It's Hard To Tell The Story

CBS Correspondents Speak of Misery, Hopelessness

(CBS) 
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."