtaken by events writes via e-mail:

My wife is going insane. Her mom is 82, recovering from a broken pelvis and stuck in the Jefferson Healthcare nursing home in Metairie. I cannot find anything about the conditions in the area (it’s around Ochsner). If any of your contacts have any info, I would be eternally grateful.

If anyone knows anything, please leave it in comments. Thanks!

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco on Larry King Live: “We believe we’ve lost some lives.” No idea how many, but various reports here and there.

NOLA: “unconfirmed reports of dead bodies in floodwaters.”

Also: “Gentilly, Treme, Bywater and the 9th Ward [have] been swallowed.”

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, “we have a report that portions of U.S. 90 are under seven feet of water.” Evacuees are being told NOT to come back.

Here’s a summary of the Mississippi damage: “Hurricane Katrina brought catastrophic damage from the Coast to Hattiesburg. Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said downtown buildings were ‘imploding’ or collapsing, particularly in the 19th street area. Coastwide there were reports of homes and buildings knocked off their foundations by storm surges as high as 28 feet.”

Let’s be clear about something. I don’t want to hear any of this crap about how the media and local officials overhyped this storm. First of all, the damage along the Mississippi coastline was catastrophic! The storm surge was worse than Camille, and basically, entire sections of coastline are GONE. And that was from a weakened Katrina!!! Secondly, New Orleans was hit very, very hard, at least in terms of property damage. (It’s too soon to say what the human toll will be.) But it could have been much, much worse — unimaginably worse — and that is not just hype.

There are two reasons New Orleans was not destroyed (but merely devastated), two reasons this was not an apocalyptic lost-city-of-Atlantis scenario (but merely a really bad flood). Those reasons are: 1) a last-minute northward turn, and 2) a last-minute sudden weakening the likes of which I have rarely seen before. (Yes, several recent hurricanes have weakened as they approached the Gulf coast, but this one really weakened FAST, particularly the left-hand side of the eyewall. And look at all the damage it still did!!) I watched both things happen in the wee hours of this morning, and believe me, neither of them were pre-ordained to happen. Both of them happened in the final 6-9 hours before landfall, and if either one of them had not happened, we’d be looking at a very different situation right now. We wouldn’t be rescuing people from their rooftops because the rooftops would be submerged, along with the rest of the city up to 20-30 feet. This is not a hypothetical scenario. IT ALMOST HAPPENED.

Anyone who suggests that this storm was “overhyped” is contributing to a DEADLY CULTURE OF COMPLACENCY that will dissuade people from evacuating the next time around. For there will be a next time around. New Orleans was spared “The Big One” today — this was a big one, but not the Big One — but someday, the worst will happen. It is inevitable; it’s a matter of when, not if. THIS SHOULD BE A WAKE-UP CALL, not an excuse to become complacent and arrogant. New Orleans should learn from this storm and actually come up with a viable plan to deal with a direct hit from Cat. 4-5 hurricane, which this ultimately was not. Shore up the levees, wall off a portion of the city, whatever — something has to be done. And sitting around, carping about how this storm was “overhyped” is obscenely counterproductive.

Here’s a Katrina missing persons board.