Martial Law Declared

Martial Law Declared

NEW ORLEANS, LA, United States (UPI) -- Martial law was declared in New Orleans midday Tuesday as the city continued flooding from at least two levees damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
WWL-TV, New Orleans, which evacuated its studios earlier, reported airlifts of sandbags had been ordered as water flooded along the city`s landmark Canal Street. No one but emergency personnel was being allowed into the city, whose two airports were under water. Looting was reported.
Mayor Ray Nagin said bodies have been seen floating in floodwaters, although neither city nor Louisiana state officials had issued a preliminary death toll.
Nagin said the city`s Twin Span Bridge is "totally destroyed" and that 80 percent of the city is underwater. New Orleans is 6 feet below sea level, and reliant on levees to hold back water from Lake Ponchartrain.
He also predicted there would be no electricity in the city for four to six weeks. Natural gas leaks were also reported throughout the city, CNN reported.

Martial law Has not been issued since WWII.
is the system of rules that takes effect (usually after a formal declaration) when a military authority takes control of the normal administration of justice (and usually of the whole state).
Martial law is instituted most often when it becomes necessary to favor the activity of military authorities and organizations, usually for urgent unforeseen needs, and when the normal institutions of justice either cannot function or could be deemed too slow or too weak for the new situation; e.g., due to war, major natural disaster, civil disorder, in occupied territory, or after a coup d'état. The need to preserve the public order during an emergency is the essential goal of martial law. However, declaration of martial law is also sometimes used by dictatorships, especially military dictatorships, to enforce their rule.
Usually martial law reduces some of the personal rights ordinarily granted to the citizen, limits the length of the trial processes, and prescribes more severe penalties than ordinary law. In many countries martial law prescribes the death penalty for certain crimes, even if ordinary law doesn't contain that crime or punishment in its system.
In many countries martial law imposes particular rules, one of which is curfew. Often, under this system, the administration of justice is left to military tribunals, called courts-martial. The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus is likely to occur.

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Volunteers Mobilized Nationwide to Support Katrina Relief

Volunteers Mobilized Nationwide to Support Katrina Relief
Lesly C. Simmons , Staff Writer, RedCross.org

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 — The American Red Cross has mobilized thousands of volunteers to respond in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which completely devastated parts of Louisiana and left at least 55 people dead.

The Red Cross plans to send close to 2,000 volunteers in the area to begin the initial response in the next few days.


Red Cross emergency response vehicles (ERVs) will visit damaged neighborhoods like this one in Florida after Hurricane Charley last year. (Photo: Bonnie Gillespie).

“Volunteers are truly the lifeblood of the American Red Cross, and we are calling on them now by the thousands to help support relief efforts in Louisiana and other states after Katrina,” said Pat McCrummen, American Red Cross disaster spokesperson. “We are looking at a long term, very significant response to this storm.”




The Red Cross is mobilizing every available resource from across the country including thousands of staff and volunteers to respond to this storm. Red Cross volunteers and donors are neighbors helping neighbors.

Volunteers are already on the ground staffing shelters for tens of thousands of people in five states—Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas.

The Red Cross is launching the largest mobilization of resources for a single natural domestic disaster, in part because the extent of the damage is so widespread over a large geographical area. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin including sending nearly 1,900 staff and volunteers into the field in the next few days, and sending more than 250 Emergency Response Vehicles (ERVs) out to provide food and water to affected residents.

The best way to help is by making an online contribution to the Disaster Relief Fund at www.redcross.org.

If you are interested in volunteering for the American Red Cross, the place to start is your local chapter Red Cross. There you can learn about the training courses necessary to become a disaster volunteer. For more information, visit your local Red Cross chapter online.

Trained disaster volunteers often start by volunteering on local Red Cross Disaster Action Teams, which respond to disasters 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Red Cross responds to more than 70,000 disasters each year, the vast majority of which are house and apartment fires. Disaster volunteers who gain local experience also are eligible to serve as part of the Red Cross Disaster Services Human Resources System to be deployed to disasters around the country.

All American Red Cross disaster assistance is free, made possible by voluntary donations of time and money from the American people. You can help the victims of this disaster and thousands of other disasters across the country each year by making a financial gift to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, which enables the Red Cross to provide shelter, food, counseling and other assistance to those in need. Call 1-800-HELP NOW or 1-800-257-7575 (Spanish). Contributions to the Disaster Relief Fund may be sent to your local American Red Cross chapter or to the American Red Cross, P. O. Box 37243, Washington, DC 20013. Internet users can make a secure online contribution by visiting www.redcross.org.

New Orleans resident is rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard from a rooftop.

Thirty Dead in One Apartment Building

BILOXI, Miss. — Joy Schovest swam for her life, fighting Hurricane Katrina's storm surge and its angry winds, brushing aside debris and floating cars to reach higher ground.
Behind her, at least 30 of her neighbors in the Quiet Water Beach apartments were dying, trapped in their crumbling two-story building as it was swept away with much of this Mississippi coast community Monday.
"We grabbed a lady and pulled her out the window and then we swam with the current," said Schovest, 55, breaking into tears. "It was terrifying. You should have seen the cars floating around us. We had to push them away when we were trying to swim."
The tragedy at the apartment building represented the biggest known cluster of deaths caused by Katrina. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said the death toll in the county where Biloxi is located could be as high as 80.
The only remaining evidence of the Quiet Water Beach apartments was a concrete slab surrounded by a heap of red bricks that were once the building's walls. A crushed red toy wagon, jewelry, clothing and twisted boards were mixed in with the debris. The four-lane road that separated the building from the beachfront was buckled and covered with rubble.
"This is all that's left of my house," said nearby resident Jack Crochet, 56, shaking his head and looking at the rubble. "It's never going to be the same. It's over."
The storm also inflicted a punishing blow to Biloxi's waterfront casinos, down the beach from the apartment building. The Grand Casino gambling barge and a second casino broke away from their moorings, ending up in a ditch now filled with water and slot machines.



"Basically, it's a total loss, and that's in excess of $100 million to replace what was lost here," Bernie Burkholder, president and chief executive of Treasure Bay Casino in Biloxi, said as he walked around the casino property.
People examined the slot machines to see if they still contained coins, and looting broke out in other areas of Biloxi.
"People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they're Santa Claus," said Marty Desei, owner of a Super 8 motel in Biloxi. "I haven't seen anything like this in my whole life."
The lucky ones in the Quiet Water Beach apartment building and other vulnerable areas of Biloxi described a scene of pandemonium as they fled the rising water. When asked why they ignored evacuation orders, some said they did not think the storm would be that bad; others would not give a reason.
Apartment tenant Landon Williams, a 19-year-old construction worker, said he and his grandmother and uncle ran from the crumbling building as the storm hit. As they later swam through the swirling water and debris, "we watched the apartments disintegrate. You could hear the big pieces of wood cracking and breaking apart."
He said the winds flung two-by-fours and drywall.
"I lost everything. We can't even find my car," he said. "I'm looking through this wreckage to see if I can find anything that's mine. If not, I'm moving on. I think I'll move on to North Carolina and do some work over there. I can't take it here anymore — not after this."
Williams said six of his neighbors in the building who remained behind also survived. "As the second story collapsed, they climbed onto the roof and part of it floated away and they floated to a house that made it," he said.
Paul Merritt, 30, surveyed the damage in Biloxi with his 18-year-old wife and their 3-month-old son, Brandon. He said the water rose to the second story of his townhouse, which is less than a block off the beach.
"I've never seen destruction of this magnitude," Merritt said. "You see this stuff on TV and you hope that it never happens to you. Everything's gone."
Ida Punzo rode out the storm with a friend and two neighbors in her 130-year-old home on the beachfront in Biloxi. The first two floors of the old house were almost completely gone, but she survived.
"It was a miracle," Punzo said. "This place is held together with God's spit. We're not supposed to be alive."

'This Is Our Tsunami'

GULFPORT, Miss. — Death and destruction ravaged the severely storm-battered Gulf Coast Tuesday, with as many as 80 dead in one Mississippi county alone as the frantic search for survivors of Hurricane Katrina continued.





"We have nowhere to go," one broken man whose wife and house were swept away by floodwaters in Gulfport, Miss., told FOX News. "I lost everything. That's all I had. That's all I had."

Photos Aftermath Scenes Of Devestation

Scenes of Devastation
The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

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Let us all Pray in the name of Jesus as we view these photos.

New Orleans Evacuated by Governor

NEW ORLEANS — Rescuers along the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast pushed aside the dead to reach the living Tuesday in a race against time and rising floodwaters, while New Orleans sank deeper into crisis, with Louisiana's governor ordering storm refugees out of this drowning city.
Two levees broke and sent water coursing into the streets of the Big Easy a full day after New Orleans appeared to have escaped widespread destruction from Hurricane Katrina .
An estimated 80 percent of the below-sea-level city was under water, up to 20 feet deep in places, with miles and miles of homes swamped.
"The situation is untenable," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. "It's just heartbreaking."
The number of dead was still unclear, a day after Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds. But one Mississippi county alone was believed to have lost as many as 80 people — 30 of them from a beachfront apartment house that collapsed under a 25-foot wall of water. And Louisiana said many were feared dead there, too, making Katrina one of the most punishing storms to hit the United States in decades.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said hundreds, if not thousands, of people may still be stuck on roofs and in attics, and so rescue boats were bypassing the dead.
"We're not even dealing with dead bodies," Nagin said. "They're just pushing them on the side."
The flooding in New Orleans grew worse by the minute, prompting the evacuation of hotels and hospitals and an audacious plan to drop huge sandbags from helicopters to close up one of the breached levees. At the same time, looting broke out in some neighborhoods, the sweltering city of 480,000 had no drinkable water, and the electricity could be out for weeks.
With water rising perilously inside the Superdome, Blanco said the tens of thousands of refugees now huddled there and other shelters in New Orleans would have to be evacuated.
She asked residents to spend Wednesday in prayer.
"That would be the best thing to calm our spirits and thank our Lord that we are survivors," she said. "Slowly, gradually, we will recover; we will survive; we will rebuild."
All day long, rescuers in boats and helicopters pulled out shellshocked and bedraggled flood refugees from rooftops and attics. The Coast Guard said it has rescued 1,200 people by boat and air, some placed shivering and wet into helicopter baskets. They were brought by the truckload into shelters, some in wheelchairs and some carrying babies, with stories of survival and of those who didn't make it.
"Oh my God, it was hell," said Kioka Williams, who had to hack through the ceiling of the beauty shop where she worked as floodwaters rose in New Orleans' low-lying Ninth Ward. "We were screaming, hollering, flashing lights. It was complete chaos."
Frank Mills was in a boarding house in the same neighborhood when water started swirling up toward the ceiling and he fled to the roof. Two elderly residents never made it out, and a third was washed away trying to climb onto the roof.
"He was kind of on the edge of the roof, catching his breath," Mills said. "Next thing I knew, he came floating past me."
Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, more than 1 million residents remained without electricity, some without clean drinking water. An untold number who heeded evacuation orders were displaced and 40,000 were in Red Cross shelters, with officials saying it could be weeks, if not months, before most will be able to return.
Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage.
Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown warned that structural damage to homes, diseases from animal carcasses and chemicals in floodwaters made it unsafe for residents to come home anytime soon. And a mass return also was discouraged to keep from interfering with rescue and recovery efforts.
That was made tough enough by the vast expanse of floodwaters in coastal areas that took an eight-hour pounding from Katrina's howling winds and up to 15 inches of rainfall. From the air, neighborhood after neighborhood looked like nothing but islands of rooftops surrounded by swirling, tea-colored water.
In New Orleans, the flooding actually got worse Tuesday. Failed pumps and levees apparently sent water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing through the streets. The rising water forced hotels to evacuate, a hospital to move patients to boatlift patients to emergency shelters, and drove the staff of New Orleans' Times-Picayune newspaper out of its offices.
Officials planned to use helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags into the breach, and expressed confidence the problem could be solved. But if the water rose a couple feet higher, it could wipe out water system for whole city, said New Orleans' homeland security chief Terry Ebbert.
In devastated Biloxi, Miss., areas that were not underwater were littered with tree trunks, downed power lines and chunks of broken concrete. Some buildings were flattened.
The string of floating barge casinos crucial to the coastal economy were a shambles. At least three of them were picked up by the storm surge and carried inland, their barnacle-covered hulls sitting up to 200 yards inland.
The deadliest spot yet appeared to be Biloxi's Quiet Water Beach apartments, where authorities said about 30 people were washed away. All that was left of the red-brick building was a concrete slab.
"We grabbed a lady and pulled her out the window and then we swam with the current," 55-year-old Joy Schovest said through tears. "It was terrifying. You should have seen the cars floating around us. We had to push them away when we were trying to swim."
"What I'm authorized to say now is we expect the death toll to be higher than anything we've ever seen before," said Jim Pollard, civil defense spokesman for Mississippi's Harrison County, which includes Biloxi and Gulfport.
Asked if the toll could be higher than Hurricane Camille in 1969 when 131 were killed in Mississippi and 40 went missing, Pollard referred back to his statement and said, "That would be higher wouldn't it?"
Said Biloxi Mayor A. J. Holloway: "This is our tsunami."
Looting became a problem in both Biloxi and in New Orleans, in some cases in full view of police and National Guardsmen.
On New Orleans' Canal Street, which actually resembled a canal, dozens of looters ripped open the steel gates on clothing and jewelry stores, some packing plastic garbage cans with loot to float down the street. One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store.
"No," the man shouted, "that's EVERYBODY'S store!"
Outside the broken shells of Biloxi's casinos, people picked through slot machines to see if they still contained coins. "People are just casually walking in and filling up garbage bags and walking off like they're Santa Claus," said Marty Desei, owner of a Super 8 motel.
Insurance experts estimated the storm will result in up to $25 billion in insured losses. That means Katrina could prove more costly than record-setting Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which caused an inflation-adjusted $21 billion in losses.
Oil prices jumped by more than $3 a barrel on Tuesday, climbing above $70 a barrel, amid uncertainty about the extent of the damage to the Gulf region's refineries and drilling platforms.
By midday Tuesday, Katrina was downgraded to a tropical depression, with winds around 35 mph. It was moving northeast through Tennessee at around 21 mph, with the potential to dump 8 inches of rain and spin off deadly tornadoes.
Katrina left 11 people dead in its soggy jog across South Florida last week, as a much weaker storm.