The Guardian reports that the waters of New Orleans are ten times over their toxic limit.

The disclosure from the first tests conducted by the US government into conditions in New Orleans added a growing urgency to an order for thousands of inhabitants remaining in the wretched city to leave or face forced evacuation.

At least three deaths from bacterial infections have been reported from the carnage wrought by Hurricane Katrina. The EPA warned that there was a risk not just from drinking water but from skin contact as well. "Human contact with the floodwater should be avoided as much as possible," said Stephen Johnson, an EPA administrator.

by Last Night in Little Rock

CNN.com reported about an hour ago in its "Breaking News" e-mail alerts that between 25 to 30 bodies have been found in a nursing home in St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans. (Nothing on CNN.com as of the time of this post.) The NY Times reported today that the elderly in Katrina's path were hard hit.

This apparently is a cost of the Bush Administration's extolation of "personal responsibility" for their own lives. They should have just evacuated, like all the "white people" with cars. They probably were trapped in their rooms or died in their beds. I pray they did not even know what was happening to them.

As Barbara Bush would say, the evacuees are better off anywhere else other than in New Orleans, like a dormitory for 20,000, since they had nothing to begin with. "Let them eat cake."

And so it goes...

Update:

Soledad O'Brien on CNN's Larry King Live reports "more than 30" dead at nursing home.

From CNN tonight:

• FEMA has 25,000 body bags on hand.
• 70% of New Orleans police are homeless.
• New Orleans Remains 60% under water
• 15,000 people are still in New Orleans, many refusing to leave.
• Dr. Henderson was on again. He said people died because of the late response. Mostly old people but babies too. One woman delivered a baby at the Superdome or Convention Center and it died.
• Michael Brown is standing his ground, back giving interviews and refusing to resign

by TChris

Mara Leveritt titled her proposed book “Losing New Orleans.” She hit on the idea after Hurricane Ivan made a fortuitous change of course, bypassing New Orleans. She started thinking about the people who would be stranded if a hurricane hit the city: the residents of nursing homes, the disabled and hospitalized, the poor. She wondered what would happen to gas prices if pipelines ruptured. She pondered the ability of the levees to keep the water out, and worried that they might trap water inside a flooded city. The ramifications of a full-force hurricane, striking at the heart of New Orleans, seemed to make a grimly fascinating story.

As she researched her book proposal, she discovered that she wasn’t alone in considering the potential catastrophe.

All this was well understood by any officials who had bothered to look. In early 2001, FEMA had issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely U.S. disasters, and that included a terrorist attack on New York City.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Yesterday we reported "word on the street" that a coroner was going on "Larry King Live" to talk about the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency's refusal to allow coroners to handle the remains of the dead in New Orleans.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette confirms today that he will be on.

Race is one issue that will not go away when examining the New Orleans devastation. Writer Leonce Gaiter, who authored the book Bourbon Street, addresses it today in Katrina's Deck is Full of Race Cards.

The first days were the most telling. Nobody mentioned it. Tens of thousands of people trapped in increasingly filthy conditions—free-flowing feces, dead bodies lying about, grounds soaked in urine—yet nobody mentioned that they were all black. It was obvious to anyone with eyes. The images made you squirm and cringe—hordes of black faces pleading for help—life, food, water—in a major American city. Yet nobody mentioned it. What were they afraid of? Were they scared that the right-wingers would accuse them of playing the race card? Accuse them of suggesting that America had not achieved the colorblind state of utopian bliss that they insist it has; that white people and the American society over which they hold sway are not as perfectly just as they claim?

Finally, a good idea from the government. It will begin handing out debit cards today worth $2,000 to Katrina survivors, beginning with those at the Astrodome and other rescue centers.

Crooks and Liars has the video.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The NY Times yesterday had a poignant story of the suicide of NOLA PD PIO Sgt. Paul Accardo. The fact there were two suicides was previously reported here.

Accardo was a lovable perfectionist who was a fixture on the nightly TV news, making sense of the senseless crimes he reported on for the Department.

Colleagues believe he was overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness, unable to do anything to help anybody. Whatever he did do would not be enough by his own standards. The Times article is like a punch in the gut:

by Last Night in Little Rock

Evacuees are landing at Ft. Chafee, AR by the hundreds as already noted here. Yesterday I was on I-40 for 2-1/2 hours each way to and from Ft. Smith, and the buses were still coming and going, with markings from many states. A lawyer friend in Ft. Smith reported a dozen buses heading south back to New Orleans on US-71 (via Shreveport) yesterday.

The local newspaper for Ft. Chafee is the Southwest Times Record of Ft. Smith. Today's edition discusses:

• local school officials preparing to absorb the children into their systems.

• More "evacuees" being sent from Chafeee elsewhere

• A survivor complaining his is not a criminal and shouldn't be treated like one.

The statewide paper is the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette with a separate Northwest Arkansas Edition. Its coverage today:

• State officials still are trying to get a handle on the numbers of evacuees so they can be given medical care, housing, and jobs.

• Ft. Chafee is now a processing point for evacuees, and 2,000 have been processed through the hospital alone, with 300 having been transferred to area hospitals. Many are being sent elsewhere.

• The Northwest Arkansas Regional Campus of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences has undertaken training National Guardsmen as medics.

by TChris

Elected Republicans may still have the president's back, but they can't afford to ignore anger like this:

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today," Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard said on CBS' The Early Show. "So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

This article lists some of the hearings that will soon be held in the House and Senate to assess -- as has been the president's mantra during the past couple of days -- "what went wrong and what went right." Justifiable anger has fueled the demand for a candid inquiry into the failings of the Bush administration, oversight notably absent from the passive, stonewalling majority party in recent years.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Word on the street in Little Rock is that its intrepid and indefatigable coroner with a heart of gold, Mark Malcolm, who this writer knows personally as a stand up guy, will be on Larry King Live tomorrow on CNN, 9 pm, 12 am, 3 am ET, telling about his trip to New Orleans as a volunteer to cope with the dead bodies, and FEMA would not allow them to deal with any of the dead without signing off on it, and FEMA would never sign off. He apparently gave up in frustration, and he is going on Larry King Live to tell his story about his experience with the Federal Emergency Mismanagement Agency. See Katrina Dead to be Warehoused in Former Leper Town, below.

(Keep in mind that this is third hand information but from what I consider reliable sources or it wouldn't be up here.)