NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans glimpsed a possible turning point Wednesday as floodwaters that had risen harrowingly for two days reached equilibrium and began spilling back into Lake Pontchartrain through breaches in the levee system, officials said.

At midday, Maj. Gen. Dan Riley, chief of engineers for the Army Corps of Engineers, estimated the floodwaters had receded by as much as 2 feet overnight and would continue to flow out of the city at a rate of about a half-inch per hour – a process that could be slowed, if not temporarily reversed, by the next high tides.

The continuing magnitude of the flooding, with some neighborhoods buried under as much as 20 feet of water, was made clear in Riley's added estimate that it would be at least 30 days before the saucer-shaped city would be pumped out.

To accelerate the draining process, engineers were making plans to punch holes in the lakeside levee, at strategic points starting in eastern New Orleans and working west to the Jefferson Parish line. The levees along the Intracoastal Waterway would also be breached to help dry St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward.
The good news about receding floodwaters coincided with a massive ramp-up in federal relief efforts. President Bush, cutting short his Texas vacation, flew low over New Orleans en route to Washington to witness the devastation, and he ordered regular Army, Navy and Air Force troops into action on the search-and-rescue front, freeing hard-pressed National Guard units to concentrate on restoring public order and to confront the looting that continued unabated Wednesday.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt declared a federal health emergency throughout the region, a designation that will allow for expedited action on his plan to set up 40 emergency medical centers for evacuees and victims.

Efforts resumed to plug the giant breach in the swollen 17th Street Canal by using Chinook helicopters and barges to drop more than a thousand, 10-ton sandbags and about 250 concrete highway construction barriers into the chasm.

As New Orleans breathed a cautious sigh of relief, less devastated Jefferson Parish grew anxious about water that began sluicing across Interstate 10 at the parish line and into Metairie neighborhoods, according to Jefferson Parish Emergency Management Director Walter Maestri.

The West Bank, far less afflicted by flooding than parts of Orleans and Jefferson parishes across the Mississippi River, found itself a magnet for exhausted refugees, some of whom were seen wandering along highway embankments in search of dry ground, sustenance and a place to stay.

In St. Tammany Parish, Slidell Mayor Ben Morris said half of Slidell’s homes were under water and that 2,168 residents had been evacuated to emergency shelters. Upriver in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes, the first wave of evacuees began trickling back to check out what one radio-station caller described as generally intact and dry homes.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour flew over his state’s ravaged coastline and likened it to Hiroshima in 1945. Bush ordered four Navy ships to deploy off the state’s shore. Civilian armadas also massed Wednesday in Orleans and Jefferson parishes. Capt. Timothy Bayard, in charge of maritime operations for the New Orleans Police Department, said as many as 200 volunteers had showed up with skiffs and flatboats, some from as far away as Texas and Kentucky.

Assistance from afar

Working alongside watercraft operated by the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the NOPD and the Coast Guard, the volunteers targeted inundated communities from Lakeview to the Lower 9th Ward, and they plucked survivors off rooftops and out of attics.

As soon as the survivors had been offloaded onto bridges or other elevated surfaces, the rescue teams were rushing back through the flooded city. At times, the influx of the rescued residents threatened to overwhelm the ability of city and military officials to cart away the survivors to more permanent safety.

"We are relying on the military to run the trucks," Bayard said as troop transport vehicles rumbled to and from gathering points, such as interstate on-ramps and the drawbridge that carries St. Claude Avenue across the Industrial Canal and into the Lower 9th Ward.

Bayard stopped short of concurring with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s contention on "Good Morning America" that Katrina’s death toll in New Orleans would be "most likely thousands" – figures that would make it the deadliest U.S. natural disaster since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

But Bayard acknowledged many elderly or otherwise fragile residents trapped in their homes had made it into attics as floodwaters rose, and later drowned or were killed by scorching temperatures before they could climb onto rooftops and wave to rescue teams.

Bayard declined to estimate a death toll but said, "Absolutely, the worst is yet to come."

Massive evacuations

Meanwhile, 475 buses were dispatched to the Superdome to begin evacuating thousands of refugees who sought shelter there. The evacuees were destined for another temporary shelter, Houston’s Astrodome, in what could be "one of the largest, if not the largest, evacuation in this country," said Col. Jeff Smith, deputy director of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. Alternate plans, possibly involving the use of cruise ships and troop transport vessels in the Mississippi River, were being developed for those not well enough to endure the seven-hour bus ride.

At the city’s major hospitals, diesel-powered generators critical to sustaining the lives of people on ventilators or other electric-powered medical devices began to run out of fuel Wednesday. Plans were made to relocate the 350 patients and 1,000 doctors and nurses at Charity and University hospitals to facilities in Alexandria, Lafayette, Shreveport, Lake Charles and Monroe. Methodist Hospital evacuated its 1,000 patients.

Louis Armstrong International Airport reopened Wednesday, solely for humanitarian aid. But seven of the region's eight major oil refineries remained shut down, contributing to a gas shortage that sent spot oil prices spiking above $70 per barrel again Wednesday. The crisis was felt sharply by motorists who found bags over gas pump nozzles at drained service stations in Baton Rouge and other cities to the north and west that had a heavy flow of evacuees. Some of the evacuees began returning Wednesday to the brim of the devastation to await the first opportunity to venture back into the city and find out what was left of their homes.

Reversing his earlier refusal to tap the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, about 700 million barrels of crude oil stored in salt domes near the Louisiana and Texas border, Bush authorized a draw-down from the reserves to ease the pressure on refineries. Within minutes of the announcement, crude futures fell back below $70.

Anarchy and menace

The massive recovery effort contrasted starkly with the widespread looting that continued to shame the city. It had moved well beyond theft of water, food and other necessities to include electronic gear, liquor, cigarettes. One woman was seen hauling a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cooler down a Bywater street.

The Wal-Mart Supercenter on Tchoupitoulas Street was stripped of huge amounts of goods, including its ample supply of guns and ammunition. The Winn Dixie at Basin Street across from the French Quarter was all but stripped of inventory.

A late afternoon fire at one of the Footlocker outlets on Canal Street contributed to the sense of anarchy and menace. Another plume of smoke at the foot of Canal Street suggested the Aquarium of the Americas also was on fire. But an attendant, roused from a catnap, said the rooftop smoke was from a failing generator used to keep the aquarium’s huge fish tanks aerated.