Mayor Predicts Thousands Dead

One Of Three Levee Breaks Is Fixed

(CBS/AP) 
In another effort of "encouragement," a Louisiana State Police SWAT team armed with rifles confronted two brothers at their home in the Uptown section of New Orleans, leaving one sobbing.

"I thought they were going to shoot me," said 23-year-old Leonard Thomas, weeping on his front porch. "That dude came and stuck the gun dead at my head."

One officer, who did not give his name, said his team tried to make sure that the two men understood that food and water were becoming scarce and disease could begin spreading.

With almost a third of New Orleans' police force missing in action, a caravan of law enforcement vehicles, emblazoned with emblems from across the nation and blue lights flashing, poured into the city to help establish order on the city's anarchic streets.

Four hundred to 500 officers on New Orleans' 1600-member force were unaccounted for. Some lost their homes. Some were looking for families. "Some simply left because they said they could not deal with the catastrophe," Riley said. Officers were being cycled off duty and given five-day vacations in Las Vegas and Atlanta, where they would also receive counseling.

The leader of National Guard troops patrolling New Orleans declared the city largely free of the lawlessness that plagued it in the days following the hurricane. And he angrily lashed out at a reporter who suggested search-and-rescue operations were being stymied by random gunfire and lawlessness.

"Go on the streets of New Orleans — it's secure," said Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore. "Have you been to New Orleans? Did anybody accost you?"

Hopeful signs of recovery were accompanied by President Bush's second visit to Louisiana that exposed a continued rift between state and federal officials over the slowness of a relief effort. The first significant convoy of food, water and medicine didn't arrive in New Orleans until four full days after the hurricane, and the mayor and others said some survivors died awaiting relief.

The Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest newspaper, published an open letter to Bush, called for the firing of every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

At a stop in Baton Rouge, Bush said all levels of the government were doing their best, and he pledged: "So long as any life is in danger, we've got work to do."

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has refused to sign over National Guard control to the federal government and has turned to a Clinton administration official, former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt, to help run relief efforts.

Blanco, a Democrat, was not informed of the timing of Bush's visit, nor was she immediately invited to meet him or travel with him. In fact, Blanco's office didn't know when Bush was coming until told by reporters.

Late Monday, Blanco denied there was tension with Bush.

"We'd like to stop the voices out there trying to create a divide. There is no divide," she said. "Every leader in this nation wants to see this problem solved."

In Texas, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared a public health emergency for that state, saying it would speed up federal assistance to help almost 240,000 storm evacuees — the most of any state.

While the New Orleans' refugees were mostly poor and black, Jefferson Parish brought the storm's destruction to a much wider economic cross-section. The sprawling parish stretches from Grand Isle on the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Pontchartrain in the north, and includes some of the metropolitan area's most exclusive neighborhoods.

Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, expressed his frustration with the federal government's recovery response on CBS' Early Show.

"They don't want America to know just how many people have been murdered in New Orleans because of their inefficiency."

"They're holding back the horror from the nation to try to get their act together. And then by the time they get it together, the body counts are going to far surpass Iraq, so far surpass Afghanistan."