NEW ORLEANS - After dodging a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, this historic city descended into such chaos and destruction Tuesday that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco ordered evacuation of all remaining residents, including tens of thousands of refugees huddled in the Superdome.
Water pouring through levee breaks covered thousands of houses in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Rescuers in helicopters and boats plucked more than 1,500 people from attics and rooftops.
Downtown and the French Quarter, which had remained relatively dry Monday, began flooding Tuesday afternoon, including hip-deep water outside the Superdome. Officials estimated that 80 percent of the city was swamped.
Looters, some wearing waders, emptied stores along fashionable Canal Street as police could only shoo them away. Some shot at police officers, using guns and ammunition stolen from sporting goods stores.
"Criminals had guns before and now they have more," said Officer Al Celestain. "It's been a war out here."
Power was out everywhere. Drinkable water disappeared after a major main ruptured. And officials could not estimate when essential services could be restored.
On Tuesday evening, authorities abandoned efforts to plug levee breaks with monstrous sandbags. Instead, they warned residents that 9 more feet of water could hit neighborhoods near downtown sometime today.
"The situation is untenable," Blanco said at a news conference. "We saw block after block, neighborhood and neighborhood inundated. . . . It's just heartbreaking."
Roughly 80 percent of New Orleans' nearly 500,000 residents evacuated before Katrina's center came ashore Monday morning, passing just east of the city.
Blanco gave few details as to how the tens of thousands of people remaining in New Orleans could be evacuated, particularly with large sections of Interstate 10 wiped out by the storm.
Displaced residents filled many hotels and shelters. The leaking, powerless Superdome, which had held about 10,000 evacuees Monday swelled to as many as 20,000 people Tuesday as stragglers made their way to relative safety and at least one flooded-out hospital had to shift its operations to the dome.
Hundreds of other residents fled to elevated portions of I-10. "There's going to be whole families living along this highway before long," said Brett Oncale, who stood on the highway and watched Canal Street flood.
People trapped in the city are "in desperate need of water and supplies," Blanco told CNN. "We are ferrying them in as much as we can, but it's unfathomable."
Mayor Ray Nagin declared martial law in the afternoon and ordered everyone still in the city - including police officers not considered "central emergency personnel" - to leave.
Off the rooftops
Zachary Harris, 41, lost both legs 10 years ago in a stabbing. With Katrina approaching, he sent his wife and 6-year-old son to Houston but stayed behind because he didn't think the storm would be "all that bad."
Like thousands of residents of Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, he found himself in desperate straits when a three-block gap opened Tuesday morning in a canal levee between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Water quickly rose up to 20 feet in some of the city's below-sea-level neighborhoods.
As water filled his house, Harris punched out a window and found himself flapping his arms in the water outside, trying to stay alive.
"I was like a jellyfish," Harris said. "That was my first time in the water without legs."
Somehow, Harris reached the top of his carport, then his roof. He then hopped on a floating door and rode it to a higher roof on his neighbor's house, where a boat rescued him.
Throughout the day, fish and wildlife officers, National Guardsmen and helpful citizens ran boats through flooded areas.
State Sen. Walter Boasso, who pitched in, said thousands of people were stuck on roofs and in attics. Rescuers in boats sometimes heard people screaming for help but couldn't tell which attics the sounds came from.
Bodies floated by but rescuers had to let them be, using boat space and manpower to rescue the living. Sometimes rescuers placed bodies on rooftops for later retrieval.
"God only knows what we're going to find when the water goes down," Boasso said. "You're going to have a pile" of bodies.
"We know of young kids being lost because parents couldn't hold on to their children as the water was rising and ripping so fast."
Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said it could take several days to rescue everyone from flooded areas. This is "just at the tip of the iceberg," he said. "We need more boats, more men. Whatever it is, we need more of it."
Rescued from houses, people were taken to island-like interstate highway overpasses or to secure levees, where they had to wait for further evacuation. Many were brought to the base of the Strauss Bridge, between downtown and the eastern parishes. They had to hike about 200 yards to the middle of the bridge, where Army trucks took them to the Superdome.
By Tuesday afternoon, people outnumbered trucks.
About 500 to 600 bedraggled evacuees huddled on the bridge, mostly shoeless and some in their underwear. Arms and legs showed cuts and gashes, where people had punched their way through roofs and escaped through windows. Most had not eaten in 24 hours. Rescuers handed out water bottles but one boy used his to cool off feet scorched by the pavement.
Widespread looting
The driest downtown areas were near the Mississippi, which is higher than many parts of the city. The French Quarter, largely dry Monday, picked up about 2 feet of water as the day progressed.
Two feet was too shallow to discourage looters, who ransacked the Quarter and nearby Canal Street, even though police with automatic rifles tried to ward them off. Looters used shopping carts to hit convenience stores and drove a van up to clean out one drugstore.
"The looting is out of control. The French Quarter has been attacked," council member Jackie Clarkson said. "We're using exhausted, scarce police to control looting when they should be used for search and rescue while we still have people on rooftops."
Police Lt. Steve Lindsey said he saw 50 people grabbing shoes from one shoe store.
"All we could do was run them off because the jail is flooded," Lindsey said.
Police piled up discarded booty along the St. Charles trolley line - soda cans, LL Bean shoes, clothes, cameras and a bag of Pepperidge Farm chocolate chip cookies.
With police running low on gas, officers made a half-hearted attempt to commandeer gasoline cans brought in by reporters for their own use. Instead, the police refilled their tanks by siphoning gas from parked cars.
More water to come
For a while Tuesday, authorities talked of using helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags into two levee breaks. But by evening, they abandoned that plan and warned residents of Jefferson Eastbank and Orleans parishes, in and around downtown, to expect 9 more feet of water by today. The Superdome is in Orleans Parish.
Such flooding would wipe out the entire city's water system, already disabled by the broken main, said New Orleans' homeland security chief Terry Ebbert.
Flood experts, like Ivor van Heerden of Louisiana State University, said the city is apt to stay awash for days under oily, filthy water infested with mosquitoes, even if levees can be fixed quickly.
Flood-control pumps are broken, choked by excess water or storm debris. Others were lacking power needed to run. Roofs collapsed on two major pumping stations. Without power, it's hard to fix pumps. Without pumps, the water will have nowhere to drain.
"It's going to be days before they get all that water out," said van Heerden.
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report, which used information from the Associated Press, CNN and WWL-TV.
Multimedia: Continuing fallout