Home > The Danziger Bridge incidents
Here’s the full text (also available here and here and here) of the Associated Press article on something that happened at Danziger Bridge in New Orleans on September 4:
"Police
shot and killed at least five people Sunday after gunmen opened fire on
a group of contractors traveling across a bridge on their way to make
repairs, authorities said.
Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot at eight people carrying guns, killing five or six.
Fourteen
contractors were traveling across the Danziger Bridge under police
escort when they came under fire, said John Hall, a spokesman for the
Army Corps of Engineers.
They were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to help plug the breech in the 17th Street Canal, Hall said.
None
of the contractors was injured, Mike Rogers, a disaster relief
coordinator with the Army Corps of Engineers, told reporters in Baton
Rouge.
The bridge spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
No other details were immediately available."
This is a revision of the first version (or here):
"Police
shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing
five or six, a deputy chief said. A spokesman for the Army Corps of
Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a
canal.
The contractors were walking across a bridge on their way
to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to fix the 17th Street Canal,
said John Hall, a spokesman for the Corps.
Earlier Sunday, New Orleans Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot at eight people, killing five or six.
The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
No other details were immediately available."
The Associated Press had severe second thoughts about the first version:
"Stations:
The latest New Orleans-datelined urgent series Hurricane
Katrina-Shootings has been KILLED. The Army Corps of Engineers says the
contractors were shot at, then police fatally shot the gunmen who’d
fired on the contractors. The contractors were NOT killed.
A kill is mandatory. Make certain the story is not broadcast.A sub will be filed shortly.AP Broadcast News Center - Washington"
The difference between the two AP
stories is that one story has the police shooting and killing armed
contractors, while the later story has them shooting and killing people
who were shooting on armed contractors. A fairly significant change.
Reuters has what appears to be an even later version (or here) of the story:
"New
Orleans police killed four looters who had opened fire on them on
Sunday as rescue teams scoured homes and toxic waters flooding streets
to find survivors and recover thousands of bloated corpses.
A
fifth looter was in critical condition but no more details were
available about the incident in a city where authorities are slowly
regaining control after a wave of looting, murders and rapes in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina.
’Five men who were looting exchanged
gunfire with police. The officers engaged the looters when they were
fired upon,’ said New Orleans superintendent of police, Steven Nichols.
U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers contractors working on a levee breach were
fired on by gunmen but no one was hurt, said the Corps’ Mike Rogers. It
was not clear if the two incidents were connected."
So now it
appears there were two incidents, one where U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers contractors were fired upon but no one was hurt, and one with
no contractors, where police killed looters who were firing at them.
The incident appears to have been reported on Australian television, together with the sound of live gunfire.
Quite
the story. It made a considerable impression on various right-wing
bloggers, who felt it showed how these dangerous black looters were so
evil that they were preventing repair of the levees in order to keep
the city flooded so they could continue looting. When you think about
it, that theory seems to give the looters a degree of planning and
organization which is not credible. It makes more sense that the police
would get into a gunfight with looters, or even use the excuse of
looters to explain why they killed a lot of people, but how then did
the AP get the whole story so wrong - twice! - by adding the contractors to the mix?
It was a big day at Danziger Bridge. Later in the day a helicopter crashed there. From USA Today (or here):
".
. . in the evening, a civilian helicopter crashed near the Danziger
Bridge, but the two people on board escaped with only cuts and scrapes,
according to Mark Smith of the state office of emergency preparedness."
More, from CNN (more CNN here):
"On Sunday, a helicopter that had been involved in rescue operations crashed northwest of New Orleans.
No
evacuees were on board the Eurocopter AS 332 Super Puma and the pilot
and crew were rescued safely, according to an official with Helinet
Aviation Services, which had a chopper flying above the crash site."
More, again from the AP:
"A
civilian helicopter that was not involved in rescue operations crashed
in New Orleans on Sunday and the two people on board were slightly
injured, a state official said.
The helicopter crashed in the
area of the Danziger Bridge, said Mark Smith, spokesman for the
Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
’The
helicopter came down hard and rolled over on its side and broke its
blades off and broke its tail off,’ Smith told reporters in Baton Rouge.
’There were two civilians on the helicopter. Both sustained cuts and scrapes,’ he said.
It was not known why the helicopter was in the area, Smith said.
The
US military and Coast Guard have conducted hundreds of helicopter
flights in the New Orleans area in recent days searching for Hurricane
Katrina survivors and have rescued thousands of storm victims.
Early media reports said the crashed aircraft was a Coast Guard helicopter.
Live
television footage from the scene showed the red helicopter lying on
the ground near a roadway, with smoke drifting from its cockpit. The
ground around the wreck was blackened and churned up by the aircraft’s
rotor blades.
Smith said he did not know if shots had been fired
at the helicopter. Gunfire has been reported on numerous occasion in
the New Orleans area in recent days.
’It could have been mechanical failure,’ he said."
So
now a coast guard helicopter has morphed into a civilian helicopter,
which is showing a peculiar fascination with the Danziger Bridge. This
mysterious helicopter was also described as a ’rescue helicopter’ and a ’Coast Guard Super Puma helicopter":
"A rescue helicopter has crashed in New Orleans, US television networks say.
The two crew members from the Coast Guard Super Puma helicopter were safe, MSNBC said.
Live
television footage from the scene showed the red helicopter lying on
the ground near a roadway, with smoke drifting from its cockpit. The
ground around the wreck was blackened and churned up by the aircraft’s
rotor blades."
This is an awfully specific description to be
wrong. On the other hand, the Coast Guard doesn’t appear to use the
Super Puma, but rather another Aerospatiale product called the Dolphin.
Of course, the Coast Guard might have contracted with somebody with a
Super Puma, so you never know. You have to wonder why a rescue
helicopter was flying around the Danziger Bridge, not a residential
area where there would be somebody in need of rescue, and on all
accounts a dry enough area for quite a bit to be going on.
Some good questions from Nur al-Cubicle:
"For
certain, the Danzinger Bridge is nowhere near the breaches nor should
the industrial area be a magnet for looters looking for television
sets."
and:
"The implication is that something
is occuring on and near the Danziger Bridge which is both extraordinary
and alarming. A simple mind says the helicopter was a news aircraft
gone out to follow up on the shooting and was forcefully not permitted
to photograph. A dull person could think that 3:00 pm in the afternoon
is an odd hour to be on foot in the hot Gulf sun and rather late in the
day to be getting around to starting repairs on breached levees. A
disinterested so-and-so might wonder about the police escort after
having heard press accounts of the reduction of New Orleans police to
skeleton crew on the point of exhaustion."
I would add that it
is an odd way to make repairs in a breech in the 17th Street Canal by
launching barges into Lake Pontchartrain.
My best guess is
that the police killed some people and used the Army contractor story
to cover it up. The victims are unlikely to have been looters, but may
have used guns in self-defense. The police story inadvertently
disclosed that people working for the army were up to some mysterious
job, a job that was supposed to be a secret. The helicopter went to
take a look at what was going on, and was shot down. Discrepancies in
the official story are starting to lead to theories that
at least some levees and floodwalls were intentionally destroyed,
theories that gain some credence in that even the experts are baffled
at what happened to the floodwalls. Its a bit too convenient that storm
surge gauges stopped functioning during a . . . storm surge, thus
removing inconvenient questions about how a nine foot storm surge went
over a wall designed to stop an 11.5 foot storm surge.