New Orleans Today: Wreckage and Bloated Bodies
Posted on Sun Sep 11, 2005 at 11:26:01 PM EST
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As President Bush begins his third tour of the Gulf Coast, here's what the rescue workers around him are seeing in New Orleans - a view of which he undoubtedly will be spared:
Police, troops and rescue crews in New Orleans pursued their round-the-clock mission of fishing out rotting corpses and pressing lingering survivors to leave their homes....A National Guard unit patrolled one neighbourhood, trying to persuade the old and infirm to abandon their homes, as nearly half a million others have done, and were inevitably stumbling across decomposing bodies in the streets.
"It ain't a pretty sight," said Sergeant James Terrel as his men went house to house. "I don't recommend walking down there. Even a lot of my guys don't want to see this kind of thing... and some of them have been in Iraq."
...today, their home stadium is enduringly linked with the nightmare that swept New Orleans when Katrina hit. The surrounding streets are a tangle of fallen power lines, smashed and charred homes, dead dogs, and abandoned cars, with not a soul to be seen, save a squad of four soldiers patrolling, picking their way past piles of steel and garbage.
Bush's reputation as a leader is in tatters:
The latest opinion poll by Newsweek magazine found that just 38 percent approve of Bush's job performance, while 52 percent of respondents no longer trust him to make the right decisions in a foreign or domestic crisis.
And a survey by Time magazine suggested 61 percent of Americans thought the government should cut its spending in Iraq to help pay for post-Katrina reconstruction.
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