Mayor: Everyone Must Evacuate

After two days of Hurricane Katrina rescuers coming back with heartbreaking stories of braving dangerous conditions only to encounter some people who refuse to evacuate, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has ordered police and the military to begin forced evacuations.

Nagin's order targets everyone except those individuals who have been designated as helping with the relief effort.

An estimated 10,000 residents are believed to still be in New Orleans, and some have been holed up in their homes for more than a week.

Most of the people who have been reached by rescuers are grateful and glad of a chance to get out of a city that grows ever more dangerous, with germs and dead bodies in the huge stagnant pool of water that surrounds the city.

But some fear leaving the only city they know might mean a worse fate, and rescuers have reported being in personal danger confronted by holdouts who refuse to leave.

No one knows exactly how many people fit into that category.

"I think a lot of these people as you know are convinced that the water's gonna subside and get back to normalcy," Admiral Joseph Kilkenny told CBS News.

"We have to convince them to leave," said Nagin. "It's not safe here. There is toxic waste in the water and dead bodies and mosquitoes and gas. We are pumping about a million dollars' worth a gas a day in the air. Fires have been started and we don't have running water."

Acknowledging the mayor's declaration, Police Capt. Marlon Defillo said late Tuesday that forced removal of citizens had not yet begun. He said that officers who were visiting homes were still reminding people that police may not be able to rescue them if they stay.

"That would be a P.R. nightmare for us," Defillo said of any forced evacuations. "That's an absolute last resort."

Tuesday, engineers began the herculean and possibly months-long task of pumping out the flooded city, and the water level is dropping noticeably. "I'm starting to see rays of light," said Nagin.

Local officials' frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's sluggish response was exacerbated however, when internal documents showed the government's disaster chief, Michael Brown, waited roughly five hours after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast before asking Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to dispatch agency employees to the region: 1,000 to arrive within two days and 2,000 to show up within a week.

The New Orleans pumping began after the Army Corps of Engineers used rocks and sandbags over the Labor Day weekend to finally plug the 200-foot gap that let water spill into the city and swamp 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

On Tuesday, the Corps said the area under water has been reduced to about 60 percent of the city.

"I'm starting to see water levels much lower than I've seen," said Nagin, said after surveying his city from the air. "Even in areas where the water was as high as the rooftops, I started to see parts of the buildings."

He warns of the horrors that are likely to be revealed when the waters recede. "It's going to be awful and it's going to wake the nation up again," the mayor predicted.

Local authorities braced for the eventual death toll.

"I said thousands. Some computer models say 10,000," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told CBS News. "I don't know what the number is. But it's going to be big. And it's going to shock the nation."

Walter Baumy, a Corps manager in charge of the engineering job, said it will take 24 to 80 days to drain the city.

Exactly how long the job will take depends on a number of factors. Among other things, the condition of the pumps — especially whether they were submerged and damaged — is not yet fully known, the Corps said. Also, the water is full of debris, and while there are screens on the pumps, it may be necessary to stop and clean them from time to time.

CBS News Correspondent John Roberts reports that there's oil and gas in the city's floodwater, and officials fear an explosion could happen.

Four people may have died of a waterborne bacterial infection circulating in Hurricane Katrina's flood waters, and health officials took steps Tuesday to stem spread of a diarrhea-causing virus among flood victims in Houston's Astrodome.

There are no large disease outbreaks yet attributed to the hurricane, but infection control within shelters housing thousands of evacuees is a top priority, said Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gerberding sought to put to rest concern about disease from exposure to dead bodies in the flooding – the corpses aren't infectious – or from agents not typically seen in this country, such as cholera.

Instead, doctors are being urged to watch for more likely causes of diarrheal illnesses: E. coli bacteria; the easy-to-spread noroviruses that, while seldom life-threatening, can cause days of misery; or Vibrio vulnificus, cholera-like bacteria that every year kill more than a dozen Gulf Coast residents.

Tuesday, fire broke out at a big house in the city's historic Garden District — a neighborhood with lots of antebellum mansions. National Guardsmen cordoned off the area as firefighters battled the blaze by helicopter. In all, firefighters battled at least four major fires in New Orleans by midafternoon.

At the same time, the effort to get the evacuees back on their feet continued on several fronts.

Patrick Rhode, deputy director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said evacuees would receive debit cards so that they could begin buying necessary personal items. He said the agency was going from shelter to shelter to make sure that evacuees received cards quickly and that the paperwork usually required would be reduced or eliminated.

The Air Force late Monday concluded its huge airlift of elderly and serious ill patients from New Orleans' major airport. A total of 9,788 patients and other evacuees were evacuated by air from the New Orleans area.

Local officials bitterly expressed frustration with the federal government's sluggish response as the tragedy unfolded.

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today," said

"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."

Bureaucracy may have been responsible for a devastating delay in the rescue effort. CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports that while Coast Guard helicopters had been pre-positioned and were making rescues two hours after the hurricane, the military response was much slower.

CBS News Correspondent Gloria Borger reports that one Air Force reserve colonel says his unit was crippled by red tape.

"We could have been airborne in six hours and overhead plucking out people but between all the agencies that have a part in the approval process it took 34 hours to get three of my helicopters airborne," said Tim Tarchick of the Air Force Reserve Command.