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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Aired August 31, 2005 - 23:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

AARON BROWN, CNN HOST: Many of you are just joining us at the top of the hour. A quick recap of the day for you. Today, the magnitude of the crisis along the Gulf Coast became painfully obvious. Nowhere is that more apparent than in New Orleans and the area around New Orleans. The mayor of the city said thousands are likely to have died.
The focus has been on finding the living. Three thousand people rescued so far, many hundreds still stranded. Counting the dead will have to wait. The daunting task of evacuating the city has begun. It's no longer safe enough for people to remain there. Buses will take 23,000 or so people who are staying at the Superdome in New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome, about a 12 hour bus ride that's getting underway now. That will become home for a time. How long is not clear.

The disaster has not brought out the best in everyone. Lawlessness has complicated everything.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): In a city drowning, one sentence today above all others told the story. "Hundreds, most likely thousands, are dead." The mayor spoke those words. The dead are in houses flooded out. They are floating in the waters that own the streets. They are un-retrievable because the authorities cannot get to them, even if they had the time, which they don't. It takes all the city has to find the living.

LT. CRAIG O'BRIEN, U.S. COAST GUARD (voice-over): Words cannot describe what you see when flying over this city, especially at night. Hundreds and hundreds of flashlights are signaling us. Strobe lights, flares, it is a tough situation for a search and rescue professional.

A. BROWN: Three thousand rescues so far, hundreds more waiting and they will wait again to another night at least. So will most of the 20,000 people still cooped up in the once grand Superdome, now a disaster area of its own.

A convoy of buses has started taking them to Houston to the Astrodome, where they will live for who knows how long, many weeks certainly.

GOV. RICK PERRY, (R) TX: I want those stranded families to know that the doors of Texas public schools are going to be immediately opened to their school-age children. A. BROWN: It is an enormous challenge to evacuate an entire large American city. A city with few passable roads, with no power, gas, communications. But go they must. 15,000 a day or more. The city is unlivable.

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO, LOUSIANA: It's a logistical nightmare but what we have done is identified shelters in other parts of the state, communities are ready to receive these people to help them out. We've got to make their living conditions a little more decent.

A. BROWN: And there is this. A certainly lawlessness that has set in. Looting continued today because it's hard for police to stop it. They have nowhere to put the people the arrest. So it goes on.

BLANCO: What angers me the most is that usually disasters like this bring out the best in everybody, and that's what we expected to see. And now we've got people that it's bringing out the worst in. And we're going to restore law and order.

GEORGE W. BUSH, U.S. PRESIDENT: This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years.

A. BROWN: The president returned to Washington today amid some criticism the federal government has not acted quickly enough, not provided enough. How valid the complaints are will be sorted out down the road. Today was about promises.

BUSH: The Department of Transportation has provided more than 400 trucks to move 1,000 truckloads containing 5.4 million meals ready to eat, or MREs, 13.4 million liters of water, 10,400 tarps, 3.4 million pounds of ice, 144 generators, 20 containers of pre-positioned disaster supplies, 135,000 blankets and 11,000 cots and we're just starting.

A. BROWN: But it's not there now. Not yet. What is there now is misery. The sick and the frail, the desperate. Jeffrey Williams is a doctor at Charity Hospital.

DR. JEFFREY WILLIAMS, CHARITY HOSPITAL: A couple have died and a couple of people have gotten worse and we have approximately 50 people we need to get out of here. We are running out of time, though. We don't have water and we have a number of patients who need dialysis urgently and we can't run those machines without water.

A. BROWN: The army is setting up 40 field hospitals at the airport in New Orleans, the Red Cross bringing in satellite telephones. A city isolated is trying to reconnect. The simple truth is tonight New Orleans is a city of refugees. People who lost homes, lost businesses, lost jobs, lost schools. Two to three months before people can live there again, that long before there is power, maybe six months before the water is gone. Think about that. February.

MICHAEL BROWN, DIRECTOR, FEMA: We understand that you don't have access to your banks, you don't have access to your checkbooks, you don't have access to anything so we're going to ask you for the time being to turn to the American Red Cross, the charities, Salvation Army, local churches, others who can provide for your immediate needs.

A. BROWN: Most all the misery has been caused by the failures of the levees to hold back the waters. Levees failed, pumping stations failed. The system the city counted on, has always counted on, failed. The best that can be said for now is that the worst of the flooding seems over.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The good news here is that we've stabilized. Water is not rising in the city and in fact since yesterday the lake has reduced its level by two feet and hopefully by high tide tonight we may not even see the effect of high tide.

A. BROWN: Small hope where there has been little. But even small hopes are better than none.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (on camera): The overview tonight. Right now the National Guard is moving people from the Superdome to a convoy of buses waiting outside, also outside, embedded with the Guard is Don Jacks, who is a spokesman for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and he joins us now on the telephone.

Just tell me what it looks like. Are people -- how are you deciding, or how is it being decided who gets on those first buses and who has to wait?

DON JACKS, FEMA SPOKESMAN (on phone): Well, Aaron, apologize for the noise in the background. We've got choppers here about 100 yards away. They are evacuating out right now the critically ill and the injured. I understand the residents, the occupants of the Superdome will be moving out around first light here early, early in the morning.

I'm with FEMA's disaster medical assistance teams. A bunch of really professional doctors, there's paramedicals. There are about five teams here working in the arena next door to the dorm where the Hornets, there in the arena where the Hornets play basketball and they have -- just imagine the largest hospital emergency room in the largest city in the country and then multiply that by about 10 times. And it's been that way since yesterday afternoon.

These folks showed up after driving all night from Houston where we were staged there and I followed them in here and they're seeing a lot of critically injured people and they have begun airlifting out those critically injured folks and those people are in a critical care state. They can do a lot of work here but they can't do dialysis. They're treating a lot of asthma conditions. They're treating a lot of diabetic conditions. They've had some pregnant ladies in contractions. No babies delivered yet. But I think the stress is putting some tension on some of them.

It's very organized. It's very busy. It's -- and I just can't say enough about it, the Louisiana Guard, they're doing an extraordinary job. The soldiers who are helping to get the people here -- we're staged on the top of a parking garage just to the west of the Superdome and then on about another 100 yards from the top of another garage is where the choppers are landing and there are no lights there so I can only imagine these pilots are using their night vision goggles and they're doing a heck of a job. I can't say enough for what they're doing.

A. BROWN: Don, let me ask you a couple quick questions, if I can. How long do you think it will take to evacuate everyone who has been living in this refugee camp that we call the Superdome?

JACKS: Aaron, I really can't address that. I am not part of that operation. I am here with the disaster medical team. We're talking a couple of days, 48 hours or so to get all of the injured out of here to hospitals in Baton Rouge. Right now we also have disaster medical teams in a hospital situation at the field house at LSU at Baton Rouge.

A. BROWN: You feel -- I'm sorry.

JACKS: These folks are professionals, they're volunteers, they just walked away from their jobs in hospitals in New Mexico and Oregon and Washington and Arizona and Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas and they -- but they want to do this and they don't get any sleep ...

A. BROWN: Don ...

JACKS: ... they eat meals ready to eat, when they do sleep for a few hours it's on a cot and they have a life-saving mission and we just -- we're so thankful that we FEMA, we have the disaster medical assistance teams under our umbrella now as part of the national disaster medical assistance.

A. BROWN: Don, we are grateful for their work too, but let me see if I understand something you said. Did you say you think it will take you two days to get everybody who needs medical assistance, just that sub-population of the Superdome, two days to get them out of there? Is that what you said?

JACKS: That was a statistic I heard earlier this afternoon, Aaron, but what you have to realize is they're moving them out on choppers and they can't take many on a flight and we also have a large number of nursing home patients here. I was just over by the tent just a few minute ago and there are probably 100 nursing home patients in wheelchairs waiting to be airlifted out. And so when you're talking three, four, five people or so on a chopper, it's going to take a while.

When you're putting the occupants on the Superdome on 40 or 50 passenger buses, that's going to go faster, but I can't say how long that will take because I'm just not part of that operation.

A. BROWN: Okay, thank you. We appreciate the update and we enormously appreciate, as I know everyone listening and people around the country and around the world appreciate the work that those medical teams are doing.

One of the things sometimes all of us forget, honestly, in moments like this is that whether they're police officers or medics or the National Guardspeople who are trying to maintain some measure of control and the like, they're not getting any sleep, they're not eating very well. It is tough for them also. And we're grateful for what they do.

Most of the people, 25, 30,000 people in the Superdome when they leave, they will head for Houston's Astrodome. More on that part of the story, about a 12-hour journey, from CNN's Sean Callebs.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SEAN CALLEBS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For the immediate future, this will be home for thousands fleeing the flooded City of New Orleans. It's not going to be a short-term situation. In fact, the Astrodome has cleared its schedule until December. The Red Cross says the sheer scope of this disaster makes clear that the evacuees will need to be taken care of for months, not weeks.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Places have to be found for these people. Many of these people may never be able to rebuild.

CALLEBS: Only hours before the exhausted families are due to arrive, an Astroturf football field was peeled away from the floor. Authorities say it will soon be a sea of cots.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mobilization is taking place right now of all the cots, all the medical facilities, the food and beverage, the laundry, all of that stuff is in the process right now.

CALLEBS: FEMA is overseeing the operation at this immense shelter. The first truck rolling in was carrying tissue paper. There won't be a shortage of bathrooms, and a shower schedule is being worked out utilizing the locker rooms, and for children coming from New Orleans, they will attend Texas public schools.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Look at my daughter. Look!

CALLEBS: There is discontent in the shadow of the Astrodome. Legions who fled Louisiana before the flooding are being turned away.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And we have so much water in New Orleans and we had to evacuate. So therefore the next dry spot would be Houston, Texas. Now we came there to go in there. That's where we were told to come to go in. But when we got there, we cannot get in.

CALLEBS: They say they can be fed at existing shelters, but can't get a roof over their head. They say they simply can't find an open facility.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: FEMA got all of this revenue and all of this money. Why can't we go in there?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CALLEBS (on camera): And to be perfectly fair, the Red Cross is certainly turning away evacuees. It's not something it wants to do. Margaret O'Brien, who was in that story, was nearly in tears, saying she can empathize with all those already in the Houston area, but at this point, the Astrodome is only set up to handle those coming in from the Superdome.

Aaron?

A. BROWN: A couple quick ones, be as brief as you can. How long are they telling you it will take to get everyone from point A in New Orleans to point B in Houston?

CALLEBS: It's a good question and we have asked a number of people. We have heard everything from seven to 12 hours. It is simply very difficult to get out of New Orleans itself. Once they get on the major highways, not too bad.

A. BROWN: I'm sorry, let me be a little more specific with the question. How many days will it take to get all 23,000 or 25 or 30,000 people, we don't know for sure, from the Superdome to the Astrodome?

CALLEBS: Very difficult to say, again. Everybody here says FEMA has been in charge. FEMA has been overburdened today. They simply weren't at the news conference, if you will, earlier today when we were able to ask these questions. They were preparing, certainly, for this to be spread over a period of days, however.

A. BROWN: What's going to be set up in this building, the original dome in the country is going to be a city? It's going to need law enforcement, it's going to need medical staff. Do you see the preparations for all those things being laid out?

CALLEBS: To tell you the truth, we have not seen it unfold. We have been told by the manager of Reliant (ph), which is now the agency that manages the Astrodome, that indeed, they are going to be ready, but they're going to have ambulances, they're going to have medical staff, they're going to have a nursery so people who are trying to sleep, if there is a child crying, will be moved to another area.

They're trying, as I mentioned, to work out a shower schedule for all these people, but remember, there are two locker rooms and you're talking about a small city in there. This is certainly going to test everybody's abilities. They said they had an actual drill back in June and it went pretty well but the real thing is always a bit different.

A. BROWN: Yeah. I don't know that anybody can anticipate this. Sean, I assume you'll be there when they get there and that will be an enormous part of the story tomorrow because the one part of this story I think we understand least well is what it's been like to live in the Superdome for the last three days.

Thank you for your work tonight, Sean Callebs who is awaiting the arrival of the people -- refugees is such an uncomfortable word to use. For some reason, when you talk about other countries, other places and use the word "refugees" it doesn't sound quite so awkward or uncomfortable. When you talk about refugees of an American city, but that's in fact what they are, and they're going to be bused, that's about a 12 hour ride or so, depending on conditions from New Orleans to Houston and while they won't be there forever, certainly they're going to be there for sometime until somebody can figure out where they're going to live.

We talked with Michael Brown with FEMA about that, whether they're tent cities, cruise ships, what have you, these are people who are going to need homes and there are thousands of others like them.

They're in the Superdome tonight and over the next days, nobody seems to know how many, I don't know why, but nobody seems to know how many, they'll end up in Houston, Texas.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

A. BROWN: Hurricane devastated enormous area in Greater New Orleans, especially, we still have no ideas, honestly, who are out there who need medical attention. Richard Zuschlag runs Louisiana's largest private ambulance service. His crew is facing lots of obstacles, including in some cases angry crowds. He is on the phone with us tonight from Lafayette, Lousiana.

It's good to talk to you. Tell me -- I want to talk about the medical stuff in a second, but you had trouble with people trying to steal stuff from you, rolling ambulances, the whole thing, right?

RICHARD ZUSCHLAG, ACADIAN AMBULANCE SERVICE (on phone): Actually, we suspended the evacuation of Charity Hospital this afternoon where some of our wildlife and fisheries boats were turned over and the people were threatened. We weren't able to finish that evacuation. I have been promised by the governor and the Homeland Security people that we're going to have the proper security tomorrow to get that job done.

A. BROWN: Any -- there's no rational explanation for this. Why would people try and flip these boats or interfere with the work you were doing? What is the point of that?

ZUSCHLAG: Quite frankly, I can't understand this. It's bad enough we've lost so many people due to high water wind, now to have this civil unrest is just beyond my belief. I think our big problem is this -- we have no communications and we have no vehicles to navigate through water.

The TV trucks have a hard time getting into New Orleans for the first 24 hours so the people around the world didn't really realize how bad this has been until this last 24 hours and finally the federal government is beginning to come through in a big way.

But I'll tell you, today at our command post, they stole our generator so we lost our communications. It's so hard for us to continue the evacuation. We've got seven hospitals that we moved about 700 patients before the storm. After the storm, we estimate that we have 2,000 more patients to get out of there and we're having a very difficult time doing it because of the lack of communications. And once we get going -- and I have to tell you, Aaron, the military has been excellent. Once they started responding -- and one day I hope to meet the captain of the USS Baton (ph) because he come up that Mississippi River, I don't know who gave him our control center's telephone number, but he called it and said, "I have five helicopters, where do you want them?"

And the navy really came in there fast. We had a hard time getting the Army MASH unit going, but once they starting coming to help, it's been great. We're up to about 30 military helicopters now and 25 civilian helicopters and we moved today about 500 patients. It's been a massive undertaking but time is drawing too short.

The water has risen, all the hospital generators have gone off, there is no communications, and we've got to get those people out of those hospitals tomorrow or I'm afraid some of them are going to die.

A. BROWN: I'm running out of time with you. I need you to be as brief as you can. How long do you think it'll take you to get everybody out of a hospital who needs to be evacuated? Are we talking several days?

ZUSCHLAG: If we have proper security, we can do it all in a day and a half.

A. BROWN: Do you think you have proper security now?

ZUSCHLAG: No, but I think we'll have it tomorrow morning.

A. BROWN: Godspeed. We hope you get it.

Thank you, Richard.

ZUSCHLAG: Thank you, Aaron.

A. BROWN: Richard Zuschlag, who runs a private ambulance service. You get a great sense of the conditions that he has been and his people have been working under and his hope that it will get better simply by the presence of armed National Guardsmen and women.

And that's the situation we're in.

Dr. Michael Osterholm is a public health specialist at the University of Minnesota, where I suspect it's high and dry, not a bad place to be tonight, a long way from New Orleans.

Doctor, I want to talk to you about the kinds of public health possibilities that we face in a city like this. The first thing that comes to mind is -- everybody hears all these dead bodies, honestly, are floating around. Is that your biggest concern?

DR. MICHAEL OSTERHOLM, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: No, not at all. I think it would even help the listeners tonight if we talked about New Orleans and the rest of the area because that part of the Gulf outside of New Orleans also has some unique and troubling public health issues ahead of it but let's just make it real clear. Dead bodies, in and of themselves, as they are mental health issues, they are real tragic. They are not a public health issue from infectious disease standpoint at all.

A. BROWN: What are the public healthy issues from an infectious disease standpoint then?

OSTERHOLM: Well, right now the first thing we have to do is make sure that we have good sanitation, which right now for many areas of the Gulf region, we have none. No running water, no sewers. We have people congregated in areas where the transmission of infectious agents, like in the Superdome, are at a very high risk and so that the potential for disease outbreaks are real.

Now, we've had some discussions about things like cholera and typhoid and I might at those are not big problems because they don't already exist in the area. But a lot of other diarrheal diseases which could be serious are there.

Also just public health problems such as vaccine preventable diseases. When you get that many people together under those conditions, just one person who is infected could infect many other unvaccinated people and we know we have some like that.

So there, really, the immediate infectious disease issues are going to be clean water, clean food, sanitation and making sure that we are tracking infectious disease outbreaks.

A. BROWN: The -- I hope this doesn't sound terrible dense, I apologize if it does. But specifically, what are the infectious diseases we are trying -- we are looking out for a trying to avoid?

OSTERHOLM: Well, most of these are going to be the kind that cause severe diarrhea. There can be some like hepatitis A infection, which can also be -- any infectious agent that can be ingested, so contaminated water, contaminated food.

We're talking about the kind of classic foodborne outbreaks that we think of, e. coli and so forth. In addition, though, when you have crowding like this and people under this kind of stress, you also have the potential problem of respiratory transmitted agents.

And then finally, last but not least, much like we saw with the tsunami in Southeast Asia, where you had trauma victims in the community, in other words, because of all the wind-related damage, they may have puncture wounds.

In that case you're worried about infectious agents with the contaminated water getting into those puncture wounds, which then can quickly lead to life threatening infections.

So we need to ascertain those people. I think initially people thought of search and rescue only as those that were dying at the time because of their wounds. You could have a very healthy 25-year-old who was wounded, you might say, during the actual event, who doesn't appear to be very sick the first day or two, may actually have a life- threatening infection by day three or four. So it's important we find those people.

A. BROWN: Are mosquitoes a problem and mosquitoes a public health problem? Is West Nile a problem?

OSTERHOLM: That's a very, very important consideration, Aaron, and interestingly enough there really are two different parts of that problem in two different areas. What I mean by that is in the next seven to 10 days, primarily in those areas where the water has actually receded, Biloxi, Gulfport, those areas that are not yet inundated with water but where there is stagnant water, we are going to have a massive overgrowth of nuisance mosquitoes. Not the kind that cause disease, but the kind that are going to make living very difficult, to the point where in evenings, in particular, you are going to have people who find it very difficult to sleep, they're going to find it difficult to work.

That will be less true in New Orleans, because frankly, there is such high water levels, it is not the kind of stagnant water where the mosquitoes can breed.

But then to get to your point, West Nile virus is one that typically this virus would start to wind down naturally in the fall season by early October, but now that we have about 30 good days of what yet could be 90 degree weather with that kind of water, we could see a major amplification of the mosquito population that does cause West Nile.

We already had activity in that area that was just starting and so that's a problem.

In addition, I might add, other public health issues, particularly in the rural areas, are things like snakebites. We now have a lot of venomous snakes, particularly water moccasins that are now in the confines on humans. We have potential rabid animals that would normally not be in close contact with humans because of the water are coming in contact. And so there are a lot of other considerations, again, not so much in New Orleans, but clearly throughout the rest of the Gulf region.

A. BROWN: Just quickly, the single most important thing to get to people is fresh drinking water, isn't it?

OSTERHOLM: Absolutely. Fresh drinking water so that they aren't exposing themselves to contaminated water that we have. And I might add, we're not worried about the toxins. We had a lot of discussion today about the chemicals in the water. While there are chemicals in that water that's floating around, fortunately the dilution factor is such that we really don't worry from a public health standpoint about that.

It's really the infectious agents.

A. BROWN: Dr. Osterholm, nice job tonight. Thank you.

OSTERHOLM: Thank you very much. Thank you. A. BROWN: Thank you. University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. We'll take a break. Our coverage of this extraordinary catastrophe continues in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

A. BROWN: The bottom of the hour for those of you joining us here and around the world, a quick recap. It's taken nearly three days for simple facts to sink in. Katrina was a nightmare that everyone had feared and much, much more.

All across the region, now, a see of rubbled neighborhoods destroyed, lives lost and forever changed. A storm has created a sea of refugees. There are homeless, many are sick, they have no idea what tomorrow will bring.

For some it will bring some relief but it is now clear that life for those who call the region home is not going to get anything approaching normal anytime soon. In New Orleans, a city underwater to a great extent, two to three months before people can just live there again, before there is power and it may be six months before all the water is gone.

Immediate concerns are life and death. Of course, finding the hundreds of survivors who are still stranded, getting medical help for the sick, evacuations, medical evacuations are going on literally right now out of the Superdome, but that's going to take a couple of days and there are many hospitals that need to be evacuated. That's going to take another day and a half under the best of circumstances.

The Bush administration today declared a public health emergency for the entire Gulf Coast region. For those waiting for help, it is not coming fast enough. The head of FEMA acknowledged that to some degree they underestimated the severity of what has occurred in the Gulf Coast of the United States of America.

You have probably heard the word levee more than a few times in the past several days, probably more than you have in your whole lives. After all, most of us don't live near one, much less depend on one to keep us secure, but they are part of New Orleans since the beginning, virtually, and the formal levee system dates back well over a century.

So what is it and why is it so crucial, why have they failed, what will it take to fix them? Here's CNN's Tom Foreman.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The fundamental question being asked in New Orleans right now is why can help not get into this core of the city?

If you go all the way down like this, you look at this is the Superdome over here, the French Quarter over here, why is help not getting there? There are two reasons, one, all of these surrounding streets are flooded right now. The reason they are flooded is up north here. Right about here and right over here, Lake Pontchartrain has been pouring in. It's now stabilized, but all of these areas throughout here are filled with water and that is making it impossible for help to move around the city.

Further, if you look over on the east side of town is that the main highways going in and out, I can get them zoomed out, right there. That's Interstate 10. That's un-passable right now. You can't go across that because all of the way the road has been broken up there. You can't go across that bridge. If you go to the other end of town, there are ways in and out and it's right by Kenner here, as you go out this highway, that's Interstate 10 going the opposite way to Baton Rouge and down here you can cross over the Huey Long Bridge down in here, which is a little further up that way. That will take you out towards Houma, Louisiana.

Why more help is not getting in there, we do not have a good answer to. If it gets there, it is still about 15 miles from Downtown. There are medical staging units that are now at the airport and trying to spread into the town, but until they reach the middle of this town and they open up traffic between these areas, the situation downtown simply cannot get much better.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

A. BROWN: Tom Foreman, who in another life used to work down in New Orleans. Spent a lot of time down there.

Take -- before I do that let me do this. I just got a note that the first bus has arrived now at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas and reporters are talking to evacuees that said earlier, to my thinking, the most underreported part of this tragedy has been what it was like in the Superdome itself all these days.

These are scenes shot by KHOU, CNN affiliate in Houston, Texas. If this is what they call access to those people, it's not great access is it. Well, I guess they're opening the gate there. That's a good thing.

So to hear their stories, to hear what life was like -- they're being allowed inside the perimeter now of the Astrodome. There were reports of a couple of suicides in there, a couple of people jumping from balconies. I don't know if in fact those checked out, but obviously it was a hellish circumstance over the last couple of days and we're getting their stories now, trying to tell those stories.

The first stories will be exactly that, they'll be the first stories. I think we'll get a much better, broader and more relevant picture when we piece together a lot of stories, which we'll do in the next hours and certainly in the next day. But that's the scene outside the Astrodome in Houston, Texas.

By and large, I think it's fair to say most people who could get out left. But a lot of people couldn't get out for all the reasons people can't, okay? And so they were stranded there and that's the way they lived for a couple days, for three days, and we'll find more about that in the hours ahead.

Take a minute to think about numbers for a second. New Orleans proper, normally the city has a population of a half a million. By the mayor's estimate, 80 percent of those people left by the time the hurricane struck on Monday. The remainder, now, have to be evacuated and then there's the surrounding area, the Greater New Orleans Area that's about a million people, maybe a little less than that in that area.

Where are all these people going to live? How are they going to be fed? How are they going to be housed? How will they get medical treatment? That is the crisis that faces not just the City of New Orleans, but the entire area.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

A. BROWN (voice-over): In many ways, these people are the lucky ones. They are safe and dry and cool. But they'll be living in this church assembly hall for a very long time.

PASTOR LARRY STOCKSILL, BETHANY WORLD PRAYER CENTER: We're looking until at least the end of September and maybe much longer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Tonight, curfew is 10:00. That means in the building, 10:00. We have 500 people and we're taking in probably 200 more.

A. BROWN: With governments overwhelmed, churches like this one on the outskirts of Baton Rouge have stepped in. Beds and food for thousands, they have become our refugee camps, as uncomfortable as that sounds.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We have family still up in New Orleans, so we don't know what's going on with them, if they're okay ...

A. BROWN: This woman is 101 years old, part of an extended family of more than 30 here.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My grandma is 101 years old so we had to bring her with us. (unintelligible) to everybody, we've got a lot to thank them for, because if it weren't for them we wouldn't have made it out.

A. BROWN: Evacuees aren't the only ones being helped by churches. These Coast Guardsmen arrived in Louisiana from St. Louis. They are not sleeping here on beds made of rows of chairs facing each other.

LT. JAMES PEELER, UNITED STATES COAST GUARD: Just getting us down here was a task in itself. The organization and then planning that goes into an event like this. It is very extensive and this event is so large and so catastrophic that I don't think you can actually do enough planning. You can't really prepare for something like this. A. BROWN: And in the place where decisions are made, the command center for the catastrophe, the reality that for all the talk of preparation for disaster, for all the emphasis these years on homeland security, all of that was just a drill, and this is life and death.

MARK SMITH, LA OFFICE OF HOMELAND SECURITY: In actuality, doing it on paper and doing it for real, there's a different urgency to this than you would have with an exercise. There's that need to get out and help the public, to help those who are stranded, to help those who have lost their properties, lost their livelihoods, lost everything.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

A. BROWN (on camera): How many times have we seen that shot of the last day of those people standing on the roof, holding up the sign, saying "Help Me." Imagine what that must be like. And that's just the Louisiana part of the story. There's also Mississippi.

Take a break. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

A. BROWN: I don't remember who said it but someone once said old age is not for sissies and it's true under the best of circumstances on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The best of circumstances are many months away so this is an especially difficult time for the elderly in Biloxi, Mississippi, tonight. CNN's Jonathan Freed.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JONATHAN FREED, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Adele Lawton's (ph) mother, Sara Anderson, is 94 years old and a hurricane victim.

So how are you doing? I heard you didn't have a great night.

SARAH ANDERSON, HURRICANE VICTIM: No, I didn't have a great night. I don't know what's wrong.

FREED: Anderson has heart disease and regularly needs oxygen to get by. Her daughter says Anderson spent the previous night short of breath and with skin that felt clammy. She says it was frightening.

Are you worried that she could become another casualty of this storm?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It has passed through my mind, yep.

FREED: How do you deal with that?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Just have to.

FREED: Anderson has an oxygen machine, but can't use it because the power is out at her hotel. She used to have a battery-powered unit at her home and she would have gotten it, but Katrina got home before she did.

(on camera): So your mother wasn't with you the night of the storm.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Right. I put her in the hospital with a sitter.

FREED (voice-over): The local hospital let Anderson ride out the storm there, but she had to leave the next day to make room for those who are worse off.

(on camera): So where are we here?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're on the front porch.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Used to be a nice big swing right here and it was all screened in.

FREED (voice-over): Lawton says her mother is falling into a grey area. Not well, but not sick enough to warrant being in the hospital. Still it's frustrating for the family.

TIM LAWTON, SARA'S SON-IN-LAW: You've got a 94-year-old woman on oxygen and they can't keep her in care like that. I mean, that's insane to send her out like they did in the shelter.

FREED: Anderson, though, is trying the best she can to cope with the circumstances forced upon her.

ANDERSON: I think you ought to be able to do things about your life and go on. If you can't accomplish one step, you should go to another one and find out what's on that step.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

FREED (on camera): Aaron, we spoke to the hospital today and they said anybody who shows up there is going to be helped as best they can under the circumstances. Unfortunately, Aaron, though, those circumstances involve using power generators and they can't run all systems at all times and that includes things like oxygen machines.

Aaron?

A. BROWN: That's an unbelievable story, Jon.

FREED: It is.

A. BROWN: Nicely told. Jonathan Freed in Biloxi, Mississippi tonight. Probably true we've underreported a bit the Mississippi part of the story tonight. The New Orleans part of the story has been so enormous and it is shifting a bit, at least a part of it is, to Houston, Texas, where the first of the evacuees, or refugees, pick a word your comfortable with, have started arriving at the Astrodome in Houston and we are getting the first sound from them of what their experiences over the last hours, last many hours have been like.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... from the Superdome, people come up here using water, too. That's not even fair. That's not fair. They made room for that. If it was Morial, he would have been got us here before the water even came. Nagin didn't do nothing for us. Anything.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This bus didn't come from the Superdome?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, we hitchhiked a ride from the interstate.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So you came from Louisiana and just got here right now?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: New Orleans, yes we did.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Who is this precious little baby?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Nephew.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You've stored (ph) this baby on the Interstate.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. We were over the interstate. Nobody going to help the poor people -- nobody ...

(END VIDEOTAPE)

A. BROWN: Pretty raw video coming in and we'll piece these things together over the next hours. We'll be on all night and the story obviously is going to dominate not just tomorrow, but beyond.

Our coverage continues in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

A. BROWN: Just as we have the last few nights, we want to take a moment to show you some of the more powerful pictures that have emerged from this ever-growing story. The still photos that will be in our minds a long time to come. Here's NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is what the president saw from the windows of Air Force One. Miles of the nation's southern coast under oil-slick water. Damaged homes, damaged ports, factories, refineries.

What Coast Guard rescuers saw from their helicopters over New Orleans for hundreds still stranded on rooftops.

Hundreds more in flooded neighborhoods. On flooded streets. Ferried by boats, carried by volunteers to safer ground, to drier ground.

Some, no one knows how many, found loved ones. Some, no one knows how many, lost loved ones. A few thumb their way home or to what was left of home. So many homes, communities, splintered. In Alabama, and in Mississippi, and in Louisiana.

As engineers struggled to repair broken levees, further inland work began on clearing and burning debris. Help began arriving. National Guard units from further north. Search and rescue units from Los Angeles and New York. Donated supplies, baby formula and diapers from Florida.

Help for the thousands of families now homeless. Help for the tens of thousands who have lost everything.

Three long days after the storm, more faces look dazed. So hard to comprehend what must be done before whole communities are whole again. Before hundreds of thousands of children can go back to school. So hard to figure out where to even begin.

Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

A. BROWN: Just a couple of papers. This is today's -- Tuesday's "Times" of Shreveport, Louisiana. "Catastrophic" is the way they headline the story. Gulf Coast awash in misery from Hurricane Katrina. This is the paper that the folks up in Shreveport -- they're dry and fortunate -- will get tomorrow. "Despair, horror. Level of devastation still rising."

"Everyone ordered out of New Orleans," the headline in the "Washington Times" tomorrow. We'll take a break and wrap up this special edition of NEWSNIGHT in just a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

A. BROWN: But he just wants to be a regular guy. That was like French fries and mayonnaise.

Many of you want to know how you can help and there's lot of ways you can. Put up a number. If you want to contact Red Cross, a lot of businesses are contributing lots of money in the relief effort and I think everyone is grateful for that and if you -- a lot of businesses will match your contribution. You might check with your company on that.

The Website works great for the Red Cross. Call the number is another way to do it. There are other agencies, church groups are helping and you can check on those. We'll put those together. Larry I think is doing four hours on just that part of the story on Saturday.

We'll see you tomorrow night. Good night.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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