It's Hard To Tell The Story

Four long days and nights have passed since Hurricane Katrina pounded, flattened and drowned New Orleans and much of the southeastern Gulf Coast.

The death toll keeps rising and today one Louisiana senator said 10,000 people may be dead in his state, CBS News correspondent Dan Rather reports. Damage estimates for the entire hurricane zone have climbed as high as $100 billion.

More federal aid finally started arriving in the area today. The National Guard transported food and water, driving through streets in New Orleans that looked more like rivers. The Guard - or the cavalry as one general called them -- also brought their guns and are under orders to take back the violent streets of the city.

President Bush, criticized for doing too little too late, tried to comfort some residents in Mississippi and promised to restore law and order in New Orleans. The president said he was happy with the federal response to the disaster but he did concede he is not satisfied with the results.

The president spoke after the mayor of New Orleans said the federal government does not have a clue what is going on in his city. And as gasoline prices spike all over the country, Mr. Bush warned there may be gas supply problems this Labor Day weekend.

All week long, a team of veteran CBS News correspondents has been covering the deadly destruction and extraordinary misery caused by Hurricane Katrina. Rather asked John Roberts and Lee Cowan to take a step back from their daily reporting in the epicenter of the storm and share their impressions of what they've seen and felt.

"I've been to a lot of these hurricanes including Hugo in 1989 and Andrew in 1992, which were both considered to be some of the biggest storms to hit the United States with some of the most grievous damage," Roberts says. "But I have to be honest to say I have never seen anything like this, that the scope of the human suffering here in New Orleans is difficult to comprehend, let alone try to convey to viewers through video and through storytelling. There are so many people here who have nothing, who have nowhere to go and are not being helped."

He says he talked with people who were on the interstate highway for two days in the broiling sun: "No one had even come by to check on them, certainly nobody had dropped off water. There was some water that was being dropped off as of Thursday, but certainly not enough to take care of everybody here.

"And the scene at the convention center in downtown New Orleans was reminiscent of something we have seen before perhaps in places like Haiti, thousands of people just standing around, not knowing where to go, not knowing what to do."

Roberts shows a clip of on evacuee shouting, "We got a 3-week-old baby out here. They don't have no formula, no water and they want us to survive out here. Where's FEMA? Where's the mayor? We need some help out here."

Roberts points out that the federal response to Hurricane Andrew was criticized as sluggish. "But they still got lots of water in," he says. "They got those water buffalos that the National Guard brings in. They were distributing meals ready to eat and other relief supplies. It appears as though what happened was that the authorities locally put all of their chips into one basket, that basket being the Superdome and just about everything else fell through the cracks."

Amid so many compelling stories, Roberts says, are the ones that just sit with you and give you nightmares at night and make it difficult for you to sleep. One for him involved a 75-year-old woman. "She had been trapped in her house in the eastern section of New Orleans with water up to her chest," he recounts.

"She was finally rescued by a boat, they brought her to the interstate along with her husband of 53 years and they were left on the interstate. Cars, police cars and other emergency vehicles, were traveling up and down the interstate all night long. She was desperately trying to flag them down because her husband was having a seizure. They kept passing her by and her husband died at her feet. That was on Tuesday evening; yesterday, we went by the same area and that body is still sitting there."

Roberts tells Rather the single biggest problem is what to do with people who aren't at the Superdome. Buses took some to facilities in Houston, including the Astrodome, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry is accepting up to 50,000 more.

"But there are thousands, tens of thousands of other people in this area who just have no place to go," Roberts says. "We were shooting on the streets down in the eastern section of New Orleans on Thursday and people were just walking. We saw a man who was a Vietnam vet, who gave his service to the country. He was wounded, disabled, unable to walk. He was being pushed along on one of those carts that you would pile boxes on having no idea where to go, but he had to leave his neighborhood because there were no relief supplies coming into it. There was nobody whatsoever giving them any direction. Gangs of looters were roaming through the streets; he felt it was unsafe to stay there. But they didn't have any kind of direction other than to say they eventually wanted to get to Texas.

"And you see those stories repeatedly, everywhere across this city. That the sense of desperation among these people is growing and while the operations at the Superdome, seem by the end of the week finally to be getting into gear, there are just so many other people across the city of New Orleans and all of these other parishes who just have no help whatsoever."

Cowan, who also reported from New Orleans, tells Rather it reminds him last year's tsunami, with one key difference.

"That time around, it seemed as if the world came to a stop and all the attention was focused on helping the people of the tsunami," he says. And the people there got that sense and really appreciated that. I don't get that sense here at all. In fact, it is just the opposite, almost everybody that we've talked to feels like the world has forgotten them."

When he first got there, he says he went to one of these freeway overpasses that was essentially the high ground or the highest ground for people to get to. "The very first thing that happened, " he says, "we were mobbed by people saying 'Where's the water? Where's the food?' A woman grabbed us, took us over to the side of the bridge and told us to look over the edge. We did and there was obviously someone who had jumped to his death down there. And she said he'd been sitting there for two days saying, 'They're not going to bring the water, they're not going to bring the food, we're not going to make it.' And one day, he simply got up and jumped."

A day later, Cowan says, he was in a boat, trying to check out the hospital situation in downtown New Orleans when he found a patient, an actual patient still in his hospital gown, floating on a piece of plywood.

"He'd been there for a day and no one had picked him up," Cowan says. "We had to pick him up. We pulled him into the boat ourselves and took him back to the hospital that we think he came from."

There 's a sense of hopelessness there that he has never experienced certainly on any other story, including the tsunami, Cowan says.
The most touching scenes involve the children, he says. "You see 2-, 3-, 4-year-olds that are trying to help their parents get through this, amazing scenes. And then you see literally newborns, I mean, children that are 10-days old, 2-weeks old, mothers don't have any milk. They're doing the best they can to shade them from the sun. They don't have tents, they don't even have wood, they don't even have cardboard. They're literally sitting on the curbs with no water and very little food, just waiting for someone to come and pick them up."

Is the sense of being forgotten justified by the facts on the ground?

"There are a lot of good folks here," Cowan says, "who are really trying their level best to help the people that are here. But the response so far just does not seem to match the scope of the disaster. And one incident I think maybe sums it up the best, when all the looting started, the police tried to do their best to stop it. It got out of hand; they didn't stop it. But at one point, we found ourselves in front of a door that had been broken in at a Walgreen's drug store, a crowd gathering around. There was one policeman there at the door, and he said 'Look, I can't tell you to go in here, but you gotta do what you gotta do to survive.' Pretty remarkable statement."

With thousands of people feared dead and still missing in New Orleans, there is mounting concern about the threat of widespread disease. Rather asked Dr. Frederick Cerise, head of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, to gauge that threat.

"The more immediate medical concerns at this point are those people who have special needs who have medical conditions now," he says. "The cholera and those types of things, probably the rescue workers that have been in the water are most at risk for that type of thing as opposed to, as I said, the people that are being sheltered now."

Do the corpses floating in New Orleans present a problem?

"We have a morgue effort that is ongoing now that will be collecting bodies and trying to deal with that situation," Cerise says. " Obviously, the emphasis up to this point has been collecting live people and getting them to points of safety."

The doctor says dealing with emergencies like this was not part of his training and he never anticipated having to deal with anything like it.

"So much of what we are dealing with is not the science of medicine," he says. " It is how to get people out of disaster situations to a safe environment. When we were on a military vehicle that ended up being able to get through the water to Charity Hospital in New Orleans and to see those residents in training that were in the hospital and to see those staff physicians there who were taking care of these people like they were their own family. They were going down 12 floors of the hospital with the patient above the head on a flat board to get them down to a boat in this particular instance, to get them to a helipad."

For hundreds of miles east of New Orleans, communities, homes and lives all along the Gulf Coast have been shattered and destroyed Correspondent Harry Smith has been in that zone of 90,000 square miles all week long.

"It's been an incredible journey," he says. "We got into Gulfport, Miss., Monday night. Well, you all have seen the pictures. I mean, it was a scene of just utter total destruction.

"What we kept hearing day after day after day this week is all storms were measured against hurricane Camille. Camille came though, was a killer hurricane in 1969. A couple of old timers came up to me one day this week and they said, 'You know what? Camille was a thunderstorm compared to what this thing was.' And for the first time in my 20 years of covering these kinds of storms, it wasn't the high winds, it was just this unbelievable volume of water."

The best example was First Baptist church in Gulfport. The church was built in 1968. Camille came in 1969. That church withstood Camille. All that's left of that church right now is a shell.

"We've covered so many storms over the years," Smith says, "and there's always the anguish, there's always the heartbreak, there's always the tears, there's always this sense of being that their heart is torn out. I don't think we even have a tiny clue as to what the death toll will ultimately be here. The pictures we see do in fact tell the story but the people on the ground here, as resilient as tough as they are, it's taking a terrible, terrible toll.

"We met a family, their home was wiped out. Their car was covered in the flood; they couldn't drive anywhere. They had $50 in their pocket; they had all their possessions in two shopping carts."

During the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Smith says, "it was so quick, especially like where I was in Sri Lanka, they set up tent cities, was certainly more desperate in Ache and some other places. But I kept thinking to myself all week this week, where's the relief? Where's the dramatic pulling together of these resources that we're so used to in America. And as these pictures unfolded I kept thinking to myself how can this be happening here. We're so used to looking at those pictures and saying to ourselves, in a somewhat smug manner, 'Well, that's what happens in a Third World or developing country. They just don't have what we have and don't we feel sorry for them.'

"How did this happen here like this? Lord knows, Dan you and I've covered so many stories together. You always talked about 'Boy, if it hits New Orleans.' They've planned so much for it. They've talked so much about it. The worse case scenario happened and they were not able to respond to it."