The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour tonight; the news of this Wednesday; then, extended coverage of the continuing efforts to come to grips with the deaths and the destructions of Hurricane Katrina; and the latest on the human stampede in Baghdad that killed at least 700 people.

NEWS SUMMARY

JIM LEHRER: The crisis in New Orleans grew more desperate today. Mayor Ray Nagin announced Hurricane Katrina killed hundreds of people, possibly thousands. He warned bodies could trigger outbreaks of disease. Water finally stopped surging through breached levees today but the city remained flooded. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco appealed for help to stop looting and to help survivors.

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO: We believe that we need to free up the National Guard essentially to do security in the city, and I'm asking for a military presence to do all of those - to help us with the evacuation, take charge of the evacuation and do all of the other things that our people have been doing.

JIM LEHRER: Officials in Mississippi reported at least 110 people killed there. The worst of the storm blasted the Biloxi and Gulfport areas and left little intact along their coastline. Across the Gulf region, at least 70,000 people were in shelters. Federal officials said some may never be able to return.

Disaster relief efforts moved into higher gear today. Twenty-one thousand National Guard troops were mobilized andthe U.S. Navy dispatched a hospital ship, helicopter carriers and supplies.

President Bush flew over the damaged zone on his way back to Washington from Texas. He spoke later in the Rose Garden at the White House.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The folks on the Gulf Coast are going to need the help of this country for a long time. This is going to be a difficult road. The challenges that we face on the ground are unprecedented. But there's no doubt in my mind we're going to succeed.

Right now the days seem awfully dark for those affected. I understand that. But I'm confident that with time, you'll get your life back in order, new communities will flourish, the great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger place for it.

JIM LEHRER: The president also urged all Americans to help by contributing to the Red Cross. We'll have much more on the hurricane's aftermath and the response right after this News Summary.

The hurricane cut oil output in the Gulf by 95 percent. So today, the Energy Department opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to make up the shortfall. In response, oil futures in New York dropped nearly 90 cents to settle under $69 a barrel. But gasoline futures continued rising. The refinery shutdowns along the Gulf fueled gasoline prices. They spiked 30 to 50 cents overnight across the country. We'll have more on the energy part of this story later in the program.

Wall Street had a hurricane rally today. Investors bought oil company stocks and shares in companies that could help rebuild the Gulf Coast. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained more than 68 points to close at 10,481. The NASDAQ rose 22 points to close at 2152.

Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in a stampede in Baghdad today. The health ministry said 769 died, most of them women and children. More than 300 others were hurt. It happened as thousands of Shiites were crossing a bridge in a religious ceremony. Rumors of a suicide bomber in the crowd ignited panic and the victims were trampled or jumped into the Tigris River and drowned. We'll have more on this story later in the program.

Back in this country the Food and Drug Administration approved a new flu vaccine today made by Glaxo-Smith-Kline. The company will be the company's third major supplier. There were only two last year and one had to stop production over contamination fears. A top FDA official resigned today in a dispute over emergency contraception. Susan Wood had been director for women's health. She criticized the agency for not allowing sales of the "morning-after pill" without a prescription. The FDA said last week it could not decide how to enforce an age limit for the sales.

And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to, the tragedies along the U.S. Gulf Coast, and across a bridge in Baghdad.

UPDATE - HURRICANE KATRINA

JIM LEHRER: The terrible stories of Hurricane Katrina continue.

Spencer Michels begins our coverage with this report on the day's developments.

SPENCER MICHELS: While officials assessed the damage and attempted to relieve the misery, the people of New Orleans tried to cope with an unprecedented disaster.

With water pouring into city streets through two levee breaks and 80 percent of the city underwater, the mayor said he had no choice but to order the total evacuation of the city. He added that New Orleans won't be functional for two or three months.

Attempts to plug the breaches with sandbags have thus far failed. The risk of disease is growing, as officials confirmed bodies are floating in the water around the city.

So today refugees awaited help. There are as many as 1 million homeless people across the region.

WOMAN: If I cry, I've got to keep a strong front in, in front of my children and if I panic then they're going to panic.

WOMAN: As long as I have my family and everybody else is all right and we're very grateful.

SPENCER MICHELS: Coast Guard teams continued rescue operations by helicopter -- plucking people huddled on rooftops.

Hundreds remained stranded on rooftops and balconies frantically waving and holding signs calling for help, hoping for rescue.

This woman had to decide which of her family members to leave behind because the police rescuing the family had limited space.

DIANNE ANDERSON: I was trying to send my baby and the daughter with the police officer because the baby has a respiratory problem but I'm looking at my other daughter with her three kids and my brother standing there. I want to be there with them because I feel like when my daughter had a chance to go with the police it would have been a good choice but to leave my brother and my grandkids and my other daughter, it's like I couldn't do it, but my baby girl with the baby -- she was screaming and crying and saying "If you don't come with me, I'll kill myself; you've got to come with me." So my daughter told me take my daughter, take Lexis and she said, "Go."

SPENCER MICHELS: Many residents didn't evacuate because they didn't have cars, money for gas or anywhere to go. A quarter of New Orleans residents live below the poverty level.

JOANNE MURPHY: It's just a thing that always happens. The ones that has the least, seems like they're hit harder than anything else.

SPENCER MICHELS: Others residents made the conscious decision to weather the storm.

MAN: Well, I work for the sheriff in Orleans Parish, and I was afraid, you know, if the water wasn't high, I would have to go to work. So we decided to ride it out, and it was a bad mistake.

SPENCER MICHELS: This man was looking ahead to rebuilding but he has no insurance.

TIMOTHY ANDREWS: If don't nobody get me any kind of assistance, I'm just going to have to try to do it piece by piece, wood by wood, paycheck by paycheck.

SPENCER MICHELS: Looters roamed the streets, particularly in the French Quarter, which sits on higher ground and wasn't flooded as badly as the rest of the city.

SHIRELLE JACKSON: It was a disaster. People were shooting right across from me.

REPORTER: They were shooting guns?

SHIRELLE JACKSON: They were shooting at each other. They were saying that they didn't care about life anymore. And it was just disastrous. It was rioting; they had a building burning down, a pawnshop where they had set it afire. And people were just looting. It was like a movie to me. You know, I haven't woke up. I feel like I'm in a dream or something.

SPENCER MICHELS: Others wandered the flooded streets desperately looking for basic supplies -- water, food, shelter and gasoline. There's no electricity and no running water and many communication systems remain down.

Inmates from a jail were moved out of their flooded cells and onto exit ramps of nearby highways -- as guards stood by with guns.

Not far away -- the Superdome -- where tens of thousands sought shelter, was surrounded by at least eight feet of water. Thousands more refugees sat outside the Superdome waiting for shelter.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry and his response team today explained they'd shelter the 23,000 refugees at Houston's Astrodome -- transferring them in a bus caravan.

HARRIS COUNTY JUDGE ROBERT ECKELS: The Astrodome is a county facility. We have worked closely and have contingency plans to use the dome as an emergency disaster recovery and refuge center in the event of a storm here in Houston. We're implementing those plans today for New Orleans. The dome is not suited well for this kind of a crowd for a long term.

The problem when you put twenty or thirty thousand people in a single place you have problems of privacy; you have problems of social issues, psychological problems when you put those people in that kind of an environment.

We are also dealing with people who have been without food, without water, without sanitary sewer, without the ability to take a shower for three or four days. They're not happy when they come here. And we are cognizant of that.

We will provide a place for as long as is necessary but are working closely with FEMA, with the Governor's Emergency Management officials to try to move them through the dome to other facilities where they would be better suited for the longer term.

SPENCER MICHELS: Army National Guard troops continued arriving on the scene to assist and keep law and order.

And four Navy ships left from Norfolk, Virginia today to join the relief effort.

KEVIN BAKER: That case of water may be the case of water that makes it to one of my family members and you know just knowing that I had a small part in that is going to be, you know good for me just knowing that in some way I helped.

SPENCER MICHELS: Thirty-two miles Northeast of New Orleans, this is all that remains of the town of Slidell.

WOMAN: Oh it's gone. It's total disaster, nothing left. We lost everything.

OLDER WOMAN: We just didn't think it would be that bad, but inside our home water was up to here.

SPENCER MICHELS: Interstate 10 used to go through Slidell but now it looks like a jigsaw puzzle. Katrina tore out the bridge leading into the town of 25,000.

This house was cut in half by a fallen tree.

Jim Day was sitting in his garage when the tree came through the roof.

JIM DAY: Crash, bang, I dove out of the car.

REPORTER: Where was your heart?

JIM DAY: Still in the car.

SPENCER MICHELS: Next door in Mississippi, Gulfport today lies a city in ruins.

Residents stood in line for ice as military police patrolled the streets.

In Biloxi, casinos and homes up and down the coast were flattened by the 30 foot storm surge.

SHIRLEY ROBINSON, Biloxi Resident: There's not a word to describe it. Wondering how long it's going to take for things to get back to normal. Power, water, food, gas, stores destroyed, gas stations destroyed, homes destroyed, loss of life. There's no question in my mind that if there's ever a storm approaching, you know, next time we're going to leave the area. And we won't worry about trying to get back because a lot of times -- as you can see there's -- not much to come back to.

CURTIS TOCHE: We raised seven children here, my wife and I are 73 and 74 and yesterday this hurricane wiped us clean. Every one of my children lost everything they had.

HAYES BOLTON: This property right here has been in family. This was uncle's house right here; this was grandmother's house; this was my pawn shop over here and also had jet ski rental business out of it; there's a house right back in the back over here that you can't quite see it but it's my aunt's house and it's totaled; these are just gone completely, and we have pretty long history here and it's all gone, it's devastated; it looks like someone nuked the place, it's just -- I'm an emotional mess, I mean, I can't deal with it.

SPENCER MICHELS: Late today in New Orleans, one ray ofhope amid what officials are calling an impossible situation - water stopped rising as the levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain equalized. And in some places the water appeared to be dropping slightly, but New Orleans is far from out of the woods.

JIM LEHRER: Keme Nzerem of Independent Television News is in Biloxi, Mississippi. He spent the day surveying the damage with residents of the area.

PAUL: Totally devastated and gone. These were businesses that used to exist before the Hurricane Katrina.

KEME NZEREM: Paul is looking for his friend. His bar used to be on the beach here but now it's gone.

PAUL: I was working in this bar the night before the hurricane came through.

KEME NZEREM: It's gone. There's nothing left.

PAUL: There's absolutely nothing left. Except for the sign. It's no longer here. I no longer have a job.

KEME NZEREM: Gulfport, Biloxi's 27-mile man made beach is quite frankly no more, Hurricane Katrina leveling the town and also social barriers. Million dollar mansions and shacks alike, the storm did not discriminate. Amid the wreckage, heart felt reunions.

MAN: The reason I'm still here is because of that.

KEME NZEREM: That protected you. That big building behind you.

MAN: That protected me.

KEME NZEREM: If that wasn't there you would have been flattened.

MAN: Would have been gone.

MAN: I didn't think it would be that bad. I didn't. I underestimated it.

MAN: The water level. It was all in the garage. Of course everything floated.

MAN: My apartment complex is in the Gulf.

MAN: Looks like a battle zone.

KEME NZEREM: People here have run out of everything. There's still no power, not long after sunrise it's already in the 90s. It's starting to smell fetid.

MAN: Hey, if it helps.

MAN: Oh, man.

MAN: Every little, eh?

MAN: Thank you.

KEME NZEREM: I guess you could call Paul and Eddy lucky. Many were not. At least 30 killed when their apartment block collapsed. Even those already at peace weren't spared.

What you can see about two miles in the distance is a floating casino ship. There was another floating casino there. That casino is now here. It's moved two miles down the beach and in doing so it's completely leveled this hotel. This was a 20-row Holiday Inn it's completely gone. About three rows. The power of this thing was devastating. Today the beach an escape route, casino workers no longer with jobs, many simply with nowhere to go.

MAN: From California.

KEME NZEREM: Are you going to be coming back here soon?

MAN: No, probably not in my lifetime.

WOMAN: Probably not in our lifetime.

KEME NZEREM: What is the situation back there?

WOMAN: It's horrible.

MAN: Pretty much. Houses are gone. People have lost all their stuff.

WOMAN: Total chaos. Flattened.

MAN: Our house was completely covered in mud.

OLDER WOMAN: Anybody on the first floor wouldn't have made it.

KEME NZEREM: And neighbors, now bonded by more than just proximity.

OLDER WOMAN: The storm surge would take it up. Then after a little bit it would come down and then it would rise again and each time it came in it got higher and higher. It was way over our heads. It was probably what? About 12 feet?

MAN: The first floor was completely covered, windows and all.

KEME NZEREM: The beach front, a wretched reminder this is all that's left.

JIM LEHRER: Reporter Joe Contreras of Newsweek Magazine has been driving from the Baton Rouge area toward New Orleans today. He spoke by phone with Ray Suarez a short time ago.

RAY SUAREZ: Joe Contreras, welcome. Why is it so hard to get back into New Orleans?

JOE CONTRERAS: Since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on Monday morning, law enforcement authorities have been sharply restricting access to the New Orleans metropolitan area and in particular the center city. All major access routes have been blocked. Because of the unique topography and geography of New Orleans, there are very, very few access roads under normal circumstances. I just got turned back about maybe five miles outside the outskirts of the city.

Essentially law enforcement authorities want to keep a very, very close control on the number of people entering the city in view of the deteriorating security situation on the streets of New Orleans.

RAY SUAREZ: You're finding it hard to get back in. Are people still pouring out of the area?

JOE CONTRERAS: I have not seen a lot of vehicles streaming westbound out of the city today. I think that there are some people who remained in the city who are being bussed out but by no means is it an exodus at this point -- I suppose in view of the very restricted supply of available vehicles for transporting people out of the stricken area.

RAY SUAREZ: You had tried to get on a boat, didn't you? What came of that?

JOE CONTRERAS: I've been trying to organize maritime transport for the last 36 hours. And I have yet to find either a boat owner willing to brave the security situation in the city or willing to risk having his vessel possibly damaged by overturned trees floating in the water, pieces of metal debris floating in the water. So, yes, that has proved to be a dead end.

RAY SUAREZ: It's estimated four million people are without electricity in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. As a practical matter, what has that meant to daily life in southern Louisiana?

JOE CONTRERAS: Well, it's meant, for example, that no one can get gasoline in large stretches in that portion of the state. I'm at a gasoline station near a rural area called La Plus and I just heard a refugee complaining to a friend of hers on this very pay phone that they are stuck. They have only a quarter tank of gas. They can't get back into their homes. They're being told by authorities to go to Tennessee. They don't have enough fuel in their tanks to get much past the border with Mississippi.

In Baton Rouge, the state capital which really emerged only with cuts and bruises relatively speaking from Hurricane Katrina, there are long lines of cars at gasoline stations that do have power. And I spent the night in a very, very up-market suburb with a family. We all just sweated out the brutal humidity of a Louisiana summer.

RAY SUAREZ: I noted you used the word refugee. You're someone who across your career has covered a lot of calamities in Central and South America. Is this a word you use with care in this situation?

JOE CONTRERAS: I do use it with care but I think it is applicable because the term evacuee does not quite capture the full human drama and suffering that people in this part of the country are enduring. As I said to your colleague Neal Conan yesterday, the images I've seen, the motels and hotels of east Texas and southern Louisiana packed with people from all walks of life brought to mind images of Parisians fleeing the French capital as the Nazis advanced in may of 1940.

It brought to mind scenes that I have witnessed in El Salvador, in Angola, in Mozambique, in Nicaragua of people who are displaced. But in those cases they had their worlds turned upside down by military conflict as opposed to natural disaster.

I covered the Mexico City earthquake in 1985 that killed 20,000 people. And I never witnessed anything like the drama, the human suffering, and the sheer quantity of people whose lives have been turned upside down by a natural catastrophe as what I have witnessed in the last 36 hours.

RAY SUAREZ: What have people been telling you about what's happening to them, what they're going through?

JOE CONTRERAS: Well, frankly, they're saying that life as they knew it will never exist again for a very, very long time. I heard the president of the New Orleans City Council, Oliver Thomas, saying earlier today that there's so much water in the city that it should be rechristened Lake New Orleans. He said that he remembers how the twin towers at the foot of Manhattan were renamed Ground Zero. And to him, New Orleans should be called Lake Zero.

This is a city that will require decades to rebuild, reconstruct, and many people are frankly walking around like zombies, like people out of a horror movie because of the dimensions of the biblical scale of the disaster that has happened to their lives.

RAY SUAREZ: Joe Contreras from Newsweek, thanks a lot for joining us.

JOE CONTRERAS: Thank you.

JIM LEHRER: As the frustrations have grown in New Orleans and the surrounding area today, government relief efforts have been criticized by some local residents. A short time ago Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco responded to those criticisms and spoke about her own frustrations.

GOV. KATHLEEN BLANCO: You need to understand that we are working in what is essentially a primitive site condition. These conditions make it extremely impossible to do everything that is absolutely essential to be done simultaneously. So we have deployed our people in a prioritized fashion. And our goal is to save as many lives as possible.

We begged all of those people, the mayor begged the people; the parish presidents begged people to get out. The people who stayed chose to stay in some cases and in other cases had limited resources. But they were given --even those with limited resources were given opportunities and perhaps the communications network did not filter rapidly enough.

We were working on a very short time line when that hurricane turned its fire power on Louisiana. We acted as rapidly as humanly possible and we got out over a million people out of that region. Now, you know, we have limited resources.

No state, no region is prepared for the dimensions that we have dealt with. But I will tell you something. We have heroes a minute in this operation. We have people who have extended themselves in such a dramatic fashion, you know, that you'll have plenty stories to write about our heroes.

But I do want to tell you 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 are going to restore law and order. We are not going to put up with the kinds of things that we have heard.

We're not going to put up with petty criminals or hardened criminals doing their business. This is not a time or a place for any of that behavior. I am just furious. This is intolerant. Louisiana people are too good. They're too strong. They're too wonderful. They're too noble for our reputation to be destroyed by these... this criminal element that is just making us have to turn essential people over to taking them off the streets. And we will take them off the streets and they will be dealt with appropriately.

Now, you know, this is massive. I think that anybody who has seen it firsthand knows that the logistics are impossible. The Red Cross cannot set up in that disaster area. All people have to come out to get the kind of help that is necessary. There's no place to function there or function in a rational, civilized fashion.

And as we eliminate the water from the streets and from the houses, people will be able to go back in. We will be able to actually assess the situation. We know that there are people trapped in their attics. We're trying to get those out. The ones who are alive are being removed right now. The ones who didn't make it, we don't even know where they are. We don't know which houses had people and which didn't.

Certainly a lot of people are calling in knowing that their relatives were in certain houses. We've got addresses. But I will tell you, addresses mean nothing right now because street signs are underwater in so many places.

You know, so you have to have a coordinated effort. You have to have some people who know the area, who do it systematically, who pick up people as they come upon them.

JIM LEHRER: Now, Gwen Ifill looks specifically at what happened to New Orleans' levee system.

GWEN IFILL: It is now nearly impossible to tell where Lake Pontchartrain ends and the city of New Orleans begins. The crescent city, wedged at the mouth of the Mississippi River below sea level, has finally lost its century-long battle against the waters which surround it.

Cascades are rushing in through two large breaches in the wall of levees designed to keep combined waters of the river, the gulf, and the lake at bay.

CHOPPER PILOT: There is no delineation between the river and this neighborhood. It looks like the neighborhood was built in the Mississippi River.

GWEN IFILL: Mayor Ray Nagin told ABC this morning the situation is dire.

MAYOR RAY NAGIN: So what's happening right now is the bowl effect that everybody talked about that's happening as we speak, and the water will rise to try and equal the water level of the lake, which is three feet above sea level.

That's significant because on St. Charles Avenue, one of our most famous avenues, is six feet below sea level in elevation. So there will nine feet in that area and probably twenty feet in other areas.

GWEN IFILL: The levees are a principal component in a line of defenses erected over the years to protect New Orleans. They act like the walls of a fortress. On the city's southern edge, they keep the Mississippi River penned in. And on the city's northern border, they keep the 600 square miles of Lake Pontchartrain at bay.

In the east, a levee has breached along the Industrial Canal which connects the lake to the river; a large swath of east New Orleans is under deep water as a result.

On the north side of town, a 150-yard section of the 17th Street Canal has been decimated. The results: Simply disastrous.

As this cross section of the city shows, nearly the entire city is below sea, river, or lake level. There is nowhere for the water to go once it invades.

Ordinarily, a vast network of giant pumps moves water through and out of the city, but the rising tide has knocked out many of those pumps. The Army Corps of Engineers built or fortified much of the present system.

This afternoon, Louisiana Emergency Management officials outlined efforts to plug the levees with giant sandbags.

JOHNNY BRADBERRY: There are 3,000 pound sandbags. Some have gone in. We've got another 100 that are ready to go into the hole as soon as the slings arrive on location. We have 20,000-pound sandbags that are going to be filled and ready for drop into the hole sometime later today and tonight.

GWEN IFILL: Once the levees are repaired, it could take up to a month to pump out the contaminated waters now inundating New Orleans.

GWEN IFILL: For more now on the design of the levees and the difficulties ahead, I'm joined by John Rennie, the editor of Scientific American Magazine.

John Rennie, many of us are hearing about what these levees are and what they do for the first time. In the case of New Orleans, a very unique case, what is it that this set of levees were supposed to do and how were they breached?

JOHN RENNIE: Well, really the levees were basically constructed to make it possible for there to be a city of New Orleans. New Orleans is built in a... basically in a bowl beside Lake Pontchartrain. If the levees weren't there, there wouldn't be enough dry land for you to be able to build the city on.

In this case, unfortunately, what happened was that the surge of water associated with Hurricane Katrina moved through the lake, struck the levees and opened up these holes in a few places allowing the waters from the lake to then start to flow down into the city.

GWEN IFILL: These levees were built to withstand a hurricane of this magnitude, obviously not, but what was the idea about what they would be able to withstand?

JOHN RENNIE: New Orleans has been hit by a lot of hurricanes over the years and the levees really are constructed so that they can withstand a lot of the sorts of pressures and strains associated with typical hurricanes.

The fact is that even if Katrina had really hit New Orleans dead on and if we'd seen the kind of 25-foot surge that was associated with other parts in the worst part of the storm, if that had hit New Orleans, even if the levees had held up, an enormous amount of water would have still spilled over them and flooded the city.

So really nothing is built to withstand something the strength of Katrina. But the fact is that in practice, New Orleans didn't have to experience that extraordinary level of force. It was still enough though to break open these areas of the levees.

GWEN IFILL: There are also canals and there's a pump system. Does the pump system kick into gear at a time when the levees fail?

JOHN RENNIE: That's right. Automatically, these pumps are supposed to start pumping water back over into the areas in the lake to help keep the city dry. They're normally designed, I think, to be able to handle, for example, in heavy rains something on the order of an inch of water an hour arriving. However, they do break down and a lot more water was coming in a lot faster than that this time.

GWEN IFILL: Was there anything avoidable in this circumstance or was this a catastrophe waiting to happen?

JOHN RENNIE: Unfortunately, this really was a catastrophe that was waiting to happen by almost every measure. Back in 2001, Scientific American published an article on this subject.

Because the levees themselves needed a lot of work, it was obvious that eventually some sort of disaster could occur. But also the lands involving -- the marshy lands surrounding New Orleans have also degraded so fast that they're a kind of natural buffer that would usually help to protect the city against them, and in fact have done that in the past. But they're disappearing very, very fast and, unfortunately, with every year, they leave city more and more exposed to the raw power of the ocean and hurricanes like this.

GWEN IFILL: I read in that Scientific American article that you mentioned that the city was actually losing an acre or the area every 24 minutes, an acreof wetland was going away.

JOHN RENNIE: That's right.

GWEN IFILL: So what is it that the city, the state, the government could have been doing to shore up these levees and the systems, these irrigation systems as it were, against this sort of catastrophe?

JOHN RENNIE: Well, it is a tricky problem. In fact, since 1995, the Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in a project of trying to fortify the levees and modernize the pumping systems. Unfortunately, in the last few years, some of the spending on that actually had fallen off what was recommended. I'm sure that's going to be controversial as people are looking who to blame.

Beyond that though, really the biggest problem is that it called for a lot commitment to look at these areas outside of the city proper and start to try to allow those wetlands to be reconstructed. And that's an expensive project. It's something that goes against natural development interests and, you know, unfortunately it would have been expensive, but it's -- it would have been a lot less expensive than what we are looking at having to do in New Orleans now.

GWEN IFILL: Assuming that they find a way to plug these holes in the dike, as it were, how long would it take for the city, this bowl, to drain?

JOHN RENNIE: That's a very good question. I'm seeing different estimates of that. One estimate I saw said that once they can close that up, assuming that the levels of water don't rise a lot higher, maybe in a month, maybe more they would be able to pump that back out, which is actually an astonishing feat.

But at this point, I think people are still coming to grips with just how bad the problem is and no one really knows how hard it's going to be to fix.

GWEN IFILL: And how do they plug it up? I mean, plug it up makes it sound simpler than it probably is.

JOHN RENNIE: It is, although fundamentally that's basically the problem. You have this rupture in the levee. It's a big hole in the dam in effect and the water is spilling through. They've already tried to do things like drop big sandbags down into that to fill it up. And that hasn't worked so far.

This is kind of an engineering nightmare because it's very hard to -- for the engineers to get access to these points where they have to try to build these patches. And the problem is that even when they start to build these patches, the more of the hole they fill, the faster the water that's coming through to the remaining open part. So it keeps tearing away at the surface. It's very, very hard.

They're not even sure how big the ruptures in some parts of the levees are. I've seen estimates of 300 yards, but I've also seen estimates of 500 yards and maybe growing.

GWEN IFILL: So, now that the water has stopped rising, which they say has happened, now what? Do they just wait for it to go down some more or do they just keep dropping sandbags until you hope it stops?

JOHN RENNIE: Well, you have to keep on throwing down those sandbags and you have to start the pumping and it's going to be a very, very difficult.

Unfortunately, you can't wait for gravity to take the water away because, again, New Orleans itself -- it is built under the sea level. So naturally water wants to cover New Orleans to a depth of, you know, in some places, 20 feet.

GWEN IFILL: John Rennie, a tough problem. Thanks a lot for helping us with it.

JOHN RENNIE: Thank you.

FOCUS - OIL JITTERS

JIM LEHRER: Now, Jeffrey Brown looks at what the hurricane's done to U.S. oil production and supplies.

JEFFREY BROWN: Our citizens must understand the storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and distribute gasoline-- that from President Bush a short time ago assessing the damage from Hurricane Katrina.

Today the president announced a decision to release oil from the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep refineries supplied. The reserve consists of some 700 million barrels of crude oil, stockpiled underground in Texas and Louisiana.

Joining me to discuss the situation is Red Cavaney, president of the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group.

Welcome to you.

RED CAVANEY: Thank you, Jeffrey.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why don't we start by describing the range of facilities in the area that have been affected.

RED CAVANEY: They're quite significant. Maybe to help you understand, 25 percent of the total domestic production of crude oil comes out of that Gulf region and about a little more than 20 percent of the natural gas. So it's very, very significant.

Out on the Gulf itself there are about 6500 production facilities, and on the ground there are a large number of refineries, pipeline distribution systems and everything. It's the most complex infrastructure that we have. And so when we talk about damage in an area of that scale, it's going to affect not just that region but of course the areas from which they distribute their product which is basically from the Midwest everything East.

JEFFREY BROWN: Is it possible to know how many of these facilities have been damaged yet?

RED CAVANEY: Well, right now when you look at the off-shore rigs, there are basically rigs that are close in shore that try and bring the oil and the gas out. About 23 of those principally older ones were destroyed. When you look at the more sophisticated drilling rigs that are out there, four in the shallower water and four in the deep water -- the deep water is important because that's where the really big volumes are and the big investment. And so there are eight of those that have been damaged. And we don't have a full assessment on how quickly they can brought on stream.

Of our refineries, however, in the area we know that there are nine that are out of commission at present for various reasons. And some of them have not even been able to be visited yet so it's very hard to say exactly what kind of timetable those refineries can be brought back on stream.

JEFFREY BROWN: We know about the flooding damage, the problem, of course; there's also the power problem.

RED CAVANEY: And the problem is you can't deal with both of these at the same time. You have to go in sequence because if you have refineries that are flooded, you have got to get all the water out before you're going to put electricity in there. After you put the electricity in, what you need to do is you actually need to try and start up and run tests on your refinery to see whether or not it can be run safely. And only then can you bring it up and start to create some actual production.

So we have to rely very much on the local community and the first responders to help us get the water out and then of course the utility industry which has been just terrific in terms of getting people from all over the country down there to help.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, the president's announcement today by releasing some of the oil from the petroleum reserve, what does that mean exactly? And how might that help?

RED CAVANEY: That's a big asset because one of the things that also has been affected by this are the pipelines, and most of the crude oil and the gasoline, the diesel that travels around our country moves in pipelines. But with no electricity you can't have any pipelines running so we did have just outside this critical area where we have the nine refineries that are basically out of operation for the moment, we have some refineries that exist but their concern was how am I going to get crude oil there? And the normal channels weren't able to do that.

So by accessing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, those people are going to be able to know that they're going to have crude oil product convert to gasoline and other things and so they'll keep going and they'll run very, very efficient. Without the Strategic Petroleum Reserve release, they would have been concerned that they would run out of the raw material, crude oil, and therefore would have to shut down and we'd be even in a bigger problem so the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is very important.

JEFFREY BROWN: How big a difference does it make and how quickly does it get into these refineries?

RED CAVANEY: They can literally because they're located in that particular area within a matter of a day to a day-and-a-half, from when they decide to make that first release it actually becomes of use but it's also a psychological thing. Knowing that it's going to be coming in very short order allows you then to take more confidence that you can run your existing inventory full rather than sort of backing off a little bit. It also helps those refineries that are down that may have said we can get our refinery up but we can't do much if we can't get crude oil.

Now they know with the Strategic Petroleum Oil Reserve there they have a back-up plan and confidence that they can get the machinery running and the refinery up and going and the crude oil will be there.

JEFFREY BROWN: I see, but to be clear, for the moment, this is just to help refineries up and running. This has no impact on the ones, the eight or nine that are down.

RED CAVANEY: No, not at all.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay. Now the president instructed the EPA to relax some Clean Air Act provisions about the production of oil. What does that do?

RED CAVANEY: Well, it helps you because right now even before we had the hurricane, we had a circumstance where we were in the prime driving season and the fact that prices were where they were was the law of supply and demand. There was as much demand as there was supply. And so therefore everybody was bidding up the price of the product.

JEFFREY BROWN: Excuse me. But in fact most of our discussions about this in recent weeks and months has been about the demand problem.

RED CAVANEY: Exactly. Demand driven. And now we have a situation where supply is driving this particular equation so the circumstance that people need to be concerned about was if special blends... the government sort of tells us what kinds of blends can go in what part of the country. That's part of the rules of how to distribute them.

But if we can't make certain blends that means we can't deliver product to an area that requires another blend without a waiver. So by giving a waiver, it basically says we can get gasoline to wherever it's needed and in the near term between now and Sept. 15, we don't have to be concerned about the effects of these various regulations so it's very helpful.

It makes us more flexible, allows us to move that around to where it's needed and I think ultimately will allow us to bring in imports we might not ear otherwise be able to do.

JEFFREY BROWN: In the immediate term the impact on most citizens will be at the gas pump?

RED CAVANEY: Yes. They will see more opportunity for supply with this kind of flexibility than we would have otherwise had.

JEFFREY BROWN: And why does it hit so quickly? People wonder how that works? Why is it overnight that prices rise so high?

RED CAVANEY: Well, what happens is there are about 160,000 retail outlets where the consumer actually buys their gasoline and diesel. About a little less than 10 percent are own and operated by the industry itself, the refiners and the people that produce it.

The rest are small businessmen and women, small companies that they own those things and it's very competitive marketplace because I don't think there's any other industry that actually posts its price for everybody to see every time they go by.

And so what you see is the dynamic move of people trying to decide that I want to steal some customers away from my competitors. I'm going to lower my price by 2 cents or somebody else saying, look, I think I can make more money by holding my price with fewer customers. Those are the kinds of decisions that ultimately drive the market.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right now people are seeing it go up though.

RED CAVANEY: People are seeing it because the problem with a commodity is if that's the product you're giving to consumers, you don't want to be caught without it, so you'll pay almost anything to get that last truck load to be able to take care of your customers.

JEFFREY BROWN: Okay. Red Cavaney, thank you very much.

RED CAVANEY: Thank you.

FOCUS - FATAL STAMPEDE

JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, the stampede in Baghdad that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Shiite pilgrims. ITN's Lindsey Hilsum of Independent Television News begins our coverage of that tragedy.

LINDSEY HILSUM: As if there hadn't already been enough grief in this city, enough violence and killing: Shoes on the bridge, left by the hundreds who were crushed or plunged to their deaths this morning. They gathered at dawn, hundreds of thousands of devout Shias commemorating the martyrdom of the seventh imam, Mousa al Kadhim in 799. He's buried at the shrine in Khadimiya, a suburb of Baghdad named after him. Trouble started early when at least three mortar bombs were fired into the crowd leaving tell-tale fan-shaped impact marks. Seven people were killed, others taken to hospital.

MAN (Translated): We rushed to the blast scene. The dead were scattered on the ground and the injured taken to al Khadimiya Hospital for treatment. There were more injured children than men or women.

LINDSEY HILSUM: But worse was to come. While some cooled themselves in the Tigris, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims streamed up on to the Aima Bridge over the river leading to the shrine. The atmosphere was febrile, everyone aware that any small incident could lead to disaster. A rumor spread: Someone had seen a suicide bomber.

SPOKESPERSON (Translated): After we arrived at the sacred Khadimiya area, we heard that there was a suicide car bomber. There were thousands of people on the bridge and because they were afraid, they began to panic and run. Then they began to trample all over each other.

LINDSEY HILSUM: Total disaster. Some jumped into the river and drowned. Others fell to their deaths onto the concrete approach at the end of the bridge. Still more were suffocated in the crush.

MAN (Translated): I tried to help women, children and old men. When I lifted them up, their lips were blue and their ears were bleeding. Their noses were dripping blood. Each person was lying on top of another, tangled up together.

LINDSEY HILSUM: The shoes tell the story, thousands abandoned in the panic by victims and survivors alike, testament to a catastrophe even more deadly than the daily bombings in Baghdad.

JIM LEHRER: Terence Smith spoke by phone a short time ago with Los Angeles Times reporter Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad.

TERENCE SMITH: Borzou Daragahi, welcome to the broadcast. I understand that you got to this area not long after the stampede occurred. Tell us what you saw.

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Well, it was still a lot of very, very skittish and nervous pilgrims, as well as a lot of police and Iraqi soldiers firing their weapons into the air trying to sort of maintain crowd control. There was a lot of very, very upset people, very sad people. People would gasp as they walked by a pile, really a mound of plastic slippers that apparently belonged to the... those killed and injured in the incident.

There was a bunch of politicians, including Ahmed Chalabi, who came to the scene with their security entourages and were sort of surveying the area.

TERENCE SMITH: So I take it that even in Baghdad, where you've had and seen so much violence, this was a shocking event?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Yeah, this was just really awful. I mean, one of the things that keeps staying in my mind is those piles of plastic slippers and just sort of looking at them, you could tell by looking at them what kind of people were in this incident were killed and injured in this incident. They were just very poor people. You know, very, very small people -- like elderly and young and women and people who were too poor to afford shoes.

TERENCE SMITH: Now I understand that some Iraqi officials have charged that this story that there was a suicide bomber in the midst, that this whole thing was, in their words, a "deliberate act of terrorism" and yet other officials, Sunni officials, deny that. Is there any evidence one way or the other?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: There's no evidence one way or the other. There's as many stories as there are victims that we spoke to today, and we haven't been able to nail down anything. I will say that most of the people, most of the military officials and security officials that I spoke to on the scene conceded that their security precautions played a big role in sort of... in exacerbating the problems here.

The concrete barrier... I spoke to several high-level military officials who were saying that, you know, we had ordered these concrete barriers that were in the middle of this bridge to be removed, that, you know, we could foresee this trouble, that these concrete barriers that were there to prevent the vehicles from traveling back and forth between Sunni Adhamiya and Shiite Khadimiya would create problems for pedestrians, that this bridge was not ready for pedestrians. For some reason these concrete barriers were not removed.

TERENCE SMITH: So is it clear then, or is it believed, that this was a deliberate effort to set one community against the other? Or is it still too much confusion to know?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: It's absolutely impossible to know. And I think that, you know, it's good to be cautious in this arena. You know, like traditionally the residents of Adhimiya, which is the Sunni-Arab neighborhood right across the river from Khadimiya are known for giving water and refreshments and sweets to the pilgrims that walk across.

Today there was police trucks going around saying, you know, "Don't drink the water. It's poisoned." And, you know, there were these rumors going around that the Sunnis were trying to poison the Shiites, and we could find no real evidence of that.

And, you know, even today, even amidst this chaos and amidst all of this tension, we found Sunni-Arab people who helped the victims and took them to the hospitals. So it's not clear that sectarianism drove this event.

TERENCE SMITH: What was the reaction, what has been the reaction among the people of Baghdad?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Well, I can say that a large number of the victims were from Sadr City. Tonight, Sadr City is a scene of utter mourning and grief as people set up funeral tents and get bodies prepared for burial down in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf tomorrow. The people are very angry there and very upset.

Sadr City, as some viewers may know, is a vast Shiite slum in east Baghdad, and these are people who are lacking services. They don't get much water, they don't have any sewage, they don't have electricity and this just adds to their misery.

TERENCE SMITH: Adds to the tension as well I suppose between the two communities just at a point when the country is trying to move towards a constitution.

BORZOU DARAGAHI: That may be, but at this point it's also sort of creating problems for the government. You know, it could very well be that it was more a matter of municipal mismanagement that caused this. You know, it remains to be investigated, but it seems like the crowd control strategy that they employed here, knowing full well that there would be a million pilgrims, could have been probably better handled.

There were less pilgrims many were saying this year than last year. So, you know, they should have known that there would have been this many pilgrims, Iraqis say. And the people that I spoke to at the scene, quite frankly they blamed Ibrahim Jaafari's government, the prime minister's government for the handling of this rather than... I didn't hear any sectarian slogan.

TERENCE SMITH: And finally, I understand that there is some three days of mourning, national mourning that have been declared?

BORZOU DARAGAHI: Yeah, Ibrahim Jaafari, the prime minister, has declared a state of mourning. It should be said also that the United States government has expressed its condolences and offered to help in any way it can by releasing a statement from Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

TERENCE SMITH: Borzou Daragahi, thank you very much for filling us in.

BORZOU DARAGAHI: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: Again, the other major developments on the hurricane: The mayor of New Orleans said Hurricane Katrina killed hundreds, possibly thousands. Water stopped pouring through breached levees, but most of the city was still flooded. Officials in Mississippi reported at least 110 people killed there. President Bush said the recovery could take years, but he said the Gulf coast and New Orleans will come back.

And late today in an unrelated story federal authorities announced terror indictments in Los Angeles. Four people allegedly plotted to attack National Guard sites. The Israeli consulate and other targets. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.