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CNN Live At Daybreak
Rita Getting Faster, Stronger and Closer; Mayor of New Orleans Tells People in His City to Hit the Road Again
Aired September 20, 2005 - 05:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KELLY WALLACE, CNN ANCHOR: It is Tuesday, September 20. Rita is getting faster, stronger and closer and that has people on the Gulf Coast saying not again. We'll have the very latest on the coming storm.
Also the mayor of New Orleans has a urgent message for people in his city. Hit the road again.
And a fiery crash in Iraq, British forces smash down some walls and take on a mob. We'll show you more.
From the Time Warner Center in New York, this is DAYBREAK. I'm Kelly Wallace in today for Carol Costello who's on assignment in New Orleans this morning. Thanks so much for waking up with us. We appreciate it.
We will hear from Carol in just a moment. Also take a look at the left side of your screen. CNN is working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to get out information on Katrina's divided families. Calls to the center have quadrupled since Saturday morning and with your help more cases can be resolved.
Now a look at these stories "In the News", four Americans have been killed by a suicide car bomber in Mosul, Iraq. One of the Americans was a diplomatic security agent working for the U.S. Regional Embassy Office. The others were security guards working for the Blackwater Security Company.
A videotape from Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant is downplaying U.S. achievements in Afghanistan. Ayman al-Zawahiri also calls those who carried out July's deadly London bombings -- quote -- "hero".
Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has died this morning in Vienna, Austria. He helped track down Nazi war criminals after World War II. He then spent decades fighting anti Semitism and other kinds of prejudice. Wiesenthal was 96.
President Bush returning to the Gulf Coast today. Hs fifth visit since Hurricane Katrina struck. He'll visit Gulf Port, Mississippi and New Orleans on Friday and Saturday. He'll head to Alabama, Texas and Arkansas to thank some of those who have taken in Katrina victims.
Chad, you are in Atlanta, of course, monitoring Rita. What is the latest advisory that we have about this storm?
CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: It is a 70-mile-per-hour storm, still a tropical storm although on the verge of becoming a hurricane. I've checked all the odds coming out of the hurricane hunter aircraft. They're in the storm right now. There it is very close to the Florida Peninsula in the Bahamas still, moving into the Florida Straits but certainly already affecting places like Fort Lauderdale, Bonita Beach, all the way down even into Key West where a large area, a large outer band that just really smacked the state all the way from almost West Palm right on down to Miami.
I'll zoom in for you. You can see the line. It was off shore and then all of a sudden, bang, it come onshore, Hollywood, 54 miles per hour, Miami at 38 miles per hour. Coral Gables down about 44 miles per hour, and that was just one of the outer bands of the storm. That same outer band is moving through and almost into Key West at this hour, right through it, right through Key West right now.
There you go, that's the live local radar right there. It's as close as you get, right into Key West. Now I'll flatten it out for you. And this band of water, this band of rain is just going to be coming in circulating around the storm itself. Sure, the storm is still well offshore, but we are already feeling the effects.
And if you get caught with a 55 or 60-mile-per-hour wind gust, trying to go over some of those bridges, you may have a hand full with that car or that truck. Two storms, there is Philippe or Philippe, whatever you want to call it out there. It is not going to affect anyone. That storm is going to the north.
This is the storm we're worried about, Rita. You can see Nassau, the Bahamas, here's Cuba. There is Miami right there and all the way down to Key West and the storm is still gaining strength in this very warm water, forecast to be a category one hurricane now, a category one as it passes Key West.
Not a category two, as the forecast from yesterday had it. They do have a tornado watch for parts of southern Florida as well because sometimes you can get little water spouts that will develop with a storm this size. By 2:00 this afternoon making its closest approach to Key West and by 2:00 in the morning overnight well off shore, making no problems except for the fish.
Now where does it go from there? That's a big question. They eye of the center looks like Galveston Island, maybe even over toward Louisiana, maybe as far south as Corpus Christi, but it's still going to be in that Gulf of Mexico getting much stronger, a category three.
WALLACE: And that's why, Chad, we're all having sort of an eerie case of deja vu because as we were talking...
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: ... about Katrina a few weeks go remembering when it was hitting Florida and then of course heading into the Gulf and who knew where it was going to go from there.
MYERS: That's right. I'll tell you the mechanics on what's going to turn this thing, eventually will turn to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Gulf Coast. I'll tell you the mechanics coming up.
WALLACE: OK and Chad stick around because we want to get a report from on the ground. As we know, thousands of people have already evacuated the Florida Keys. Others on the Florida Coast are bracing for the worst as Rita gets closer and closer.
We want to go straight to Key West and reporter Dave Malkoff from our Miami affiliate WFOR. Dave, thanks for joining us. Give us a sense of what you're seeing on the ground there right now.
DAVE MALKOFF, WFOR REPORTER: Well Kelly, Chad just showed us that radar picture of that one band that was skirting the Keys and we definitely felt that here. You can see my hair is soaking wet. That really pounded some rain down here, but this is what happens during hurricanes.
We will get one band come through and then there will be a long period and then the next band is more powerful than the last. Talking about the residents here in Key West, there are about 50 percent of the people are still here in Key West, but normally and in normal hurricane, about 70 percent of the people stay.
So, we've got a lot of people out and a lot of people heeded the warning, but still there are thousands who are still here in Key West and thousands who are still throughout the Keys. Even though there is a mandatory evacuation order, they are not enforcing that -- Kelly.
WALLACE: Yes David and I also know that Florida Governor Jeb Bush taking all kinds of precautions including evacuating people from nursing homes in the Florida Keys. Obviously, definitely a situation after Katrina, is that right?
MALKOFF: Absolutely. We got -- we have C-130s come through in helicopters, come through to take people out of hospitals here. The most critically ill patients they took out of here very early on. And then they went ahead and took some of the other risk categories.
They took some of the homeless people and the special needs people. They took them on buses. There's only one way in and out of Key West and that goes through a -- it actually goes over a seven mile bridge. What they wanted to do was take those people over that seven mile bridge before the wind started to push.
Because once those winds start to push, you don't want to be driving over that bridge. You don't want any of those buses going into the water.
WALLACE: And Dave, our meteorologist Chad Myers standing by with a question for you -- Chad.
MYERS: I was wondering you know...
MALKOFF: Sure.
MYERS: ... you heard so much about the people that couldn't get out of New Orleans. Do you think everybody that wants to get out of Key West is out?
MALKOFF: Yes, I think that is very true. Everybody who wanted to get out got out starting at noon yesterday, because they put out the warning. They put out the evacuation order and they got that word out on the radio, on television, and they went around on bicycles and actually told people where these evacuation centers were. So they got all those people out.
But not all the people want to leave. A lot of people...
(CROSSTALK)
MALKOFF: ... have been here generation after generation and they want to stay through this storm, even though it could be very dangerous, one of the more dangerous storms we've seen in decades here in the Keys.
MYERS: Is Sloppy Joe's still open?
(LAUGHTER)
MALKOFF: Actually Sloppy Joe's is closed. That's a very popular bar he's talking about.
MYERS: Yes.
MALKOFF: That's down the street. Sloppy Joe's is closed but the bar right next door is open. It's packed. There's about 50 people inside there...
MYERS: Where's that, Kevin...
MALKOFF: ... and it just looks like any other -- not Irish Kevin's. It's the Gecko bar and it's right next door to Sloppy Joe's and there's about 50 people in there just partying it up, even though this storm is coming. We already got one band and we have another more powerful band coming in right after that.
MYERS: I can probably tell you what the most popular drink is at this point in time (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
MALKOFF: What, the hurricane...
MYERS: The hurricane, exactly. Thanks a lot Dave.
MALKOFF: Yes.
MYERS: Appreciate your reporting out there. Stay safe.
MALKOFF: Sure.
MYERS: Kelly.
MALKOFF: Yes.
WALLACE: All right, thank you Dave and Chad, and we'll be checking in with you of course throughout the morning here on DAYBREAK.
Turning now to Texas, Galveston's mayor is taking no chances with this storm. Lyda Ann Thomas, she will ask for a voluntary evacuation if Rita becomes a hurricane and stays on course for Galveston. The city, which sits on an island, could begin using buses to carry residents out of the city tomorrow morning.
Now Galveston has a history with hurricanes and especially deadly history. Before the days of weather radar and tracking, an unnamed hurricane struck Galveston in 1900 killing more than 8,000 people.
Our John Zarrella tells us all about it.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When the sun came up on September 9, 1900, those who survived looked out over a landscape of unimaginable devastation and death. It was the day after a hurricane that still holds the ignominious title deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
CASEY GREENE, HISTORIAN: People in Galveston knew that there was a storm in the Gulf of Mexico. It was reported in "The Galveston County Daily News", but they didn't know where the storm would make landfall.
ZARRELLA: And most didn't take it seriously. Historians say what led to the Galveston disaster as much as any other factor was an attitude.
GREENE: That's one of the reasons that so many people lost their lives in the hurricane, complacency.
ZARRELLA: In 1900, Galveston, Texas was stuck on itself. It was called the New York of the Gulf. There was more money in Galveston than in Newport, Rhode Island. Street cars ran along the beach. Bath houses jutted out like sentinels in the Gulf.
ERIK LARSON, AUTHOR, "ISAAC'S STORM": There was this great sense of hubris that America and Galveston, Galveston particular was going places, could do no wrong.
ZARRELLA: In a matter of hours on a steamy Saturday in September, that notion was splintered into a million pieces. The hurricane unleashed on Galveston 150-mile-per-hour winds, a torrent of rain, and a nearly 16-foot wall of water that inundated much of the island. There was no way to escape. Entire sections of the city were leveled. Entire families were washed away.
One in six Galvestonians died, about 8,000. Everywhere there was death, dying and those literally clinging to life.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Some of them were on rooftops. Some of them were in trees. Some of them were hanging onto logs and stuff in the water. ZARRELLA: Mabelle Dulin's (ph) father and his three step brothers spent hours in a rowboat pulling people from the debris filled water. They are credited with saving 200 lives. In Galveston that day people survived simply by accident and for them the passing of the storm brought new nightmares. Nearly everyone lost family members and friends. With so many dead, disposing of the bodies became ghoulish.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If you can imagine walking out your back door and where you ordinarily see somebody's yard and kids playing and houses, you know the streets and all that stuff, what you would most likely have seen was a pile in which your neighbors were at that very moment being incinerated.
ZARRELLA: This film showing crews digging through piles of debris looking for bodies was shot two weeks after the storm. The search continued for months. Driven not to repeat history, Galvestonians built a three-mile long, 17-foot high seawall, the hope a hurricane will never again swallow up the city.
John Zarrella, CNN, Galveston, Texas.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WALLACE: Well the Big Easy just isn't ready for another big storm. That's what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says. He had encouraged Hurricane Katrina evacuees to return to parts of the city, but now he's urging them to leave again because of the threat of another storm, this one named Rita.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR RAY NAGIN, NEW ORLEANS: Our levee systems are still in a very weak condition. Our pumping stations are not at full capacity and any type of storm that heads this way and hits us will put the east bank of Orleans Parish in very significant harm's way.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: And while the mayor backpedaled, some business leaders are pushing ahead with their plans for the return of tourists. Our very own Carol Costello reports on some diehard residents of New Orleans who refuse to cancel the party.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): On the night Katrina hit, Hollywood had planned to make a horror film here. That's gone. Will Mardi Gras 2006 go away too?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is going to be a bigger Mardi Gras.
COSTELLO: Blaine and Barry Kern make and warehouse many of the floats used in Mari Gras. They're already working with city leaders to make it happen.
BARRY KERN, MARDI GRAS WORLD: We could roll a lot of the parades right now.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That's right.
KERN: We just need the people.
COSTELLO (on camera): And you need the infrastructure of New Orleans, don't you?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Oh yes, the police clean up (UNINTELLIGIBLE) but...
COSTELLO: You really think that will be done in time...
(CROSSTALK)
COSTELLO: ... five months from now.
(CROSSTALK)
BLAINE KERN, MARDI GRAS WORLD: We could have people -- come on out. Everybody in America, come to the party. The biggest party in North America, the best party in the world. Come to the Mardi Gras.
COSTELLO: This gigantic float is called the Laviason (ph). This is what Harry Connick Jr. will be riding on if Mardi Gras goes off as planned in February. Of course the business community of New Orleans is hoping it will because it has pumped $1 billion into the economy.
(voice-over): But with Rita hovering and people unsure of what to do now, it will be a miracle, but then again Mardi Gras has always been magical.
BARRY KERN: Mardi Gras is put on by New Orleanians for the rest of the world and all the New Orleanians want it to happen, so those are the people that are going to make it happen...
COSTELLO: If they do, the world will celebrate just like it always has. This year it will be February 28,2006.
Carol Costello, CNN, New Orleans.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
WALLACE: And Carol Costello will be joining us live throughout this morning on DAYBREAK. We'll be talking to her at about 5:30 a.m. Eastern.
Well you are paying less for gasoline now, just a little less, but it might not last long. The looming threat of Rita has sent crude oil prices up. OPEC is meeting right now and says it is ready to make some spare oil available if needed, but it's backing away from an immediate increase in production. So where does all of this leave you?
Gas prices have dipped a bit after surging in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But if Rita adds to the damage that Katrina did to gulf oil production, you could be in for longer lines and higher prices at the pump yet again.
And that brings us to our DAYBREAK e-mail question of the day. Do you support a price cap on oil and gas after a natural disaster in the cases of national emergencies? Let us know what you think. Send those e-mails to DAYBREAK@CNN.com and we will read them throughout the two hours here on DAYBREAK.
Well still to come here on this Tuesday morning, a firefight in Iraq. British forces take action and get a lot more than they bargained for.
Also New Orleans braces for a new storm and the mayor isn't taking any chances.
And heading south again, President Bush gets set for another Gulf Coast tour. Now here's a look at what else is making news. It's Tuesday morning, September 20.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WALLACE: It's been a good day of trading in the overseas markets this morning. Japan's Nikkei closes up, but not much, only a point and a half. It's the Nikkei's highest close since June 11, 2001. Britain's FTSE is trading higher but just a smidge, and the German DAX is trading up less than a .2.
In future's trading, crude oil prices fell this morning, but just a tad, staying just below $67 a barrel after closing at that price yesterday.
Your news, money, weather and sports, it's about 19 minutes after the hour and here is what is all new this morning.
Al-Jazeera airs a new videotape from Osama bin Laden's number two man. In the tape Ayman al-Zawahiri downplaying U.S. achievements in Afghanistan and he again claims al Qaeda is responsible for the London transit bombings in July.
Putting another man on the moon would cost about $104 billion. According to NASA that's the price tag for a scheduled landing in the year 2018. Administrator Michael Griffin says he'll redirect funding for the mission out of NASA's existing budget.
Two former Tyco executives have been sentenced to prison for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the company. Former CEO Dennis Kozlowski and the former finance chief got between eight and 25 years in prison. They were both ordered to pay fines and restitution totaling $239 million.
In culture, Tori Spelling is looking for a new leading man. "People" magazine reports that the 32-year-old actress is splitting from her husband. She married fellow actor Charlie Shanian 14 months ago.
In sports, the New Orleans Saints who have been cast adrift by Hurricane Katrina lost their so-called home opener last night. They lost 27-10 to the New York Giants in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
Kind of sad there, Chad, for New Orleans fans that they couldn't win, but it's hard to win your opener when you're not playing in your home state.
MYERS: Yes, kind of odd to call it the home opener, even though it's so. You know I mean -- or whatever. You know they had a great game last week. The Saints' fans were happy. You can't win them all. Let's see if they can get (UNINTELLIGIBLE) maybe a 10 and six season going here. I think they've got a pretty good ball club there. The Giants have a really strong club, so kudos to them.
Good morning everybody. We are watching obviously down here to the south. This is Rita, still Tropical Storm Rita. The storm is moving into the Florida Straits right now, very, very warm water. You can even see the spin down there on the bottom right hand corner of your eye. You don't even have to use your imagination. That is the eye of the storm.
That is the center, hurricane warnings from Golden Beach all the way down to Key West. It does appear, though, that the Hurricane Center dropped the category two call for Key West, down to category one and also moved the line a little bit to the south of Key West. Now you're still going to get right side of eye wall, which is the most damaging part of the hurricane because it is moving forward, but there you see what they expect for the next five days, all the way out to Friday night, Saturday morning.
And that's between Corpus Christi and what looks like Galveston. You can't look at the line, though, because even New Orleans you're still in the cone. Brownsville, you're still in the cone as well. Some severe weather up and down the East Coast today, possibly with a cold front as it runs into New York State right on down through D.C. and into Raleigh -- Kelly.
WALLACE: All right, Chad, thanks so much. And we'll be checking with you, of course, throughout the morning.
Still to come this morning, this Tuesday's edition of DAYBREAK, British forces taking action and southern Iraq heating up. We'll show you some dramatic pictures.
And a reminder, our e-mail question of the morning, do you support a price cap on oil and gas after a natural disaster? E-mail us at DAYBREAK@CNN.com.
You're watching DAYBREAK for Tuesday, September 20. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WALLACE: And welcome back. Turning now to the situation in Iraq. British forces have smashed down some walls and clashed with a mob of Iraqis in the southern city of Basra.
CNN's Jennifer Eccleston joining us now live from Baghdad. Jennifer, great to see you. Give us a sense of what this confrontation was all about.
JENNIFER ECCLESTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well Kelly, the accounts of this Basra incident continue to unfold, but a British commander confirms that a rescue operation to secure the release of two undercover British soldiers who were arrested by Iraqi police was launched on that Basra prison where the soldiers were allegedly held.
Now the assault on the jail was mounted after British military failed to negotiate their release with Iraqi police.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRIG. JOHN LORIMER, BRITISH MILITARY: I became more concerned about the safety of the two soldiers after we received information that they had been handed over to militia elements. As a result, I took the difficult decision to order entry to the Jamiat police station. By taking this action, we were able to confirm that the soldiers were no longer being held by the Iraqi police. An operation was then mounted to rescue them from a house in Basra.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ECCLESTON: Now Iraqi police tell CNN that the two were in a safe house for their own protection. Earlier Monday demonstrators threw stones and gas bombs at British tanks and then additional fighting erupted after British armor surrounded that jail where the two Britons were allegedly held.
Now the British military is seeking answers from the Iraqi police over why two soldiers were detained and not immediately handed over to the British military. And the Iraqis want to know why two undercover soldiers engaged in a firefight with Basra police, which led to their arrests -- Kelly.
WALLACE: And Jennifer, turning now to another development, another part of the country in Mosul. What can you tell us about -- we understand a U.S. State Department employee and three employees of a U.S. security contractor killed in a suicide bombing.
ECCLESTON: That's right Kelly. What we know thus far is that U.S. officials have confirmed that that State Department employee and three security contractors were killed Monday morning, yesterday morning in the northern city of Mosul when their vehicle hit a suicide car bomb. Now the State Department is attached to the regional U.S. embassy in Mosul and he was traveling, as you said, with three employees of the Blackwater Security Firm. All four were Americans and this is the third hostile death of a State Department employee since June of 2004 -- Kelly.
WALLACE: Jennifer covering a lot of ground for us. Thanks so much. Jennifer Eccleston reporting live from Baghdad this morning.
Turning now to a new videotape from Osama bin Laden's number two man, which was broadcast on Al-Jazeera television. In the tape, Ayman al-Zawahiri downplaying U.S. achievements in Afghanistan, saying the Taliban remains as strong as ever. He also says the al Qaeda terror network is responsible for the July transit bombings in London that killed 52 commuters. It is not clear when the video was made, but it does refer to a newspaper article published August 11 in "The London Times".
And here is what is all new in the next half-hour here on DAYBREAK. Come home. No. Wait. Get out quick. Rita throws a curve to returning New Orleans residents. They're told to evacuate again. We'll have a live report from Carol Costello.
Plus, oil prices shoot up amid fears oil and gas production could be interrupted once again, but will OPEC pump up production? An energy market expert weighing in.
This is DAYBREAK for Tuesday. We'll be right back.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our universes of vast landscape filled with mysterious dark forces. Dr. Anthony Tyson is helping to shed some light on the subject.
DR. ANTHONY TYSON, DIRECTOR, LSST: Dark matter controls the evolution of cosmic structure because gravitationally it pulls everything together. We have a project that will try to understand what the physical nature of this dark matter and dark energy that fills the universe is.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The project is called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope or LSST. It's a $270-million device that will allow researchers to see not only far, but wide as well.
TYSON: This telescope has a very wide field of view. It will see billions of galaxies, so it goes out to the edge of the optical universe, halfway back to the big bang. If we get...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Scheduled for first light in 2012, the LSST will gather 7,000 DVDs worth of data every night, data that will be accessible to everyone from astronomers to high school students via the Internet.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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