The police and firemen, he says, are so traumatized that they can’t function. TWO OF THEM have committed suicide.
Nagin is trying to evacuate the police and fire workers OUT of the city. Ideally, he’d like to get them to somewhere to Las Vegas where they can get nice rooms and superb medical help.
Nagin doesn’t care how much it costs. “Screw FEMA. I’ll pay for it myself until we get that figured out.” Nagin says they need BOTH medical and psychological treatment.
Update [2005-9-4 11:26:52 by susanhu]: The report continues … about public health worries, wherever people are congregating, it’s bad. “In the hotel that the mayor is operating out of, there are feces throughout the stairwells.” — Nick Robertson, reporter who interviewed Mayor Nagin, just now, on CNN.
Wolf Blitzer just asked Robertson, since he’s covered so much of the world’s toughest places, how this compares. Robertson said (and I typed best I could …):
“I think one of the most striking impressions, Wolf, is that you are coming into a massive city that is mostly deserted and that you see National Guard patrolling the city … if you go into places like the Hyatt Hotel where people … like the border betweeen Albania and Kosovo … the detritus of human beings like a Social Security card lying on the ground.
“There are large numbers of dogs are roaming the streets … getting into garbage and in some cases making big messes. It is reminiscent of Sarajevo where dogs turned wild beause people couldn’t take care of their pets anymore. The dogs went wild and got into packs…”
