Louisiana official haunted by drowned woman

WASHINGTON - A New Orleans official was overcome by emotion on national television when describing how a woman was abandoned and eventually drowned after repeated promises she would be rescued.

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, the emergency management, who's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said are you coming, son, is somebody coming," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, said as he burst into heavy sobbing on NBC's Meet the Press programme.

"And he said 'yeah mama, somebody's coming to get ya, somebody's coming to get ya on Tuesday, somebody's coming to get ya on Wednesday, somebody's coming to get ya on Thursday, somebody's coming to get you on Friday.'

"And she drowned Friday night, she drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us."

"Nobody's coming to get us, nobody's coming to get us," Broussard said through tears.

Broussard, president of the parish just south of New Orleans, did not give the woman's name.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina "will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in US history," he said.

Local and federal officials said they expected to find thousands of corpses still floating in flood waters or locked inside homes and buildings destroyed by the devastating storm that struck the US Gulf Coast last Monday.

Broussard said the government must acknowledge the part it played in senseless deaths.

"It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," he said.

"Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."

He demanded congressional hearings on what went wrong in the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane.

"They've had press conferences. I'm sick of press conferences. For God's sake, shut up and send us somebody."

- REUTERS