IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

A hurricane packing winds of 120 mph and a storm surge that tops 17-foot levees slams into New Orleans, killing an untold number of people and trapping half the area's residents in attics, on rooftops and in makeshift refuges in a variety of public and office buildings.

Parts of the city are flooded with up to 20 feet of water, and 80 percent of the buildings in the area are severely damaged from water and winds.

On Monday, at the outset of an eight-day tabletop exercise, more than 250 emergency preparedness officials from more than 50 federal, state and local agencies and volunteer organizations began using that catastrophic scenario -- dubbed Hurricane Pam -- to develop a recovery plan for the 13 parishes in the New Orleans area.

The plan will provide a "bridge" between local and state short-term evacuation and emergency response plans, and a longer-term federal disaster response plan, said Ron Castleman, Federal Emergency Management Agency regional director.

Officials are focusing on six major issues they expect to face in the aftermath of a catastrophic storm like Pam:

-- Developing an effective search-and-rescue plan to find survivors and move them to safety.

-- Identifying short-term shelters for those who evacuated, or those rescued in the storm's aftermath.

-- Creating housing options, including trailer or tent villages, for the thousands likely to be left homeless for months after the storm.

-- Removing floodwater from New Orleans, Metairie and other bowl-like areas where levees will capture and hold storm surge, possibly for days or weeks.

-- Disposing of the thousands of tons of debris left behind by the storm, which will include the remains of homes and businesses; human and animal corpses, including bodies washed out of cemeteries; and a mix of toxic chemicals likely to escape from businesses, industries, trucks and rail cars in the flooded areas.

-- Recreating school systems for public and private school students.

The ultimate dread

The Hurricane Pam scenario is the nightmare local emergency preparedness officials dread: a hurricane that slows as it reaches the Louisiana coast, battering much of the area with hurricane-force winds for as much as 38 hours. Historically, such an intense hurricane, a Category 3 like Pam or stronger, hits somewhere in Louisiana every eight years.

In advance of such a storm, officials expect public pleas for evacuation to be only half successful.

In New Orleans, when evacuees from other areas who seek shelter in the city are accounted for, only a third of the population will leave before the storm hits, according to the Pam scenario. That's partly a recognition of the city's poor population: As many as 100,000 live in households in which no one owns a car, officials say.

FEMA spokesman David Passey hesitated before answering a question about how many people could die in such a storm.

"We would see casualties not seen in the United States in the last century," he said.

Two years ago, officials with the American Red Cross estimated that the death toll from a catastrophic hurricane in the New Orleans area could be between 25,000 and 100,000, which would be more than any hurricane in the U.S. has caused.

Walt Zileski, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service's Southern Region headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, said Hurricane Pam was fashioned after Hurricane Georges, which in 1998 turned east only hours before it would have followed the path chosen for Pam.

Funneled floodwaters

Flooding caused by storm surge would cover an area stretching from lower Plaquemines Parish to the middle of St. Tammany Parish, Ponchatoula in Livingston Parish, and parts of Ascension Parish.

The water would be high enough in parts of New Orleans to top 17-foot levees, including some along Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, Zileski said. Some of the water pushed into Lake Pontchartrain would flow through a gap in the hurricane levee in St. Charles Parish, flow across land to the Mississippi River levee and be funneled south into Jefferson and Orleans parishes.

Sean Fontenot, chief of preparedness for the state Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said as much as 87 percent of the area's housing would be destroyed. That would be the result of a one-two combination of floodwaters and 120-mph winds, said Marc Levitan, director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center.

"And there would be hurricane-force winds over a very large area, all the way up to Baton Rouge and even farther north," Levitan said.

Complicating recovery would be the long-lasting effects of the storm, said Col. Michael Brown, deputy director of the state emergency preparedness department.

"This particular scenario shows that Plaquemines Parish will be out from under the effects of the storm much earlier than people in Alexandria or New Orleans, but our ability to respond will be reduced because you can't drive through the effects of the storm to get there," Brown said. "So people are going to have to prepare to sustain themselves for two or three days before help arrives."

Floating caskets

In a room set aside for those working on a plan to return youngsters to school as soon as possible, officials debated where the schools might be located and who should run them.

Terry Tullier, director of the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness and the only city official in attendance Monday, moved among groups at the state emergency preparedness office, State Police headquarters building and training academy buildings, addressing various issues. He said his staff at the city's emergency center was also answering questions from the groups by telephone.

"What's critically important about this is that so many different agencies, and all three levels of government are here, all singing from the same sheet of music, so that when we do come out with a working document, everybody will have bought into it," Tullier said.

One stop was in the room dedicated to debris cleanup.

"We have a very old housing stock in New Orleans, what most consider as historic," Tullier said. "But how many will stand up to the forces of the storm is anybody's guess.

"The other concern is that we've been fighting this Formosan termite battle," he said. "How many infested oak trees are going to be standing in the city after 120-mph winds?

"And the other question is, how many caskets and carcasses are going to be floating through the streets?" Tullier said. "Those are all aspects of debris removal. What are we going to do with all that stuff?"

An equally thorny question is where to put people as they wait for what could be months before it's safe to begin rebuilding.

Evacuation stressed

Brown said his staff has tried to identify potential sites for tent or trailer towns in areas as close as possible to the city, but keeping everyone satisfied is going to be a problem.

"It's going to be situation-dependent on the ground available after such a catastrophic storm," he said. "The bottom line is that a lot of people are going to be inconvenienced."

For Tullier, going through the recovery exercise reinforces his belief that New Orleans residents must evacuate before such a storm.

"I'm always asked what's my worst nightmare, and I talk about the generations of New Orleanians who have no historical reference in their brain about how bad this will be," Tullier said. "And when I preach the gospel of evacuation, they won't take it seriously.

"Evacuation, that's such a tough decision for our officials to make, so once they make that decision, to have people say, 'Ah, I ain't going to go,' that scares me," he said.