NOLA Police to Evacuate People Forcibly

One final piece from Reuters:

New Orleans police will try to force Hurricane Katrina's survivors to leave the fetid city on Wednesday as the political storm grows over the botched response to the crisis and cost estimates rise to as high as $150 billion (81 billion pounds).

Flood levels in some areas were said to have dropped a foot (30 cm) but Mayor Ray Nagin said 60 percent of the city was still under water, hampering efforts to recover the thousands of people feared killed in the hurricane and its aftermath.

Nagin said floodwaters also threatened those still clinging to the life they knew before Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast last week, with garbage, oil and putrefying bodies floating in the stagnant pools inundating New Orleans.

After days of trying to change the minds of some 10,000 people who have refused to leave, authorities began to enforce a mandatory evacuation on Tuesday.

Police Superintendent P. Edwin Compass said his men would evacuate residents, if necessary against their will.

"We'll do everything it takes to make this city safe. These people don't understand they're putting themselves in harm's way," Compass said.

But die-hard inhabitants of a city mainly known for jazz and Mardi Gras before it became a disaster area of Third-World proportions say they fear evacuation to parts of the country where they have no family or means of support.

Martha Smith-Aguillard, 72, said she was brought against her will to an evacuation point at the city's wrecked convention centre. Her foot was swollen after she trod on a rusty nail and she said she needed a tetanus shot.

Nonetheless, she refused to board a government helicopter.