And so, the Battle of New Orleans begins

As I pointed out yesterday, with military troops arriving in large numbers and the police getting much needed backup, combat style violence was a real possibility in NOLA. Now it seems that the first shots have been fired... not by the National Guard, but by police. Five to six are dead.

In New Orleans, police shot and killed at least five people Sunday after gunmen opened fire on contractors crossing a bridge to make levee repairs, The Associated Press reported.

Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley told the AP that police shot at eight people who had guns, killing five or six.

The Army Corps of Engineers told AP that 14 contractors escorted by police were fired upon while crossing the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

Corps spokesman John Hall told AP the contractors were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to help fix a breach in the 17th Street Canal.

While I still maintain that most of the looters, etc. will likely be abandoning their weapons and looking for a safe way out of the city, it was clear from the beginning that at least a few idiots would treat this as some sort of Mad Max scenario and try to turn it into a war. As I said yesterday,

...if any of them [the looters] are stupid enough to come out, guns blazing, when they see armed troops moving into the area, they won't get much sympathy from me if they get their fool heads shot off.

Well, now we seem to have the first list of names of the idiots in question. And no, they aren't getting any sympathy from me. What could you possibly be thinking to open fire on a group of unarmed contractors who are there to actually help you rebuild your city?

The real tragedy, of course, is that this is going to set perceptions in the city (where news is obviously hard to come by, with no power, television, newspapers, etc.) such that some of the survivors may think that the authorities are there to prosecute a war on whoever is left behind. Rediculous sounding to those of us sitting safely in our homes in unaffected areas, but who knows what's going on in the minds of those who lived through that hell?

From that same linked article, the Feds are now saying that the dead, once they finally locate them all, may be even more numerous than our worst fears.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin said Sunday that the dead in the city numbered "in the thousands."

"Thousands. If you do the math, there's 500,000 people in the city," the clearly weary mayor said. "We probably evacuated 80 percent" during the mandatory evacuation last Sunday.

"We probably moved about 50,000 people out as it relates to -- 50,000 to 60,000, these shelters of last resort. So you probably have another 50,000 to 60,000 out there. You do the math, man. What do you think? 5 percent is unreasonable (as a death toll)? 10 percent? 20 percent? It's going to be a big number."

One senior military commander on duty in New Orleans was no more optimistic.

"Maybe 3,000, maybe 5,000. God, we hope it's no more than 10,000," he told CNN.

We won't be getting over this any time soon, and sadly, the drama is still playing out.