.Saturday, Sept. 3

Early morning: The Superdome is mostly evacuated. Lt. Kevin Cowan, of Louisiana's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, estimates that 2,000 people remain in the Superdome, though a spokesperson for the Texas Air National Guard says the figure could be as high as 5,000. Air-conditioned buses are diverted to the convention center to begin evacuating the nearly 25,000 refugees housed there. The National Guard reports that it has served approximately 70,000 meals at the convention center already and has supplies to serve 130,000 more.

9:06 a.m. President Bush reads his weekly radio address from the White House Rose Garden, an unusual spectacle. Bush says he is sending more than 7,000 active-duty troops to the region devastated by the hurricane in the next 72 hours. The active-duty troops -- which will come from Army's 82nd Airborne from Fort Bragg, N.C., 1st Cavalry Division from Fort Hood, Texas, and the Marines' 1st and 2nd Expeditionary forces from Camp Pendleton, Calif., and Camp Lejeune, N.C. -- will join 4,000 active-duty troops already in the region. The Pentagon announces that an additional 10,000 National Guard forces will be deployed to the region, bringing the number of Guard in the area to about 40,000.

Throughout the day: Gov. Blanco declines Bush's offer of a federal takeover for Louisiana's National Guard. This leaves Blanco in charge of all Guard troops in the region and will prohibit active-duty troops from maintaining law and order. Instead, she hires James Lee Witt, who served as the head of FEMA under President Clinton and who has previously criticized the decision to have FEMA report to the Homeland Security Department, to help direct Louisiana's hurricane relief efforts.

DHS secretary Chertoff, along with Bush aides Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson and White House domestic policy advisor Claude Allen, holds a two-hour meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss the roles of race and poverty in the federal government's hurricane relief efforts. Also in attendance are NAACP president Bruce Gordon and National Urban League president Marc Morial, a former mayor of New Orleans.

Evacuation of the Superdome resumes and is completed. Members of the Texas National Guard who have been supervising the evacuation cheer as the last evacuee, an elderly man in a Houston Rockets cap, boards the bus. Later, more evacuees arrive at the Superdome, and the evacuation effort continues.

Col. John Smart, chief operations officer for Joint Task Force Katrina West, reports that, as of Saturday afternoon, 42,000 people have been evacuated from New Orleans by bus, air and Amtrak trains.

FEMA director Brown warns that "hot spots" of crime remain in New Orleans. "Some of these kids think this is a game. They have a gun and they think it is a game they are playing," he said. Brown also says that any "idiots with a gun on a rooftop" would soon be meeting with force from active-duty troops. Brown declines to estimate how many stranded New Orleanians remain to be rescued: "There is no humanly possible way of knowing at this stage how many people like that still exist in this vast urban area," he says.

The body of Sgt. Paul Accardo, a New Orleans police officer, is found in an unmarked patrol car in a downtown parking lot. The cause of death is suicide.

Rosalie Guidry Daste, a 100-year-old woman who had been stuck in her flooded nursing home for four days, dies moments after she's rescued from the facility.

At a press briefing in Washington, DHS secretary Chertoff expresses "full confidence" in FEMA director Brown. Chertoff also deflects responsibility for the disaster's handling, saying the reason federal support did not arrive more quickly was "because our constitutional system really places the primary authority in each state with the governor."

New Orleans deputy police commander W.S. Riley counters with criticism of the federal response: "My biggest disappointment is with the federal government and the National Guard. The Guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They drove their trucks in and went to sleep. For 72 hours this police department and the fire department and handful of citizens were alone rescuing people. We have people who died while the National Guard sat and played cards. I understand why we are not winning the war in Iraq if this is what we have."

.Sunday, Sept. 4

FEMA announces that "one hundred percent of evacuees housed in the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center have been evacuated." FEMA anticipates that more evacuees will arrive at the Superdome and convention center, and that they will be relocated on a flow basis. Authorities in New Orleans will report that 24 people died in the convention center and 10 died at the Superdome, though causes of death are not yet known.

Also in FEMA's progress report: All patients from New Orleans' top 12 hospitals have been evacuated; 563 shelters in 10 states are housing a total population of 151,409 evacuees; and cruise ships are being brought into the coastal areas to provide temporary housing to approximately 8,000 additional evacuees.

Jefferson Parish, La., president Aaron Broussard appears on NBC's Meet the Press, along with DHS secretary Chertoff, and claims that FEMA prevented aid from reaching his parish. Broussard cries when telling the story of an elderly woman who was promised aid for days before drowning on Friday. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now...," he says. "Nobody's coming to get us. The secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For God sakes, shut up and send us somebody."

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans runs an open letter to President Bush criticizing the federal response to the disaster saying, "Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially."

The Chicago Tribune reports that the massive Marine ship the USS Bataan, which has been in the region since the worst of the storm subsided, has offered its extensive hospital facility and supplies to the relief effort, but that so far federal authorities haven't made use of most of the ship's resources. Though helicopters from the Bataan's deck were involved in early rescue efforts in New Orleans, relief efforts have not made use of the ship's doctors, six operating rooms, 600 hospital beds, food and water supplies, or its ability to produce 100,000 gallons of clean, fresh water each day.

New Orleans police shoot and kill at least five residents, after those residents open fire on a group of 14 government contractors traveling across the city's Danziger Bridge to make repairs.

.Monday, Sept. 5

President Bush returns to Louisiana, visiting with evacuees at the Bethany World Prayer Center in Baton Rouge and at Pearl River Community College in Poplarville. Staff members in Gov. Blanco's office says the White House didn't notify them that Bush would be visiting, and that they found out he was coming by watching the news.

Kellogg, Brown & Root Services, long criticized for its lucrative no-bid Iraq reconstruction contract, begins work on a $500 million U.S. Navy contract for emergency cleanup and repairs following Hurricane Katrina.

The patching of New Orleans's 17th Street Canal breach with 300-pound sandbags and bags of rock is completed. The canal is reopened, so it can be used to pump water out of the city. Army engineers report that the breach in the London Avenue Canal is also closed.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush, accompanying President George H.W. Bush on a tour of the evacuation center at Houston's Astrodome, opines that many of the Gulf Coast's evacuees are better off: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them."

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