Mayor Threatens "Forced" Removal of Remaining Residents

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

NEW ORLEANS - To the estimated 10,000 residents still believed to be holed up in this ruined city, the mayor had a blunt new warning: Get out now — or risk being taken out by force.

As floodwaters began to slowly recede with the city's first pumps returning to operation, 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.

Police Capt. Marlon Defillo said that forced removal of citizens had not yet begun. "That's an absolute last resort," he said.

Nagin's order targets those still in the city unless they have been designated as helping with the relief effort. Repeated calls to Nagin's spokeswoman, Tami Frazier, seeking comment were not returned.

The move — which supersedes an earlier, milder order to evacuate made before Hurricane Katrina crashed ashore Aug. 29 — comes after rescuers scouring New Orleans found hundreds of people willing to defy repeated urgings to get out.

They included people like Dennis Rizzuto, 38, who said he had plenty of water, food to last a month and a generator powering his home. He and his family were offered a boat ride to safety, but he declined.

"They're going to have to drag me," Rizzuto said.

That's a sentiment Capt. Scott Powell, of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, has heard before as he tries to evacuate people by air boat.

"A lot of people don't want to leave. They've got dogs and they just want to stay with their homes. They say they're going to stay until the water goes down," he said.

In Washington, D.C., President Bush and Congress pledged Tuesday to open separate investigations into the federal response to Katrina and New Orleans' broken levees. "Governments at all levels failed," said Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), R-Maine.

Where does rescuing end and loss of freedom begin? I honestly don't know whether this order is right or wrong. If people were truly required to take responsibility for their decisions and forced to pay the price for their decisions, then I would say let them stay to live or die on their own volition. In this society, all too often the same people who scream about freedom and independence start screaming for help when they realize that they've made a mistake. That begs the question, "How much freedom is too much freedom?"

Full Story: Freedom Dying in New Orleans

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