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 Editorials | Environmental | September 2005 
Official: E. Coli Bacteria Detected in New Orleans Floodwater
 CNN
New Orleans, Louisiana - Floodwater in New Orleans is contaminated with E. coli bacteria, a city official told CNN Tuesday.
The official in Mayor Ray Nagin's office declined to be identified.
The failures of the levee system after Hurricane Katrina's onslaught left about 80 percent of the city flooded with water up to 20 feet deep - water that became a toxic mix of chemicals, garbage, corpses and human waste.
E. coli comes from human and animal waste and can be found in untreated sewage.
Drinking water contaminated with E. coli can lead to serious illness and death if not properly treated.
Authorities have warned it will take weeks to drain the water covering much of the city.
In the city's historic Garden District, helicopters dumped water on a raging fire as firefighters tried to keep the blaze from spreading to the other ornate mansions.
The fire destroyed at least two large buildings - one brick and the other wood, both former mansions divided into apartments.
Coast Guard helicopters snagged buckets of water from Lake Pontchartrain and firefighters from New York and New Orleans were using a gasoline-tanker sized truck filled with water since the city's water system has no pressure.
The fire was started by a candle in the basement of one of the buildings, the National Guard told CNN. Two people were rescued from one of the buildings.
The Garden District was spared from the worst of the damage from Hurricane Katrina. The area south of the French Quarter was where successful entrepreneurs of the mid-1800s built opulent mansions.
Fire is just one of the dangers faced by residents who plan to stay in the devastated city.
City officials want everybody out, both for their own safety and for the safety of those who will be engaged in the clean-up and rebuilding efforts.
"We have to convince them to leave," Nagin told NBC's "Today." "It's not safe here."
Nagin said that he did not know how many bodies would be revealed once the waters recede, but said the death toll was expected to be in the thousands.
"It's going to be awful, and it's going to wake the nation up again," Nagin said.
Currently, state officials report 71 dead.
Nagin denied that he had ordered rescuers to withhold food and water from people who insisted on staying. There had been reports that he had issued such an edict.
Recovery teams are searching house to house in New Orleans for hurricane victims, and helicopters are continuing to circle the city in a search for survivors.
Meanwhile, crews were working to pump water out of the city and back into the lake after engineers patched the ruptured levee along the 17th Street Canal on Monday.
Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, told CNN it would take up to 80 days to dry parts of the city.
Strock told CNN Tuesday that the Corps was working to minimize the environmental damage to Lake Pontchartrain.
The military was considering using planes to spray for mosquitoes in areas where standing water could become a breeding ground for the insects, which can carry West Nile virus and other diseases, an official told CNN.
Crews also resumed efforts to recover the bodies of people killed in the storm.
Bush, Congress Plan Investigations
President Bush met with his Cabinet Tuesday to discuss the relief efforts and said that he was sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the region to monitor the progress.
Bush said that he would lead an investigation "to find out what went right and what went wrong."
Congress also plans a probe.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee initiated an oversight review Tuesday of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, became the latest lawmaker to lash out at the government's response to the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe Tuesday, asking "why the hell" officials didn't immediately get victims what they needed.
Discussing images of New Orleans' Superdome, in which thousands of victims were stranded for days, Leahy said it "drives me up a wall" that the government said it was unable to get in critical supplies - such as water, food, and medicine - at the same time the press was accessing the site.
Other Developments
In Mississippi, the death toll stands at 161, according to the state's emergency management agency, but that toll is expected to rise. In a meeting with President Bush, Sen. Trent Lott demanded more help for Mississippi and called on the president to authorize sending to his state 20,000 trailers he said are "sitting" in Georgia.
A plan to house move about 4,000 evacuees from shelters in Texas to three cruise ships was put on hold Tuesday, because the people were not ready to move, officials said in a statement. The evacuees said that they wanted to focus on finding loved ones instead of being uprooted again, the statement said.
FEMA has taken over and put on hold an airlift operation Texas initiated to send displaced persons to other states, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement on his Web site Monday. The agency is reviewing how to best handle the influx of evacuees to Texas, which Perry said Sunday had reached 230,000. The American Red Cross, meanwhile, said the largest response to a natural disaster in its history has provided housing for more than 130,000 people in 470 shelters in 12 states.
Shortly after Donna Brazile made an emotional appeal on CNN Monday for rescuers to find her sister in New Orleans, an official with the Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Service sent a boat to the location she described on air and found Brazile's 46-year-old sister and five others alive. Brazile is a CNN political contributor and the former manager of the 2000 Gore-Lieberman campaign. |
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