Well it's official....everybody needs to get out of New Orleans whether
they want to or not.

Cops and military will be confiscating any weapons when they "relocate"
you to greener pastures.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/hurricane...E0BHNlYwN0bWE-

New Orleans Mayor Orders Forced Evacuation By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated
Press Writer
8 minutes ago

As flood waters receded inch by inch Tuesday, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray
Nagin authorized law enforcement officers and the U.S. military to
force the evacuation of all residents who refuse to heed orders to
leave the dark, dangerous city.

Nagin's emergency declaration released late Tuesday targets those still
in the city unless they have been designated by government officials as
helping with the relief effort.

The move comes after some citizens bluntly told authorities who had
come to deliver them from the flooded metropolis that they would not
leave their homes and property. 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.

While acknowledging the emergency 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."

Repeated telephone calls to Nagin's spokeswoman, Tami Frazier, seeking
comment were not returned.

Meanwhile, engineers struggled to drain the saucer of a city of
billions of gallons of water, a Herculean task that could take weeks
- if they are lucky.

The Army Corps of Engineers said the timetable ranges from three weeks
to nearly three months, depending on a string of variables, including
rainfall, the still-unknown condition of the pumps abandoned to
Hurricane Katrina, and whether the system can withstand the flotsam of
broken buildings, trees, trash and corpses.

Work has also been impeded by sporadic gunfire coming from "criminals
with guns," said Col. Richard Wagenaar, the Corps' chief district
engineer.

The contractors are "getting used to it and that's pretty scary,"
Wagenaar said.

Despite complications, "we have to get the water out of the city or the
nightmare will continue," said Louisiana Environmental Secretary Mike
McDaniel. He said the water will be pumped into Lake Pontchartrain even
though it is fouled with sewage, heavy metals, gasoline and other
dangerous substances.

The pumping began after the Corps used hundreds of sandbags and rocks
over the Labor Day weekend to close a 200-foot gap in the 17th Street
Canal levee that burst in the aftermath of the storm and swamped 80
percent of this below sea-level city.

Following an aerial tour Tuesday, Nagin said the water was dropping
ever so slightly, and he estimated that it covered only 60 percent of
the city.

"Even in areas where the water was as high as the rooftops, I started
to see parts of the buildings," he said, adding, "I'm starting to see
rays of light."

But he also warned of the horrors that could be revealed when the
waters recede. "It's going to be awful and it's going to wake the
nation up again," said Nagin, who a day earlier upped his estimate of
the death toll in his city to as much as 10,000.

The job to rid the city of water got off to a woefully slow start.

Once all of the city's pumping stations are running, they can move
water at a rate of 29 billion gallons a day and lower the water level a
half-inch per hour, or about a foot per day. But by late Tuesday
afternoon, Corps officials said only three of New Orleans' normal
contingent of 148 drainage pumps were operating.

With the water dropping, military and police turned their attention to
evacuating the streets. Among those refusing to leave was 69-year-old
John Ebanks, who waved off would-be rescuers from a porch stocked with
food, mosquito spray and other supplies.

"You've got to protect your property, that's the main thing," Ebanks
said. "This is all I've got. I'm pretty damn old to start over."

In St. Bernard Parish, 38-year-old Dennis Rizzuto took a break from a
Monopoly game with his family to emerge from the second-floor window of
his home.

He said he had plenty of water, food to last a month and a generator
powering his home. "They're going to have to drag me" out, Rizzuto
said.

In a plea to holdouts who might be listening to portable radios in the
powerless city, Nagin warned that the fetid water could carry disease
and that natural gas was leaking all over town.

"This is not a safe environment," Nagin said. "I understand the spirit
that's basically, `I don't want to abandon my city.' It's OK. Leave for
a little while. Let us get you to a better place. Let us clean the city
up."

To that end, the Pentagon began sending 5,000 paratroopers from the
Army's storied 82nd Airborne Division to use small boats, including
inflatable Zodiac craft, to launch a new search-and-rescue effort in
flooded sections of the city.

Some National Guardsmen and helicopters were diverted from their search
missions Tuesday to fight fires, an emerging threat in a city that is
still at least a day and a half away from restoring the first running
water since the storm.

A candle was blamed for starting one major blaze in the lower Garden
District - a historic neighborhood of mostly wooden homes. The flames
started in an abandoned brick building and spread to a neighboring
apartment house. The blazes burned for hours before Chinook helicopters
with water pouches were brought in to fight the blaze.

New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass said lawlessness in the
city "has subsided tremendously," and officers warned that those caught
looting in an area where the governor has declared an emergency can get
up to 15 years in prison. About 124 prisoners filled a downtown jail
set up at the city's train and bus terminal.

"We continue to get better day by day," Compass said.

The signs of hope came against increasingly angry rhetoric over the
federal response as too little too late. In Washington, congressional
leaders planned hearings into the aftermath of the storm.

"We need to rebuild the confidence of the American people ... in our
government's ability to protect them from attack, whether it comes from
nature or from terrorists," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman (news, bio,
voting record), D-Conn. "The government simply did not act quickly and
effectively enough."

Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard was even more blunt.

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area," he
said on CBS' "Early Show." "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."

Five of the 13 sub-basins in New Orleans were still seriously flooded,
and barges and crews were getting into place to fix levee breaches at
two other spots - the London Avenue canal and the Industrial canal.
The London Avenue canal is in the northwestern section of the city, the
Industrial canal in the east.

The Corps is concentrating on the London Avenue canal, where workers
will spend at least two weeks filling a 45-foot hole with rocks and
sandbags, Wagenaar said. Once that drainage canal is fixed, then more
pumps can start running.

Before work can even begin on the Industrial canal two barges pushed
onto a bridge by Katrina and a sunken barge need to be removed. The
Coast Guard has said 110 barges, ships and boats sank or ran aground
during the storm - 67 of them in the Mississippi River, and another
43 along the coast.

The levees were deliberately breached in some spots to let the water
flow back out into Lake Pontchartrain, where the water level had
dropped below that inside the city.

How long it takes to drain the city could depend on the condition of
the pumps - especially whether they were submerged and damaged, 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.

"We're working every avenue to do whatever we can to get things back in
order," said Walter Baumy, Corps manager for the project. "We're going
to accomplish the mission of getting the water out of the city."