[From the diaries by susanhu. Thank you, Jerome, for telling this story, and for your deep concern. It’s almost impossible for us in the U.S. to grasp, let alone write about. Btw, Anderson Cooper is doing a CNN special report at 4pm PT on the mutilated corpses, etc. at the convention center. I hope it is carried internationally.]

I just wanted to flag two stories underlining the horror in Louisiana. One you’ve probably seen, as I have found it on CNN. It’s pretty harrowing nevertheless:

Victims feel forgotten in southeastern Louisiana

CHALMETTE, Louisana (AP) — The cars were swallowed, the homes shattered and the people left clinging for life. Survivors waited for help, but it seemed like so little, so late.

More than a week since Hurricane Katrina cut its swath along the Gulf Coast, word is only now starting to trickle out from this outlying area of some 66,000 people on Louisiana’s southeastern edge.

What’s said is filled with anger — residents feeling even more abandoned than hard-hit New Orleans — and disbelief.

“If you dropped a bomb on this place, it couldn’t be any worse than this,” said Ron Silva, a district fire chief in St. Bernard Parish. “It’s Day 8, guys. Everything was diverted first to New Orleans, we understand that. But do you realize we got 18 to 20 feet of water from the storm, and we’ve still got 7 to 8 feet of water?”

(…)

As relief efforts sputtered in the days after the storm, Verlyn Davis Jr., an out-of-work electrician, took charge. He transformed his parents’ bar and seafood restaurant, Lehrmann’s, into a shelter where he dispatches people to clear roads, hook up generators and help in the disaster relief process.

About 20 people have been staying there these days. On a boarded-up window out front is a blue spray-painted sign: “ABOUT TIME BUSH!”

“The governor and the president let thousands of people die and they let them die on their roofs and they let them die in the water,” said Davis, 45. “We got left. They didn’t care.“

Help has begun to pour in — the sound of the military helicopters overhead interrupts the silence. Search teams in boats pound on rooftops. They shout, “Anybody home?” But they know the answer.

“New Orleans took a beating,” said Jason Stage, a 47-year-old maintenance worker staying at Lehrmann’s. “But St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines was ground zero.”

The other comes from Le Monde, and comes from one of their special correspondants inside NO. This is the original article in French, and below you can find a translation by Google corrected by me as required:

Floating corpses, polluted water: death drives out the living

The odor of dead has fallen on New-Orleans. Nine days after the cyclone, the rescuers patrol in boat in the zones flooded, searching for survivors but they cannot escape the corpses everywhere, floating in putrid water, wedged in cars or stuck in garbage. They have orders to leave them on the spot, nothing being ready to deal with them.

At the headquarters of the police force, Captain Bayard confirms that to its knowledge, the phase of recovery of the bodies has not started: “Our priority is to find survivors”, he says, acknowledging his impotence: “we have not been told the procedure to be followed to remove the dead.”

However, in order to prevent the corpses from drifting around, rescuers and police officers attach them by an arm, a leg or by the neck to the nearest tree, truck, or whatever traffic sign which still emerges. Then they note the exact location and transmit information to their headquarters, which has started to build a list. Some army units note the GPS co-ordinates of each body. On the other hand, the volunteer first-aid workers do not get close to the bodies and do not always provide information on those they saw.

CONTINUED BELOW:

In the districts where water invaded only the ground floors, the army teams search the houses, one by one. When they find bodies there, they make a special mark on the frontage. Sergeant Turner, of the 20th Battalion of the special forces of the American army, says that no house will be forgotten, even if the operation will undoubtedly take months: “Where water went up to the roof, we can do nothing yet. We will have to wait until the level goes down.” He knows that the worst is to be come: “In the next weeks, as water is pumped, we will undoubtedly find many victims in the buildings, including in the attics. It was the last refuge.”

MIASMAS AND BACTERIA

It is a specialized federal service, the D-Mortuary (Disaster Mortuary), which will manage the recovery of the corpses, because the more time passes, the more this mission will be complex and dangerous. Black and thick water, already saturated with chemicals and oil poured by the flooded factories, fills up with the miasmas and bacteria of the bodies in decomposition. One sees also many dead dogs, poisoned by water.

The persons in charge for the FEMA, based in Baton-Rouge, 130 km from there, say that some specialists in D-Mortuary are already on the spot with refrigerator trucks. An emergency mortuary was assembled close to Baton-Rouge, and 25 000 body bags are expected.

But no reliable figure on the number of victims, nor even on the number of corpses located to date, was published. Last week, during a press conference, the democratic mayor of New-Orleans, Ray Nagin, had advanced the figure of 10 000 died, but nobody knows on what he based this assertion. And some think now that the mayor perhaps spoke under emotion, or to feed the polemic which opposes him to the federal government on the insufficiency of first aid.

In the meantime, death drives out life. The army blocks the access to the city, and in view of the risks of epidemic, the mayor ordered, Wednesday September 7, the total evacuation of the center, including the spared zones. By force if necessary.