Myths of Katrina anarchy shattered

LOS ANGELES - The stories that came out of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were little short of sickening: evacuees terrorised, bodies piled up amid the stench and human waste, children raped, murdered and thrown into waste bins.

One month after the storm, however, it appears that few, if any, of the most lurid reports repeated on US television, echoed in official statements and reported in many newspapers had basis in fact.

Contrary to reports of dozens of deaths at the Superdome shelter, reporters and officials who visited the city in the aftermath now say the death toll was six - and four of those were the result of natural causes.

The fifth victim overdosed on drugs and the sixth committed suicide. If there were shootings or stabbings, none were fatal.

The story of a purported rape of a 7-year-old was repeated by the city's mayor and police chief, only to be disavowed much later.

At the city's convention centre, where the New York Times reported a death toll of 24 amid scenes of gun violence and fear, officials have now told the local Times-Picayune that they recovered four dead bodies, with just one suspected murder.

Police confirmed just four murders in the city in the week after the hurricane - about average for one of America's most crime-ridden cities.

While it now seems certain that the stories were exaggerated, it may still be too soon to paint an exact picture of what happened in the chaotic aftermath of Katrina.

Some of the distortions were due to the collapse of communications and the general sense of horror at what was unfolding.

Some were the hallmark of an over-eager, under-informed media - who six years ago managed to get almost all the basic details of the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado wrong, too.

And some of it appears to have been fuelled by an attitude of fear - occasionally bordering on bigotry - towards a poor, desperate, largely black population.

In New Orleans' whiter, more affluent suburbs, stories spread right after Katrina of marauding gangs of urban looters on the rampage. No such thing ever happened.

Even as far afield as Baton Rouge, the state capital 130km to the northwest, rumours of a crime wave created by thousands of New Orleans evacuees triggered such a panic the campus of Louisiana State University was locked down for almost a day.

Police later said the only crime logged in Baton Rouge was a minor incident involving a knife at a temporary shelter. Nobody was hurt there, or anywhere else.

In many of the white communities surrounding New Orleans, residents openly described the urban poor as "animals" and indicated they were willing to believe just about anything of them.

Once the National Guard arrived in the city, soldiers charged with securing the perimeter of the Superdome warned journalists they would not be safe going inside.

The inside turned out to be chaotic, fetid and stiflingly hot, but very far from the Mad Max-style hellhole advertised.

"It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done," Ed Bush of the National Guard told yesterday's Los Angeles Times. Only now, one month later, is the record being set straight.

- INDEPENDENT