By CAIN BURDEAU
The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS - To the estimated 10,000 residents still holed up in this ruined city, the mayor had a blunt new warning: Get out now or risk being taken out by force.
As floodwaters began to slowly recede with the first of the city’s pumps returning to operation, Mayor C. Ray Nagin instructed law enforcement officers and the U.S. military late Tuesday to evacuate all holdouts for their own safety. He warned that the fetid water could spread disease and that natural gas was leaking all over town.
By midday Wednesday, however, no forced evacuations were reported. Police Capt. Marlon Defillo said police were focusing for now on people who wanted to be rescued. And Art Jones of the state Homeland Security Department said the National Guard does not work for the mayor and has yet to receive orders from the military to force people out.
Nagin’s directive - which superseded an earlier, milder order to evacuate made before Hurricane Katrina crashed ashore Aug. 29 - came after rescuers scouring New Orleans found hundreds of people ignoring warnings to get out.
They included Dennis Rizzuto, 38, who said he had plenty of water, food to last a month and a generator powering his home. He and his family were offered a boat ride to safety, but he declined.
''They’re going to have to drag me,’' Rizzuto said.
That was a sentiment Capt. Scott Powell of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources kept hearing as he tried to evacuate people by air boat.
''A lot of people don’t want to leave. They’ve got dogs and they just want to stay with their homes. They say they’re going to stay until the water goes down,’' he said.
Workers struggled, meanwhile, to find and count the corpses decaying in the 90-degree (32 Celsius) heat. Even when cadaver dogs pick up a scent, workers frequently cannot get at the bodies without heavy equipment. The mayor has estimated New Orleans’ death toll could reach 10,000.
State Rep. Nita Hutter said 30 people died at a flooded-out nursing home in Chalmette, just outside New Orleans. She said the staff left the elderly residents behind in their beds.
In Washington, President George W. Bush and Congress pledged on Tuesday to open separate investigations into the federal response to Katrina and New Orleans’ broken levees. ''Governments at all levels failed,’' said Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated her call for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be made autonomous from the Department of Homeland Security and for an independent commission to investigate the federal response to the disaster, saying neither Congress nor the administration should do it.
''The people that I met in Houston - they want answers and they want to know what went wrong and they want to know what they are going to be able to count on in the future,’' she said on NBC’s ''Today’’ show Wednesday, two days after visiting refugees at the Astrodome. ''I don’t think the government can investigate itself.’'
The pumping began after the Corps used hundreds of sandbags and rocks over the Labor Day weekend to close a 200-foot (60-meter) gap in the 17th Street Canal levee that burst in the aftermath of the storm and swamped 80 percent of this below sea-level city.
Although toxic floodwaters receded inch by inch, only five of New Orleans’ normal contingent of 148 drainage pumps were operating, the Army Corps of Engineers said.
How long it takes to drain the city could depend on the condition of the pumps - especially whether they were submerged and damaged, the Corps said. Also, the water is full of debris, and while there are screens on the pumps, it may be necessary to stop and clean them from time to time.
New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass said lawlessness in the city ''has subsided tremendously,’' and officers warned that those caught looting in an area where the governor has declared an emergency can get up to 15 years in prison. About 120 prisoners filled a downtown jail set up at the city’s train and bus terminal.
''We continue to get better day by day,’' Compass said.
Some National Guardsmen and helicopters were diverted from their search missions Tuesday to fight fires, an emerging threat in a city that has no water pressure to fight fires or electricity, which has prompted holdouts to use candles.
Some people may already be heeding the mayor’s message. After surviving for days in New Orleans, Johnnie Lee MacGuire finally accepted an offer to evacuate.
''It’s too filthy. Look at that - the fish is dead, you got dead dogs, you got dead people around there,’' the 66-year-old said.
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Associated Press writers Doug Simpson, Dan Sewell, Jim Litke, Melinda Deslatte, Matt Apuzzo and Randolph E. Schmid contributed to this report.