U.S. won't ban media from New Orleans searches

[The AP is now telling us that there are many fewer bodies than expected yesterday, while at the same time reporting that a simulation for a Category 3 hurricane hitting New Orleans might produce more than 60,000 deaths (much higher than the two stories we reprinted for you on September 8th). But the military and police completely barred any press from being present during the recovery process. Larry King announced on CNN that Time-Warner was going to court on behalf of all media to be able to broadcast and report live on the body recovery process. I’m glad they succeeded. We all have a right to know exactly how many people died. The American government has failed its people in many grievous and shameful ways these past two weeks. We are right not to trust. We must not trust. And we are right to demand full accountability on this point. But what about all the other deep, vital, unanswered questions we never demanded complete answers for?

There’s a part of me – as major media starts actually showing some long-misplaced backbone – that asks: “I suppose it’s better late than never, but where have you guys been all these decades that it had to come to this? Why now? It’s too late.” The major media busted Michael Brown in a heartbeat but where in the name of God were they when the system that put him in that position as a natural and unchallenged act came into being in the first place? Why didn’t the media cover that story? Will they cover it now?

I have one other observation as I start to write one of the most important articles of my life.

If this had happened to white people – spoiled as we are – I don’t think they would have behaved half as well as the African-Americans of New Orleans have behaved as a whole. We crackers would have to fall from the penthouse into the soup. Most African-Americans in the Deep South only had to fall from the sidewalk. White folk start throwing tantrums when we have to wait too long in line.

Those who seek to blame, scapegoat and demonize the very few African-Americans who mutilated corpses (as shown on CNN today) or murdered and robbed the sick and infirm, willingly ignore the fact that the capability to commit the really ugly crimes of New Orleans exists within all humans and in all places. What we are afraid of is facing that possibility within ourselves and being forced to see how tall we stand when our own turn comes.

I know. I am a blond-haired, blue eyed, white male of direct German descent. This evil is not a property of any particular ethnicity. It is the shared, collective property of the human race. It is also something that we must come to grips with quickly. This is the Rubicon; this is the path and the future destiny which was chosen for us on September 11, 2001. We must find a way to turn back.—MCR]

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

HOUSTON, Texas (CNN) -- Rather than fight a lawsuit by CNN, the federal government abandoned its effort Saturday to prevent the media from reporting on the recovery of the dead in New Orleans.

Joint Task Force Katrina "has no plans to bar, impede or prevent news media from their news gathering and reporting activities in connection with the deceased Hurricane Katrina victim recovery efforts," said Col. Christian E. deGraff, representing the task force.

U.S. District Court Judge Keith Ellison issued a temporary restraining order Friday against a "zero access" policy announced earlier in the day by Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who is overseeing the federal relief effort in the city, and Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland security director.

In explaining the ban, Ebbert said, "we don't think that's proper" to let members of the media view the bodies.

Army Lt. Col. Richard Steele, a member of Honore's staff, told CNN Saturday night that Honore was partly misunderstood. Steele said Honore meant that no media would be allowed to be imbedded with teams recovering bodies. However, recovery groups would not prevent reporters from doing their jobs, he added.

"He did not say we're going to ban anybody. We're not going to restrict them from any public areas whatsoever," Steele said. "We don't have any legal recourse to do any kind of law enforcement or anything like that in our role. So the only thing we do is we can control who goes with us; on our aircraft and on our trucks and in our boats, if that applies."

The judge was to consider granting a permanent injunction Saturday when the government announced its decision not to enforce the "zero access" policy.(Court transcript)

Reacting to the decision, CNN News Group President Jim Walton said, "We are pleased by the decision. The free flow of information is vital for a free society."

In an e-mail to CNN staff on Friday, Walton said the network filed the the lawsuit to "prohibit any agency from restricting its ability to fully and fairly cover" the hurricane victim recovery process.

"As seen most recently from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, from tsunami-ravaged South Asia and from Hurricane Katrina's landfall along the Gulf," Walton wrote, "CNN has shown that it is capable of balancing vigorous reporting with respect for private concerns."

CNN filed suit against Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, arguing that the officials who announced the decision were acting on FEMA's behalf.

"For an agency to unilaterally ban all coverage of a major component of its governmental function, that is, recovery of the deceased victims of the tragedy, is unprecedented," CNN argued in its legal brief. "Instead, the agency has made a subjective, content-based determination that publicizing the operation would be 'without dignity.'"

CNN's brief argued, "It is not the place of government to replace its own internal judgment for that of a free and independent media."

Because of controversy about how FEMA and other agencies handled the disaster response, CNN lawyers argued, "it is even more vitally important for the public, Congress and the administration to have an independent view of the conduct of this important phase of the operation."

Authorities in New Orleans Say Fewer Bodies Than Expected Have Been Found After City-Wide Sweep

Sep. 9, 2005 - Authorities said Friday that their first systematic sweep of the city found far fewer bodies than expected, suggesting that Hurricane Katrina's death toll may not be the catastrophic 10,000 feared.

"I think there's some encouragement in what we've found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief.

Authorities shifted their attention to counting and removing the dead in a gridbox search after spending days persuading and cajoling the living into leaving the shattered city because of the danger of fires and disease from the filthy, corpse-laden floodwaters.

The sweep was carried out by the Police Department, the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and the National Guard, and covered every part of the city reachable by land, boat or air, Ebbert said.

"Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000," Ebbert said.

Mayor Ray Nagin had suggested over the weekend that the death toll could climb that high, and authorities ordered 25,000 body bags as they started gathering up the dead across a landscape awash in corpses.

Separately, Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell, commanding general of 82nd Airborne Division, said the last of the bodies at the convention center would be taken out on Friday. Thousands took shelter there for days with little or no food or water, in what became an increasingly chaotic and violent situation, and several people were found dead.

In a small sign of progress, authorities said the New Orleans airport will reopen to commercial flights on Sept. 19. Caldwell said water and power are functioning at the airport.

Authorities continued trying to clear the city of holdouts, and also confiscated guns from homeowners. Police and soldiers feared deadly confrontations with jittery residents who have armed themselves against looters.

"Walking up and down these streets, you don't want to think about the stuff that you're going to have to do, if somebody pops out around a corner," said National Guardsman Chris Montgomery.

As many as 10,000 people were believed to be stubbornly staying put in the city, despite orders from the mayor earlier this week to leave or be removed by force. By midmorning, though, there were no reports of anyone being taken out forcibly, police said.

Police are "not going to do that until we absolutely have to. We really don't want to do that at all," Deputy Chief Warren Riley said.

Some residents who had previously refused to leave whether because they wanted to protect their homes from looters, they did not want to leave their pets behind, or they simply feared the unknown are now changing their minds and asking to be rescued, police said.

"They realize they're not going to this awful situation like the Superdome or the Convention Center," Riley said. "As days go by, it seems less and less likely that we'll have to force anyone."

"They were all insisting that I had to leave my home," said Shelia Dalferes, who said she had 15 minutes to pack before she and her husband were evacuated. "The implication was there with their plastic handcuffs on their belt. Who wants to go out like that?"

Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Jason Rule said his crew pulled 18 people from their homes Thursday. He said some of the holdouts did not want to leave unless they could take their pets.

"It's getting to the point where they're delirious," Rule said. "A couple of them don't know who they were. They think the water will go down in a few days."

On Thursday, in the city's well-to-do Lower Garden District, a neighborhood with many antebellum mansions, members of the Oklahoma National Guard seized weapons from the inhabitants of one home. Those who were armed were handcuffed and briefly detained before being let go.

"No one will be able to be armed. We are going to take all the weapons," Riley said.

The floodwaters are slowly receding, but the task of gathering rotting corpses and clearing debris is certain to take months.

At two collection sites, federal mortuary teams gathered information that might help identify the bodies, such as where they were found. Personal effects were also being logged.

At a temporary morgue set up in nearby St. Gabriel, where 67 bodies had been collected by Thursday, the remains were being photographed and forensic workers hoped to use dental X-rays, fingerprints and DNA to identify them.

Dr. Bryan Patucci, coroner of St. Bernard Parish, said it may be impossible to identify all the victims until authorities compile a final list of missing people.

Decaying corpses in the floodwaters could pose problems for engineers who are desperately trying to pump the city dry. While 37 of the 174 pumps in the New Orleans area were working and 17 portable pumps were in place Thursday, officials said the mammoth undertaking could be complicated by corpses getting clogged in the pumps.

"It's got a huge focus of our attention right now," said John Rickey of the Army Corps of Engineers. "Those remains are people's loved ones."

Some 400,000 homes in the city were still without power, with no immediate prospect of getting it back. And fires continued to be a problem. At least 11 blazes burned across the city Thursday. Three buildings were destroyed at historically black Dillard University.

Also Thursday, Congress rushed through an additional $51.8 billion for Katrina relief, and President Bush pledged to make it "easy and simple as possible" for uprooted storm victims to collect food stamps and other government benefits.

To counter criticism of the slow federal response to the disaster, Vice President Dick Cheney toured parts of the ravaged Gulf Coast, claiming significant progress but acknowledging immense obstacles remained to a full recovery.

Meanwhile, Democrats threatened to boycott the naming of a panel that Republican leaders are proposing to investigate the administration's readiness and response to the storm. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said it was like a baseball pitcher calling "his own balls and strikes."

Democrats have urged the appointment of an independent panel like the Sept. 11 commission.

Associated Press writers Cain Burdeau, Melinda DeSlatte, Brett Martel, Erin McClam and Doug Simpson contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As Katrina roared into the Gulf of Mexico, emergency planners pored over maps and charts of a hurricane simulation that projected 61,290 dead and 384,257 injured or sick in a catastrophic flood.

According to projections in the federally sponsored project, the flood would leave swaths of southeast Louisiana uninhabitable for more than a year.

The planners were not involved in the frantic preparations for Katrina. By coincidence, they were working on a yearlong project to prepare federal and state officials for a Category 3 hurricane striking New Orleans.

Their fictitious storm eerily foreshadowed the havoc wrought by Category 4 Katrina a few days later, raising questions about whether government leaders did everything possible -- as early as possible -- to protect New Orleans residents from a well-documented threat.

After watching many of their predictions prove grimly accurate, "Hurricane Pam" planners now hope they were wrong about one detail -- the death toll.

The 61,290 figure is six times what New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has warned people to expect, although by Friday officials in New Orleans thought the worst predictions were unfounded.

"I pray to God we don't see those numbers," Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told The Associated Press. "My gut is ... we don't. But we just don't know."

The known Katrina death toll was less than 400 as of Friday, but officials expect it to skyrocket once emergency teams comb through 90,000 square miles of Gulf Coast debris.

Fears are particularly acute in New Orleans, where countless corpses lie submerged beneath a toxic gumbo that engulfed the city after levees gave way.

The death toll is just one of the many chilling details in a 412-page report obtained by the AP from a government official involved in the Hurricane Pam project.

Flood waters would surge over levees, creating "a catastrophic mass casualty/mass evacuation" and leaving drainage pumps crippled for up to six months. "It will take over one year to re-enter areas most heavily impacted," the report estimates.

More than 600,000 houses and 6,000 businesses would be affected, more than two-thirds of them destroyed. Nearly a quarter-million children would be out of school. "All 40 medical facilities in the impacted area [would be] isolated and useless," it says.

Local officials would be quickly overwhelmed with the five-digit death toll, 187,862 people injured and 196,395 falling ill. A half-million people would be homeless.

The report calls evacuees "refugees" -- a term now derided by the Bush administration -- and says they could be housed at college campuses, military barracks, hotels, travel trailers, recreational vehicles, private homes, cottages, churches, Boy Scout camps and cruise ships.

"Federal support must be provided in a timely manner to save lives, prevent human suffering and mitigate severe damage," the report says.

"This may require mobilizing and deploying assets before they are requested via normal [National Response Plan] protocols."

On the defensive, White House officials have said Louisiana and New Orleans officials did not give FEMA full control over disaster relief.

The so-called Hurricane Pam plan, which was never put into effect, envisions giving the federal government authority to act without waiting for an SOS from local officials.

Brown, relieved of his on-site Katrina duties Friday, said he was kept apprised of Hurricane Pam planning from the beginning. (Brown relieved)

He said he assumed the report also was sent to superiors at the Homeland Security Department, "but can I put it in the hands of Secretary Ridge or Secretary Chertoff? No."

Tom Ridge was the first department secretary and Michael Chertoff is his successor. "I'm almost sure it didn't go to the White House," Brown said.

Under FEMA's direction, federal and state officials began working on the $1 million Hurricane Pam project in July 2004, when 270 experts gathered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for an eight-day simulation.

The so-called "tabletop" exercise focused planners on a mock hurricane that produced more than 20 inches of rain and 14 tornadoes.

The drill included computer graphic simulations projected on large screens of the hurricane slamming directly into New Orleans -- considered by federal experts to be nearly as big a risk as a terrorist attack on American soil or a massive earthquake in San Francisco.

"We designed this to be a worst-case but plausible storm," said Madhu Beriwal, chief executive of Innovative Emergency Management Inc. of Baton Rouge, hired by FEMA to conduct the exercise.

A follow-up workshop on potential medical needs took place in Carville, Louisiana, on August 23-24, bringing together 80 state and federal emergency planning officials as well as Beriwal's team.

They produced an update on dealing with the dead and injured and submitted it to FEMA's headquarters in Washington on September 3.

By then Katrina had hit. And Bush administration, state and city officials were under heavy criticism for a sluggish response.

The 2004 report was designed to be the first step toward producing a comprehensive hurricane response plan, jointly approved and implemented by federal, state and city officials.

But a lack of funding prohibited planners from quickly following up on the 2004 simulation.

Hurricane Pam planning was prescient in many ways, predicting the flooding would exceed 10 feet and create a putrid mix of corpses, chemicals and human waste.

The report is remarkably detailed in spots. It includes diagrams for makeshift loading docks to distribute water, ice and food to storm victims -- color-coded to show where pallets, traffic cones and trash bins would be placed.

In other places it's obvious the report is a working document; it doesn't specify what hospitals or airports would be used.

The report missed the mark in some cases. Planning for a weaker but slower-moving storm than Katrina, the Hurricane Pam report did not predict that levees would break as happened in real life.

However, state and federal official have long known that the levees were not built to withstand a Category 4 storm or higher.

The report did not mention looting and lawlessness, which was rampant in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. It did call for at least one security guard at each shelter.

In another burst of foresight, the planners sought creative ways to house evacuees. Among other ideas, they instructed Louisiana parishes to find large vacant lots that could house makeshift trailer parks at a moment's notice.

New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US government believes.

The bleak assessment will deepen the biggest crisis faced by President George Bush, who last week called the devastation of Hurricane Katrina a " temporary disruption."

As the relief effort finally got under way yesterday for the tens of thousands of people left without food, water, medicines or the rule of law for five days, the federal official in charge of disaster recovery told foreign diplomats that reconstruction cannot begin until next summer.

The President is now facing a political hurricane of his own, with gathering criticism, even from inside his own party, for failing to heed warnings of the city's vulnerability, cutting spending on its defences to pay for the wars on terror and in Iraq, and responding sluggishly to the worst natural catastrophe ever to hit his country.

Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, said that every day of delay has caused hundreds of deaths. Louisiana's junior Senator, Republican David Vitter, gave the Bush administration "an F grade" for its handling of the crisis. Senator Chuck Hagel, a leading contender for his party's nomination to succeed Mr Bush, said, "There must be some accountability."

The criticism is all the sharper because the President did nothing to alter his holiday schedule for 48 hours. Vice-President Dick Cheney remains on holiday in Wyoming. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, returned to Washington after being seen shopping for $7,000 shoes in Manhattan as New Orleans went under.

Dan Craig, the director of recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told the diplomats that it could take up to six months to drain the flood waters out of New Orleans, and another three to allow the city to dry out. Even then, he added, debris and other hazardous material would need to be cleared away before rebuilding could begin. Evacuees could have to be housed by the government for two years.

Officials said that the job of recovering, let alone counting, the dead may not start for weeks. The death toll is likely to far exceed the numbers killed in the 11 September attacks almost exactly four years ago. Sergeant Nicholas Stahl of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said that rescuers are focusing on finding an estimated 50,000 people still stranded by the flood waters and admitted "there is no system to collect and store bodies".

Even when the bodies are recovered, experts say it will be far harder to identify them than at the World Trade Center, because they are decomposing rapidly in the heat.

Although a government exercise last year predicted the course of the disaster, Mr Bush drastically cut back spending on city defences. Work on strengthening vital levees needed to keep out flood water stopped for the first time in 37 years.

New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US government believes.

The bleak assessment will deepen the biggest crisis faced by President George Bush, who last week called the devastation of Hurricane Katrina a " temporary disruption".

Even when the bodies are recovered, experts say it will be far harder to identify them than at the World Trade Center, because they are decomposing rapidly in the heat.

With efforts focused on helping survivors, corpses lie scattered around the city. Trucks will serve as roaming morgues.

NEW ORLEANS — No one knew much about him. He was a black man with close-cropped hair who looked to be in his 40s. He had a high school class ring. He had been at the convention center for four days, no different from thousands of others.

Friday night, he lost it. While others tried to sleep on the sweltering sidewalk around him, he began to mumble to himself, kicking aside piles of trash. He yelled something about his missing wife. Just before midnight, a police car screamed down Convention Center Drive, and from there, the stories diverge.

Some said he just ended it — ran out in front of the car. Some said he was trying to flag it down for help when it clipped him. Some said he had a gun and was either shot or run over.

In some fashion, he died in the street, his blood draining toward the curb and congealing under a pile of crushed orange juice cartons and dirty diapers. He was still there Saturday afternoon, and chances are he is still there today.

Until now, the nation has focused on the survivors. But at some point in coming days, as New Orleans continues to depopulate, the city will reach a tipping point. There may be more dead people here than living as the human exodus continues. And no one knows what will be done with the bodies.

Paramedics walked Saturday in front of the convention center pushing a gurney, but did not pause at the man's body. They were trying to rescue an elderly woman who was bleeding from her right leg and had not gotten out of her chair in three days.

Twin-blade helicopters thundered overhead, and they were trying to get her to a hospital in Lafayette.

"I know it's a tragic situation," said Miles Watts, a city paramedic. "But we need to save people who are alive first. We're going to have to deal with the dead ones later."

Officials are devising a plan to cope with the dead, but it is still in its infancy.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who predicted that the death toll could reach into the thousands, said Saturday that officials were assembling refrigerated 18-wheelers that would serve as roaming morgues.

Nagin said it might be impossible to find enough room to bury the bodies; they might all be cremated.

Unburied corpses present little, if any, risk of infectious diseases, experts agree. For one thing, people in the Katrina disaster did not die from infectious disease and thus do not likely harbor infectious agents to spread. Moreover, infectious agents in corpses do not survive long, said epidemiologist Oliver Morgan of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

"After these big events, where there are large numbers of fatalities, there is a rush to dispose of the dead and a lot of scare stories about imminent epidemics," Morgan said. "But the risk of disease transmission is really coming from the surviving population."

No one is sure when recovery of those killed by Katrina — whether in the floodwaters the hurricane left behind or the violence that erupted in its wake — will begin. It is unclear how those without wallets or papers on their bodies might be identified. And, of course, it is unclear how many there will be.

Until they are, the bodies continue to surface: on the steps of the Superdome; in the besieged 9th Ward; at an elementary school where a man's body washed up on the steps inside a basement classroom; under a freeway ramp next to a submerged SUV.

Teams searching for survivors in attics and on rooftops have been given instructions to tie bodies that they encounter to street poles so they can be collected later.

The dilemma is not restricted to the civilian population. Watts said a distraught New Orleans police officer shot and killed himself at a staging area in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, on Friday night.

In the city's business district, where Albert Jordana, 45, has been paddling around in a blue kayak, he found the bloated body of a man lying facedown in the water at Canal and Roman streets.

"They're floating around," he said. The man's gray T-shirt appeared to have snagged something as the water rippled by. "Whatever they get caught up on, that's where they stay," Jordana said.

Inside the convention center, through the main hall and a set of double doors that once led to a bustling kitchen, a dark hallway was full of catering carts and crates of coffee cups Saturday afternoon. A bulletin board still held announcements for employees: a new program offering $1 parking; an invitation to an employee picnic.

Below were two more bodies, those of a man and a woman who died at the convention center before help arrived. The others had dragged them back there. An adult diaper had peeled off the woman's body. The man's foot poked out from beneath the white sheet someone had draped over him.

"OK, there's no blood on the floor," he said. "Just don't touch them." Then he walked away.

The New Orleans morgue is located, or used to be, in the basement of the criminal courthouse downtown. Today, water laps at the front steps of the building.

Frank Marullo, a district court judge who works there, said 47 bodies that were there before the storm are now floating near the ceiling.

"By law, the coroner has to determine a cause of death for each body," he said. "That might be impossible."

Sixty-five miles northwest of New Orleans in the small town of St. Gabriel, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up a mortuary in a private warehouse.

Police guarding the entrance would not let anyone pass. But the mayor, George Grace, said he believed bodies were already arriving in refrigerated tractor-trailers.

Two tractor-trailers sit outside the 125,000-square-foot warehouse, which usually is used by businesses such as Wal-Mart to store goods.

With a population of only 5,000, the town is too small to offer any assistance to hurricane survivors, Grace said. "I wasn't able to help the living," the mayor said, so instead he will "house the dead."

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- About 700,000 electric customers in Los Angeles lost power Monday afternoon after a worker mistakenly cut a wrong line, triggering a cascade of problems in the city's power grid, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said.

About 50 percent of the department's 1.4 million customers were affected by the outage, which began at about 1 p.m. (4 p.m. ET).

Power had returned to most areas by 2:30 p.m., according to a department spokesman.

The blackout trapped people in elevators and caused traffic to snarl at intersections where stoplights weren't working.

After the power failed, Los Angeles police went on full tactical alert, with officers ordered to stay on duty at the end of their shifts. The alert was later downgraded, although officers were still being kept on duty to assist in traffic control.

The Los Angeles Fire Department received numerous calls from people trapped in elevators, said department spokeswoman Jim Wells.

Los Angeles International Airport reported flickering of lights but no interruption of flight operations.

Van Nuys Airport, a busy general aviation airport in the San Fernando Valley, lost electricity but was able to continue operations with backup power.

The blackout came as U.S. counterterrorism officials said they were skeptical that a purported al Qaeda tape that threatened Los Angeles and Australia was a prelude to an attack.

One official said it "appears to be just a propaganda tool put out by al Qaeda to mark the 9/11 anniversary," which was Sunday.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke told The Associated Press federal officials were talking to state and local counterparts about the blackout, but "there is no indication of any nexus to terror."

While heavy power usage can contribute to blackouts, the weather in Los Angeles was mild Monday, with the high temperature forecast in the mid-70s.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Sweltering heat and the loss of a key transmission line Thursday forced power officials in Southern California to impose rolling blackouts, leaving as many as half a million people without power for about half an hour, officials said.

The California Independent System Operator, which operates the state's electric grid, declared a transmission emergency at 3:57 p.m., said ISO spokeswoman Stephanie McCorkle.

About 30 minutes later, power was being restored to people subjected to the blackouts, she said.

It marked one of the most serious disruptions since the California power crisis in 2000 and 2001, when high demand, high wholesale energy costs, transmission glitches and a tight supply caused widespread problems including blackouts.

The ISO ordered Southern California Edison to reduce demand Thursday throughout its region, prompting blackouts in areas of Fontana, La Puente, Cathedral City, Huntington Beach, Long Beach and Ontario, said Gil Alexander, a spokesman for the utility.

The utility scattered the outages to the points east and south of Los Angeles. If the problem had persisted, the blackouts would have been shifted to other areas.

The situation was exacerbated by the sudden loss of the transmission line originating in southern Oregon, officials said.

A transformer went off line automatically following an oil flow alarm, causing a drop of about 1,000 megawatts of power, said Carol Tucker, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which owns the line.

Temperatures that hovered around 100 in inland areas and reached 94 in Los Angeles had created increased demand of about 1,500 megawatts. A megawatt is enough power to serve about 750 homes.

The emergency order from the ISO caused SoCal Edison to reduce demand by 800 megawatts throughout its territory. The ISO asked San Diego to shed 100 megawatts.

Northern California was not affected by the shutdowns.

SoCal Edison serves about 13 million people in more than 400 Southern California cities and communities.

Few problems were reported in communities struck by the blackouts.

Long Beach police Officer Greg Schirmer said SoCal Edison notified the department in advance of the blackout.

"We've had rolling blackouts in the past and we've been fortunate enough not to have any issues," he said.

Rozanne Adanto, community services director in La Puente in the east San Gabriel Valley, said the city received an email notifying it of possible power outages at 4:10 p.m.

"I did notify staff to keep saving their documents on the computer," she said.

It seems petty to complain about gas prices at a time when a major American city has been washed off the map and a half million of our citizens are newly homeless.

But petty resentments are what drive politics in this country. Political careers are built on whipping up small-minded hatred toward some of the most powerless groups among us - minorities, gays and liberal Democrats.

So it shouldn't be any surprise that a sudden surge of 50 to 75 cents in the price of a gallon of gasoline could have even greater political consequences than the Bush administration's incompetent cutting of flood control projects for New Orleans.

It's pretty bad that in 2004 the president slashed by 80 percent funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hold back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and made further cuts this year.

But what really gets folks' blood boiling is $3.50-a-gallon gasoline and the growing suspicion that local service stations, big oil companies and a government run by and for oil executives are playing us for fools.

As usual, the big players behind the scenes are the ones making out like bandits while the poor saps running the corner filling stations are taking most of the heat.

The resentment is understandable when gas prices immediately surge upward based on headlines. Motorists are pretty sure the gas they are pumping was delivered at lower prices before any shortages could possibly hit.

But station operators say they only keep one to three days supply on hand. They claim they have to raise prices immediately to afford the next delivery of higher-priced gasoline.

It doesn't really matter whether we believe them or not because there is no law against price gouging in Wisconsin. Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager is drafting such a consumer protection bill with Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay, and Rep. Josh Zepnick, D-Milwaukee.

Whether the bill has any chance of passing in the Republican-controlled Legislature depends solely upon how angry Republican constituents are about paying $70 to fill up their SUVs.

Lautenschlager also has joined the attorneys general of Illinois and Iowa for a joint investigation into whether the oil companies and wholesalers and retailers have manipulated the market in the Midwest.

Political investigations have been launched in the past into the oil companies' manipulation of gasoline prices. Little ever comes of it. The oil companies are too good at it.

Besides, oil executives who steal millions from all of us never go to prison. Prisons are reserved for small-time crooks who hold up gas stations for just a few bucks.

The real gauge of just how much we've all been taken will be the profit reports of the oil companies. Those show up back in the business section instead of on the front page.

That's because obscene profits by oil companies aren't considered news by the media. They're only of interest to those reaping the benefits. And quite excessive profits they are, thank you.

During early 2005, earnings at companies in the energy sector jumped a whopping 40 percent. The soaring current prices will only pad those incredible profits even more.

But average figures gloss over the individual success stories. Let's just look at one company. How about if we pick Halliburton, the oil services company Vice President Dick Cheney used to run, that somehow managed to land no-bid government contracts in Iraq worth billions. Surprise, Halliburton already has multimillion-dollar contracts to clean up New Orleans.

A share of Halliburton stock sold for $8.60 in early 2002. Last week, a single share hit $63.44, setting a record for the first time since 1997.

Oil profiteers are merely doing what comes naturally to them as rapacious capitalists.

The bottom line of Big Oil's rented politicians is the same as that of the oil profiteers - to line the pockets of the oil companies. But the politicians publicly pretend to be concerned about the little guy, the hard-pressed consumer trying to make ends meet.

So they take advantage of public anger over gas prices as an excuse to further plunder our natural environment or try to dismantle environmental protection laws.

We're already hearing dishonest politicians claim the way to bring down gas prices is to allow the oil companies to rape and pillage the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Of course, drilling in the refuge might take a decade and produce only a few months worth of oil. But, hey, if you can't take advantage of a national disaster to despoil one of the last, pristine, protected areas on Earth, what good are national disasters?

Gasoline rode high at over $100 a barrel on Thursday as the United States scrambled to replace fuel supplies lost when Hurricane Katrina slammed into Gulf of Mexico rigs and refiners.

President George W Bush told Americans he expected close ally Saudi Arabia to do "everything it can" to provide the United States with more oil and said there would be zero tolerance of price gouging at the gasoline pump.

But Europe was unnerved by how ill-prepared the world's biggest economy was for Hurricane Katrina's rampage.

The U.S. holds plenty of crude in its strategic stockpile and has offered to loan some of it to refiners, but the gesture does nothing to address an immediate shortage of gasoline. European operators dashed to charter ships to the U.S. coast.

White House economic adviser Ben Bernanke predicted gasoline prices would go higher then drop when supplies are restored.

"Hurricane Katrina has been an eye opener, highlighting the inadequacy of the global refining system," said Merrill Lynch.

The European Commission said it wanted to revive a plan to coordinate EU oil stocks. In Germany, election challenger Angela Merkel said she could envisage tapping German oil reserves, but her comments were smartly rebuffed by the government.

France announced it would give financial aid to millions of families to help them cope with sky-high oil prices, and promised to boost renewable energy.

"We have entered the post-oil era," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told a news conference.

The European Central Bank raised its inflation forecasts for this year and next, noting soaring oil prices were pushing up the cost of goods and services. The ECB raised its projection for the crude price by $12 to $62.8 a barrel in 2006.

U.S. crude was up six cents at $69 a barrel by 1644 GMT, below the record $70.85 hit on Tuesday. London Brent crude was up 28 cents at $67.30 a barrel.

Gasoline futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) continued their relentless rise to a high of $2.465 a gallon then eased to $2.355, up 9.97 cents on the day.

European gasoline barges hit a record $855 a ton, and U.S. heating oil touched a record $2.15 a gallon.

"We really need to see signs of slowing demand from China, India and the United States before prices can come off appreciably," analysts at Refco said.

But with more hurricanes in prospect risks to U.S. supply remained. "This hurricane season has been unusually active and the peak is just now approaching in early September."

The U.S. oil industry remained shaken after Hurricane Katrina, with most offshore production from the Gulf of Mexico down, about 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity paralyzed, and pipelines struggling to restart. At least 20 rigs or platforms were adrift, listing, sunk or missing.

The U.S. Department of Energy said some of the eight refineries shut by Katrina could take months to restart, with reports that floodwaters swamped at least three in Louisiana.

European operators have booked 20 gasoline cargoes to the United States since Monday to take advantage of red hot U.S. gasoline prices, brokers said on Thursday.

"Crazy gas (gasoline) prices are certainly reflecting a perception of tighter supply in that product," said Bob Frye, a trader at Access Futures and Options Trading.

"As soon as we start hearing about isolated pockets where gas is unavailable, the emotional response is likely to drive things higher."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday it would ease environmental standards of gasoline and diesel nationwide for two weeks to avert a fuel crunch.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) holds more than 700 million barrels of crude in salt caverns in Louisiana and Texas. It loaned 5.4 million barrels of oil to refiners last year to stabilize supplies after the weaker Hurricane Ivan.

Further potential supply disruption could come from Nigeria, where the main workers' union threatened a strike, saying proposed fuel price hikes by the government of the world's eighth-biggest crude exporter were unacceptable.

Pam Stegner knows a lot about preparing for an emergency. After all, Mrs. Stegner, a former emergency medical technician in Collins, Mo., has been stockpiling for years now.

To take care of her family of five during a catastrophe, she has a gravity-fed water purifier able to process 30 gallons of water a day, as well as 600 pounds of rice and beans, 18,000 dried eggs and 16 tons of organically grown hard winter wheat stored in a semi-tractor trailer and a temperature-controlled storehouse.

Mrs. Stegner is the first to admit that she may take preparedness to an extreme, but her reasons for doing it may not sound so odd after watching victims of Hurricane Katrina languish for days without aid. "You can't wait for the government to get there," she said. "You will die before they get there."

Indeed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency advises that Americans prepare a two-week supply cache because it could take that long for help to arrive. FEMA says on its Web site, "A two-week supply can relieve a great deal of inconvenience and uncertainty until services are restored."

Getting ready for the next disaster doesn't seem so crazy anymore. Mrs. Stegner, who is the host of a radio show on preparedness and sells survival products from a store in nearby Humansville, says it has been easy to "get labeled a nutcase" for worrying about catastrophes. But she and other survivalist outfitters are noticing how, at least right now, the general public is a bit more receptive.

John Maniatty, who runs the FrugalSquirrels.com Web site out of Morrisville, Vt., says he is getting six times the traffic he had in early August and considerably more than after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "So many more normal people - I use that term because I get wackos, too - are taking a look," he said.

You don't have to go as far as a survivalist, but you can certainly learn from them. Here is a distillation of advice from emergency preparedness experts from across the spectrum:

WATER. If you take nothing else away from this article, at least heed this advice: stock up on water. It is cheap, it has a long shelf-life, and, most important, you cannot live without it. Most of us can do without food - not to mention e-mail and "Desperate Housewives" - for several weeks.

But dehydration is a very real and life-threatening danger after a calamity. Though you drink half a gallon of water a day, you should store one gallon of water per person per day. Assume you will be cut off for at least three days and store as much extra as you have room for in a cool, dark space. The International Bottled Water Association says jugs of water can be kept indefinitely, though they may pick up an off-flavor from the plastic after a year or so. But it is pretty easy to rotate the stock every couple of months since many people drink bottled water.

If you have the room, store some of the water in the freezer. When the electricity goes, you'll have more ice to preserve the food in the refrigerator for a day or two longer.

If worse comes to worse and you run out of water while your community's water supply is contaminated, turn off the water supply to your house and drain water from your water heater or scoop it from the toilet tank. It must be purified by boiling it for several minutes or by mixing in two drops of old-fashioned bleach - not the "mountain fresh" scented varieties - to each quart of water.

FOOD. The odds of anything calamitous happening are slim, so you don't want to spend several thousand dollars buying and storing food. You have better things to do with your money than investing in creamed corn and sardines. If you have a pantry or basement with a decent supply of canned foods and bottled juices, you should do just fine for several weeks. "You could survive for two weeks just on Tang," said Eric Zaltas, nutritionist with PowerBar Inc., a maker of nutrition bars.

Given that in most emergencies - floods, earthquake or fire - you may have to flee, it is smart to keep a 72-hour bug-out kit. That's a three-day supply that you can easily carry out to the car at a moment's notice. The crucial concept here is high nutrition in a small amount of space. Freeze-dried foods would be perfect, except you'll need clean and heated water to reconstitute those products.

Some people buy the military's Meals Ready to Eat. A case of 12 meals costs about $73 and they are currently in short supply. Nutrition bars are another good choice. The rap against them - loads of fat, carbohydrates and calories - is actually a plus during a disaster. Something like the PowerBar Performance Bar also contains electrolytes, which when taken with water, will help keep your body chemistry in order. Avoid the chocolate-coated varieties because they will just get messy when it gets hot and water for cleanup is at a premium.

High-protein diet shakes are a bit expensive, but have the added advantage of supplying you with liquid, as would high-fiber potassium-packed vegetable juice. Throw in some dried fruit and you have enough calories to get by for three days.

Don't forget ready-to-feed baby formula if you have an infant. People with medical conditions like diabetes or kidney disease will have to pay more attention to what they store and what they eat. As for pets, buy the dried pet food your pets don't really like and they won't eat as much.

For the truly serious food hoarder, FrugalSquirrels.com, the survivalist outfitter, sells an $18 software package called Food Storage Planner that will compute exactly how much you need and alert you when to replace it.

CASH. If you get a warning, head to the nearest cash machine ASAP. (You'll already have all the food and water you need, right?) The time to raid the A.T.M. is before the disaster because when the electricity fails, you won't find one that works. Take out as much as you can because you may need it to buy supplies at post-disaster inflated prices and credit cards won't work if there is no electricity or computer networks are down. When the disaster has passed put the money back in the bank.

COMMUNICATIONS. In almost every disaster, cellphones have proved remarkably useless. (Old-fashioned landline phones hold up much better.) Without electricity, desktop computers become expensive paperweights and laptops follow in short order as their batteries drain. Short of a $1,000 satellite phone, there is precious little you can do to reach out to the world in an emergency. Face it. When a disaster strikes, you can't think like Steven P. Jobs. Abraham Lincoln must be your role model because when the electricity goes, all you have at your disposal are the things people of the 19th century got by on.

Two things that might help: get an e-mail account from Google or Yahoo that allows you access to e-mail from any computer you happen to find and buy a hand-crank cellphone charger.

EXTRAS. You cannot do without a first-aid kit, a radio and lots of batteries. The new flashlights that use light-emitting diodes will help you conserve juice. Camping gear - butane stoves, coolers and lightweight tents - easily doubles as survival gear. What else? An adapter that turns your car's cigarette lighter into an electrical outlet for any appliance could be a lifesaver. Consider sticking a can of fluorescent spray paint among your other supplies and then stash all this stuff in a plastic box that can serve to float things out to safety.

MEDICINES. Thanks to health insurance companies' rules, it is often not easy to get extra medicine without paying full price. But with a little planning it can be done. Ask your doctor for help. Or for several months in a row, start refilling prescriptions a week or so before they run out until you have accumulated several weeks' supply.

DOCUMENTS. Pulling together documents you need on the run may be the hardest thing to do. Financial planners have been after people for years to make a "beneficiary book" to help their heirs or executors more easily sort through affairs. It should hold copies of birth and marriage certificates, adoption papers, key identification numbers, copies of bank statements, deeds, titles, credit cards and insurance policies as well as passwords to online accounts. The same information would be useful to you in case you lose access to your primary records in a disaster. Just keep it in a secure place and grab it on the way out of the house.

GUNS. Some survivalists recommend a gun for protection. But if you haven't used one regularly, don't know how to store it safely and haven't made the moral decision that you could kill a person, forget it. Someone is just going to get hurt and it will probably be you. Your best protection is banding together with neighbors - and sharing that food all of you stashed.