Superdome horrors leave survivors numb with shock

A brand new city has arisen inside the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, population 15,000.

It is almost clean, more or less safe and entirely dry. No longer are these people clinging to the roofs of houses above swirling waters or squatting on elevated roadways in the sun unsure if they will live or die.

And, happily, they are no longer cowering in the New Orleans Superdome, a place that turned mad with murders, rapes, suicide, abortions and the ammonia fumes of human waste. Or imprisoned in the convention centre without food or water, in the company of corpses.

Those two places of sanctuary became hell-holes of a kind unthinkable in the United States of America. Until last week.

Gabrielle Benson, 40, has to think for a second. It is five, she says, the number of her family who are unaccounted for. "I don't know where my mum and dad are and I have three kids of mine who are missing."

Two other children are with her. Benson is calm about the missing kids. They survived the storm and were with her in the New Orleans Superdome all last week. They got lost in the pandemonium of boarding buses. Quite likely, they are in a different city by now.

It is the mess with the buses that makes Benson most angry. She and her family had fled immediately to the Superdome. She described soldiers of the National Guard barking orders - "Make a hole, make a hole, that was their favourite order," she says - and making no effort to keep parents and children together.

The soldiers did at least give them water while they waited - throwing bottles into the crowd. "Just popping people on the head with them."

Devan Allen is 11 years old. He tells of things no child should witness. Like the moment when a man stood on one of the balconies and screamed so everyone could hear that he had lost everyone in the storm and now he would die also.

He dived headfirst on to the playing field below, his head bursting open. Devan shouldn't have seen that. Nor should he have heard the gunshots, the whispers of the girls who were raped and stabbed to death, right there with him in the Superdome. Or of the boy raped.

James Allen, his father, is among those boiling with anger at what they found when they fled to the Superdome. "We went there because we thought we would be safe, but instead we were more inmates."

Allen, 31, was born in New Orleans. After what happened in the Superdome, he says, he will never, ever, go back to the city.

By the last night, he says, the soldiers of the National Guard had given up even patrolling the inside of the arena, leaving it to succumb to its own ugliness and anarchy.

Gaynell Farrell, 56, who has worked for the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans for 27 years, says she is certain of what she saw and heard. She speaks of two girls being raped and murdered inside the dome, one 7. The other was 16 and was "slit open" by a knife after she was raped in the woman's bathroom.

Allen says the rapist was chased down by other men and beaten before being handed over to soldiers. He claims they also beat him and then threw him from a terrace outside the Superdome to the asphalt, killing him.

"There was babies born and put in the garbage," Farrell says. "Human beings don't live like that, people in the street don't live like that."

Key aid pledges

Qatar: US$100 million.

Australia: A$10 million to the American Red Cross.

China: US$5 million.

Saudi Arabia: US$5 million to Red Cross.

Japan: US$200,000 to the Red Cross, will provide up to US$300,000 in emergency supplies if asked.

- INDEPENDENT