Hurricane-battered New Orleans, the jazz city known as "The Big Easy," was plunged into a nightmare on Tuesday, cut off from the outside world, submerged by rising floodwaters and troubled by signs of fraying public order.
"We probably have 80 percent of our city under water," Mayor Ray Nagin said after breaches in levees protecting the low-lying Louisiana city sent floodwaters seeping into the streets.
"It's almost like a nightmare that I hope we wake up from," Nagin told local WWL-TV. "Our city is in a state of devastation."
Hundreds of looters ransacked shops on the edge of the storied French Quarter and elsewhere as authorities searched for ways to stop floodwaters spawned by deadly Hurricane Katrina from further swamping the city.
New Orleans, most of which is below sea level, is surrounded on three sides by bodies of water, with Lake Pontchartrain in the north, Lake Borgne in the east and the Mississippi River in the south.
Most of the flooding was being caused by a breach in the levee holding back Lake Pontchartrain, officials said, and US military engineers were searching for ways to plug the hole, including dropping shipping containers filled with sand from airplanes.
"The breach in the 17th Street canal is about 200 feet (60 meters) wide," New Orleans Police Lieutenant Julie Wilson told WWL-TV. "The water is going to keep coming in until it reaches the level of the lake. I don't know what they are going to do."
Fleeing flooded areas, hundreds of soaking wet, tired and thirsty people, some carrying babies, crossed the St. Claude drawbridge hoping to make their way to the massive Superdome stadium, which has been turned into an emergency shelter.
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