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AUSTRALIAN survivors of Hurricane Katrina told last night of their dramatic escape from New Orleans and the unfolding civil disaster in city.


The group, joyful at fleeing the nightmare of the Louisiana city, lauded one of its members as a hero.
Bud Hopes, of Brisbane, was praised for saving dozens of tourists as the supposed safe haven of the city's Superdome became a hellhole.


"I would have to say that Bud is solely responsible for our evacuation," Vanessa Cullington, 22, of Sydney, told the Sunday Herald Sun by mobile phone from a bus carrying 10 Australians to safety in Dallas, Texas.


"I dread to think what would have happened if we hadn't got out. It's so great to be free."


News of the group's escape came as reports said as many as 10,000 people might have been killed by the hurricane and its aftermath, and President George Bush ordered more troops and an increased aid effort for the stricken Gulf of Mexico states.


As the Australians left the Superdome, food and water were almost non-existent and the stiflingly hot arena was filled with 25,000 people and the stench of human waste. Gangs stalked the tourists and women were threatened with rape.


"Bud took control. He was calm and kept it together the whole time," Ms Cullington said.


Mr Hopes, 32, said: "That was the worst place in the universe. Ninety-eight per cent of the people around the world are good. In that place, 98 per cent of the people were bad.

"Everyone brought their drugs, they brought guns, they brought knives. Soldiers were shot.


"It was like a refugee camp within a prison.


"It was full on. It was the worst thing I have seen in my life. I have never been so frightened."


Realising that foreigners were a target, Mr Hopes and the other Aussies gathered tourists from Europe, South America and elsewhere into one part of the building.


"There were 65 of us, so we were able to look after each other -- especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened." Mr Hopes said.


He said they had organised escorts for the women when they had gone for food or to the toilet, and rosters to keep guard while others slept.


"We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning."


John McNeil, 20, of Brisbane, said the worst point had come after two days when soldiers had told them the power in the dome was failing and there was only 10 minutes worth of gas left.


"I looked at Bud and said, 'That will be the end of us'," Mr McNeil said.


"The gangs . . . knew where we were. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We prayed for a miracle and the lights stayed on."


Mr Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guard Staff Sgt Garland Ogden, who had broken the rules to get the tourists out of the dome, with 60 people being evacuated to a medical centre.


"We did some shifts at the hospital to help nurse the sick to say thank you. It was a real Aussie thing," he said.


As the bus carrying the Australians crossed the Texan border, spirits were high.


"We've had hotdogs and chips and everyone is laughing," Mr Hopes said.


Later, the bus arrived at Dallas Convention Centre, where the Australians were processed.


Family and friends gathered at the Brisbane home of Mr McNeil's parents, Peter and Mary, where they were joined by
Mr Hopes's sister, Debbie Browne.


Mrs McNeil broke down when she saw images of her son leaving New Orleans.


"There have been times during this past week when we didn't know if we would see him again," she said.


Mr McNeil said he could see a change in his son.


"They've been traumatised," he said. "I think they've witnessed several atrocities."


The other Australians on the bus were Emma Hardwick, of Sydney; Simon Wood, of Wyalkatchem, WA; Michael Ryan, of Lithgow, NSW; Yasmin Bright, of Newcastle; Michelle and Lisa van Grinsven, of Sydney; and Elise Sims, Tea Tree Gully, Adelaide.


Meanwhile, three Australian couples were safe in Los Angeles, awaiting flights home after being rescued from New Orleans by a Channel 7 news crew.


Tim and Joanne Miller, of Rockhampton, Garry and Cynthia Jones, of Brisbane, and Jack and Gloria Slinger, of Perth, crammed into a four-wheel-drive vehicle with reporter Mike Amor and two colleagues for the early morning dash.


The crew had arranged to pick up two couples from the building where they were holed up and found the Slingers on the streets.


"They were very wary about about coming out of the building. It was a pretty frightening scene -- bodies, shootings, looters," Amor said.


A phone call in the middle of the night gave hope to relatives of Brisbane's Fiona Seidel and her sister-in-law, Katie Maclean.


Mrs Maclean's husband, Andrew, was contacted by a New Orleans police officer who said he had seen the pair get on a bus.

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Experts say the trend in the city that's home to the popular French Quarter exists for several reasons -- drugs, too few police, inexperienced prosecutors, and residents staying quiet because they fear retaliation.

They point to an experiment last year by university researchers in which police fired 700 blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood in a single afternoon.
No one called police to report the gunfire.

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They point to an experiment last year by university researchers in which police fired 700 blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood in a single afternoon.
No one called police to report the gunfire.

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The NOLA natives probably figured it was just an officer freshly recruited from LAPD doing his first traffic stop.

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Valenti and her husband, two of very few white people in the almost exclusively black refugee camp, said she and other whites were threatened with murder on Thursday.

"They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us," she said, sobbing. "They were plotting to murder us and then they sent the buses away because we would all be killed if the buses came -- that's what the people in charge told us this morning."

Other survivors recounted horrific cases of sexual assault and murder.

Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, said men had wandered the cavernous convention center in recent nights raping and murdering children.

She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the young girl went missing from her parents inside the convention center.

"She was raped for four hours until she was dead," Joseph said through tears. "Another child, a seven-year old boy was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night."

Several others interviewed by Reuters told similar stories of the abuse and murder of children, but they could not be independently verified.

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One young man said he was not looking forward to another night in the convention center and wondered when conditions would improve. "It's been like a jail in there," he said. "We've got murderers, rapists, killers, thieves. We've got it all."

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The explosions came as British students caught up in the horror of Hurricane Katrina spoke of their four days of "hell" at the New Orleans Superdome.

They described how their place of refuge descended into a scene of terror as people ran wild with knives and guns, used crack cocaine and hurled racial abuse.

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Tourists, meanwhile, were turned out of hotels to face terror on the streets. Debbie Durso of Washington, Michigan, said she asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, "Go to hell - it's every man for himself."

Up to 30 British students huddled among the thousands in the Superdome were forced to set up a makeshift security cordon to fend off abusive locals.

Jamie Trout, 22, an economics student from Sunderland, kept a record of his terrifying ordeal. He wrote: "It was like something out of Lord of the Flies - one minute everything is calm and civil, the next it descends into chaos. A man has been arrested for raping a seven-year-old in the toilet, this place is hell. The smell is horrendous, there are toilets overflowing and people everywhere."

Jamie, who had been coaching football to disabled children as part of the Camp America scheme, said people were shouting racial abuse at the Britons because they were white.

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Experts say the trend in the city that's home to the popular French Quarter exists for several reasons -- drugs, too few police, inexperienced prosecutors, and residents staying quiet because they fear retaliation.

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Experts say the trend in the city that's home to the popular French Quarter exists for several reasons -- drugs, too few police, inexperienced prosecutors, and residents staying quiet because they fear retaliation.

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I would suggest different reasons: The War on Drugs, too many anti-gun laws, tainted legal system that insists on prosecuting victimless crime thereby causing more violent crime, etc . . . .

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The best coverage of the true New Orleans situation has been overseas in Britain and Australia. The U.S. media has been willing to accept racist anarchy and mayhem, provided they don't get on the bad side of Jesse Jackson.

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U.S. media willing to accept racist anarchy and mayhem? Here's a link to some footage where even FOX, the standards bearer of the conservative status quo, is saying how terrible the whole thing is:

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I think the main problem with the American media is that there's just so much of it. And, it's become such a over-crowded industry, the media outlets are basically desperate to find stuff to broadcast and publish so you get a lot of stuff you have to wade through that isn't even real stories. There's real news out there, but you got to know where to look for it in the US, and not just be watching a newscast designed to garner ratings rather than to inform. If you've found it in Britain and Australia, fair enough.

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The authorities have charged two evacuees at Camp Dawson in the alleged sexual assault of a 13 year old girl. That has raised questions about how many of the more than 300 evacuees there, may have criminal pasts.

One West Virginia State trooper said "many" of the displaced citiznes have criminal backgrounds. He couldn't say exactly how many of them have records or what kinds of charges they've faced.

The Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety officer Joe Thornton says less than one percent of the evacuees had any type of identification on them when they arrived in West Virginia. He says some of them were finger-printed but it was a voluntary process.

Thornton says those with criminal backgrounds who have served their time have a right to move to any state they want. And evacuees with outstanding warrants wil not be able to get around the system. They will be processed in a court of law.

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Everyone is admitting that the situation is terrible, but only the foreign papers have been willing to cover the fact that there is a strong racial angle to the story: Black refugees have been targeting white refugees for abuse and violence. That is what I'm talking about.

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Conversely, they are inclined to ignore stories which may alienate an audience or decrease ad revenue, such as ones suggesting that the world's racists aren't just white heterosexual males.

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Jesse Jackson and his travelling race-riot can quickly change the profitability of a business, so the media won't consider the need for the public to know the true nature of NOLA thugs, since they are overwhelmingly members of a minority group - and criticizing them would be "racist". Thankfully, overseas outlets aren't hamstrung in this manner.

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Okay, there are a lot of poor black criminals that were in Louisiana before the hurricane, and they were raising even more hell after it. Why is it important that they are black? Most criminals are idiots, regardless of color. It's just not a good lifestyle choice. How is the fact that black criminals choose race to justify their nonsense significant?

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So you're saying they do cover a lot of stories show white racists? I haven't noticed this. The Atlanta Olympic bomber was a racist, Eric Rudolph I think his name was. The media mentioned that, but it wasn't a big part of the story.

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You think in that clip that I put up of Geraldo, that if Geraldo knew that there were thugs in that convention center with him, that he wouldn't have reported it?

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I put an excerpt up from the New York Times somewhere in this forum that said how the convention center members were afraid of the thugs. That if they told the police, or even Geraldo I bet, the thugs would have made them pay.

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As a personal bias note. I've talked to some white guy who've spent some time in prison. Those black guys are more racist than anybody they've ever met. So, yeah, there's a lot of racism amongst the blacks stupid enough to wind up in jail. But, I promise you. You go find some ignorant redneck white guy from the mountains, you find just as much racism there.

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I work downtown, so we stayed downtown," he said. "It was the day after the hurricane, before the water started rising. That's when we had to leave. We went to Algiers [a suburb of New Orleans] and stayed in an apartment. I was standing on the front porch 24 hours a day with a shotgun. We stayed about three days, and there was nothing but gunshots and cops looting. They were taking big-screen TVs, flat-screen TVs -- anything electronic, the cops had it."

While tens of thousands of people went to the Superdome as authorities had instructed, Yost said he didn't trust it.

"We heard people were getting raped and killed," he told me. "I didn't witness that firsthand, but I wasn't going to attempt it."

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A group of female hurricane survivors were told to show their breasts if they wanted to be rescued, a British holidaymaker has revealed.Ged Scott watched as American rescuers turned their boat around and sped off when the the women refused.

The account was just another example of the horror stories emerging from the hurricane disaster zone.

Mr Scott, 36, of Liverpool, was with his wife and seven-year-old daughter in the Ramada Hotel when the flood waters started rising.

"At one
point, there were a load of girls on the roof of the hotel saying 'Can you help us?' and the policemen said 'Show us what you've got' and made signs for them to lift their T-shirts," he told the Liverpool Evening Echo.

"When the girls refused, they said `Fine' and motored off down the road in their boat."

At one point he had to wade through filthy water to barricade the hotel doors against looters.

He said the experience made him want to vomit.

Mr Scott also slated the rescue operation, saying police were more interested in taking snapshots of the devastation rather than rescuing the victims.

"I could not have a lower opinion of the authorities, from the police officers on the street right up to George Bush," he said.

"I couldn't describe how bad the authorities were. Just little things like taking photographs of us, as we are standing on the roof waving for help, for their own little snapshot albums"

He added: "The American people saved us. I wish I could say the same for the American authorities."

Mike Brocken, of Chester, said he feared his wife Christine and 18-year-old daughter Stephanie would be raped when they went into the Louisiana Superdome.

The family were also racially abused by other refugees in the stadium.

Mr Brocken, a BBC Radio Merseyside presenter and music lecturer, told the station: "We were going to go inside the Superdome.

"I approached two members of the National Guard and they said to stay outside because they knew it was hell in there.

"One female officer basically said under no circumstances take the women in there, because she knew what it was like.

"We were so frightened and we stayed alongside the National Guard for some kind of protection.

"It was at that stage that they started to take us under their wing and eventually managed to get us into the basketball stadium."

He added: "Everyone talks about the National Guard in rather derogatory ways historically, but I've got to say that, but for them, and one man in particular, I may well have lost my family."

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Experts say the trend in the city that's home to the popular French Quarter exists for several reasons -- drugs, too few police, inexperienced prosecutors, and residents staying quiet because they fear retaliation.

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I would suggest different reasons: The War on Drugs, too many anti-gun laws, tainted legal system that insists on prosecuting victimless crime thereby causing more violent crime, etc . . . .

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Oh come on, none of that stuff is specific to New Orleans and other cities have citizens who manage to respond when 700 shots are fired into the air.

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3 things:

1) First of all, I never said it was specific to NO.

2) This type of tragedy is specific to NO, in recent times, and what, are you speaking of the LA riots? Great response, lol.

3) Show me where the "over your head" smilie is, please.

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It is significant since, while great social power is opposed to white racism, black bigotry is not nearly as rejected. Jesse Jackson gets to call NYC "hymietown" and gets no real public scorn. Al Sharpton called whites and jews how do business in black neighborhoods "white interlopers and diamond traders", plus he knowingly accused an innocent man of rape, Steve Pagones, and got hit with a massive civil judgement. Louis Farrakhan is a case which should require no specific examples. Yet all these people are respectable enough to get interviewed on Meet The Press, unlike equivalent white bigots like Tom Metzger.

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I thought Rudolph was primarily an anti-abortion militant, as did most people. Most of his crimes were against abortion doctors.

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Unfortunately, the U.S. media views racism as purely unique to white males. When politicians like Charles Barron talk about how they want to "slap white people for their mental health" because it's a "black thing", he gets no political penalty. When Trent Lott said what he did about voting for Strom Thurmond for President, all hell broke loose and he was pressured to step down as Republican majority leader.

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Are you familiar with Geraldo? He was a militant minority activist/journalist in the seventies. He's a militant liberal now, and a token liberal for Fox. I doubt he'd touch on any issue like that - it goes against his ideology to suggest that Blacks can be anything other than victims, and certainly not predators. NOLA had a crime rate ten times the national average before Katrina and, if the Superdome population is representative of the city, it would be bursting at the seams with criminals.

Geraldo may have indeed been oblivious, but, even if not, he wouldn't be inclined to admit it on camera. Fox would probably just arrange a stronger bodyguard detail and have him hold more Black babies and start weeping.

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Some articles have mentioned the criminality and fear, but none of America's domestic media have made observations about the racial violence that consumes the NOLA refugees. This matters strongly, since NOLA refugees are being relocated to cities filled with naive white liberals who have no clue what they could be unleashing upon their communities or even into their own homes. The public needs to be explicitly told that many of these refugees hold militant racial views, are strongly inclined towards violence, and are coming to neighborhoods near them. It's the same logic as that behind Megan's Law: public awareness saves lives and prevents victimization.

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White racism definitely exists. Black racism definitely exists. However, it is not socially contraversial to denounce white bigotry, but black bigotry is frequently excused or rationalized as the product of "oppression" or "the legacy of slavery" or something equally asinine. Whites don't have such excuses, thankfully. All I ask is that black-on-white crimes get the same response as white-on-black crimes. In the case of NOLA, lives are at stake if people aren't honestly informed of what the government is shipping into their neighborhoods and schools.

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