2 block-long breach in Ponchartrain levee ..CNN 11:28 PDT

August 28, 2005

Mayor Ray Nagin ordered an immediate mandatory evacuation Sunday for all of New Orleans, a city of 485,000 people, as Hurricane Katrina bore down with 260-kilometre-per-hour wind. Ten refuges of last resort were set up including the Superdome.

"There doesn't seem to be any relief in sight," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said, joining the mayor at a news conference.

The mayor called the order unprecedented, but said Katrina's storm surge would likely top the city's protective levees.

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The streets of New Orleans are flooding after breaches of a levee in the city, possibly due to sandbags piles collapsing, Trooper Doug Pierrelee, a spokesman for Louisiana state police, said in a telephone interview today. The city's French quarter is underwater, he said.

Water is rising 1 inch (25 centimeters (sic)) every 5 minutes and has risen 6 feet (1.82 meters) at the Tulane University Hospital, which is planning to evacuate, CNN reported earlier, citing Karen Troyer-Caraway, the hospital's vice-president.

The police are receiving calls by hundreds of people who are stranded in the attics of their houses, waiting to be rescued, Pierrelee said.

About 200 rescue boats were working to get them out, he said. Some of the callers or their families were injured and some were pregnant or had their children with them, he said.

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Levee breach reported along lakefront of New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- As the death toll from Hurricane Katrina reaches at least 56, a levee holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain has reportedly sustained a breach two blocks long in the Lakefront area of New Orleans.

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Karen Troyer Caraway, vice president of Tulane University Hospital, told CNN that Louisiana State Police had confirmed the New Orleans breach to her.

Water at the hospital, located in New Orleans' central business district, was rising at the rate of a foot an hour, she told CNN, and had already reached the top of the first floor.

"It's dumping all the lake water in Orleans Parish," she said. "It's essentially running down Canal Street. We have whitecaps on Canal Street."

"We now are completely surrounded by 6 feet of water, and are about to get on the phone with Federal Emergency Management Agency to start talking about evacuation plans," Caraway said. "The water is rising so fast, I can't even begin to describe how fast it is rising."

She did not know whether any pumps had been turned on to pump the water, but said, "they're not going to be able to compete with Lake Pontchartrain."