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A related story

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050906/NEWS08/509060374/1001/RSS01&template=printart

Left behind at the Superdome: A filthy mess

By JENNIFER JACOBS

REGISTER STAFF WRITER

New Orleans, La. — The stadium is empty now. And silent.

Walking gingerly through the deep gloom of the Superdome on Monday, it was impossible not to absorb the human suffering that happened in this toxic graveyard days before.

"Goddang," breathed Maj. Paul Pecena, his Texas slang staccato with disbelief at the mounds of garbage. "I've been a police officer for 17 years. In police work, you encounter suffering on an individual level. If you walk into a filthy house, one family's in there, not 15,000 families. This is a thousand times worse than anything I've ever seen."

The building that looks from a distance like a nuclear reactor has been declared a biohazard zone. Armed troops stand guard. The public is forbidden from entering. But Pecena, a national guardsman from Austin, escorted a couple of visitors inside.

The temperature is cooler than outside, but still tropical. A pair of jeans quickly begins to feel like horse blankets.

The red-brick walkways are slick. One puddle of urine looked like someone had dumped half of a keg.

Every Budweiser and fresh-squeezed lemonade cart has been ransacked.

When the military Meals Ready to Eat were delivered, some evacuees found ketchup and mustard at a hot dog cart and squirted it onto the MRE's baked beans.

A single shoe, in a child's size, is overturned in a mash of food wrappers, vomit and a tampon. The visitors cringe at the thought of a barefoot child and hope the shoe was just an extra that fell from a suitcase.

People escaping the floodwaters have said they grabbed everything they could and fled.

But at some point, before evacuating in buses and helicopters, they realized they had to lighten their load.

One boy had to leave behind his Xbox game and his Batman sleeping bag.

Someone else left behind a book of Hindu scriptures. Someone else took comfort with a girlie magazine, and someone else with the book "Sister, Sister" by Eric Jerome Dickey.

Down in a lower balcony, some of the smell of death and fear has evaporated. Visitors can breathe without pulling their shirts over their noses.

Careful letters penned in blue ink on a stadium seat read "Hurricane Katrina: Rebecca. Charlotte. Elisa. Vanessa. Aussy."

Someone wanted to be remembered.

Anyone who sat down Monday in that seat, number 13, row 12, inside Gate D, would feel the vibrations from the helicopters chopping the air outside.

On Saturday, the sidewalks were a madhouse, something like the feel of the evacuation of Saigon mixed with D-Day at Normandy. It was calmer Monday, with only the occasional thump of the rescue helicopter landing in an elevated parking lot that's become a staging area.

Sunlight blazes like a laser beam from a hole in the roof that appears to be the size of a garage door.

The football field is a swamp of crushed garbage and standing water.

After walking out into the fresh air, and even hours later, the stench of the Superdome clings to visitors' clothing and nose hairs.

Stepping over litter on the sidewalk outside the cavernous arena, Pecena wants to spit out his gum. Immediately.

"I can't do it," he sighed. "Isn't that funny."

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