CNN’s Jeanne Meserve talking with Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room…

BLITZER: Let’s go over to CNN’s Jeanne Meserve. She’s made the move from New Orleans, she’s in Baton Rouge right now.

Jeanne, first of all, tell our viewers what it was like in the immediate hours before you left New Orleans.

JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, one of the cameramen I was with described it as Bangladesh. That’s what it looks like — a major, major catastrophe that’s taking an extraordinary toll, not just in terms of human life, but for the living, they have lost their homes. They can’t get to their jobs — if there are jobs because businesses are destroyed. Businesses cannot rebuild because there’s no infrastructure. It defies comprehension that the United States can look like this.

I want to introduce you to someone if I could. This is Dorian Browder, a resident of New Orleans, who came out on Sunday, has been here in Baton Rouge ever since.

Dorian, you’re upset at the lack of preparation for this, right?

DORIAN BROWDER, BATON ROUGE RESIDENT: Yes, I am. It was overwhelming when I found out that they had not prepared for this catastrophe. We were only able to really contain a 3 Category hurricane and they knew this was a possibility to be a 5 Category. They had many years to prepare for this, the professionals the Corps of Engineers.

Why had not they brainstormed this? Why would they not be prepared? I don’t understand it? What are they doing every day in their offices? That’s their specialty.
MESERVE: We’ve talked a lot about the difficulties that people who remained in the city are having. You came out here; it’s not easy for you either, is it?

BROWDER: Not at all. Right now, we are in dire situations — very dire. The majority of us staying in this hotel — it’s called the Baymont in Baton Rouge — we have ran out of monies, we have no homes to go to. I’m looking and wondering what has happened to my elderly mother. I don’t know. We are at a loss. We have no jobs to go to.

We’re just at a loss. We are devastated. We’re upsetted. We think that things should have been better prepared, from Washington, D.C. — the president — on down to our governor, Kathleen Blanco.

MESERVE: Thank you so much. And good luck.

BROWDER: Thank you.

MESERVE: That’s sort of typical, Wolf, of the kind of reaction you’re getting from people who have left the city or are in the city. I have to tell you, getting out of the city for us was difficult. We had to just sort of improvise our way across the city to get to dry land and then out. We made it, thank goodness. But on the way, it looked like the dust bowl. You’ve seen the pictures of the dust bowl of people piled onto the back of trucks. Moving their lives. That’s what’s happening here. It’s extraordinary to witness — Wolf?

BLITZER: Jeanne, I take it you left the city because it was simply getting much too dangerous?

MESERVE: Yeah, the projections were this morning that the water was going to rise another two feet. We’ve been having an extraordinary difficult time doing our jobs, operating off car batteries. We were afraid we were going to lose our capability to charge them because the cars were going underwater or the water was going to make those in the garage unaccessible to us. We just felt we weren’t going to be able to produce much for the network. And there are health concerns. We still have a cameraman who broke his foot shooting during the hurricane on Monday. He still has not gotten any medical attention. All of us have been in water that, as you’ve heard, is highly contaminated. And frankly, we all wanted to get back to our loved ones.

So, we have come out. Many of us are going to continue to cover this aftermath. This is, I truly believe, Wolf, apart from 9/11, one of the most significant events that has ever hit this country. It’s just astounding.

But Wolf, what I want to say, yeah, we got out. We are lucky. What we went through is nothing next to what the people of New Orleans are going to have to go through in the coming days — but frankly for the coming years. Anybody who tells you this is going to be put to rights in a matter of months simply hasn’t seen the situation — Wolf?

BLITZER: I don’t think the pictures can do justice to what you’ve seen with your own eyes, Jeanne. Take a moment, and just collect your thoughts and describe some of the images that you saw in New Orleans as you were — when you were there and as you were preparing to leave.

MESERVE: People carrying their children, trying to get them to safety. A woman coming down to the police, close to hysteric, saying, My elderly mother is in a building over there — she needs dialysis.

She can’t get dialysis. She is dying. Can you help me? And the police had to say, There is absolutely nothing we can do. They said, We don’t have a precinct house. We don’t have communications. There is absolutely nothing we can do for you. That was amazing to me.

The other thing that struck me was the looting. The police were standing in the middle of the street, and right in front of them, stores were being ransacked. And they didn’t even make an effort to stop it.

I don’t think they could, under the situation. One, they were totally outnumbered. They couldn’t call for any kind of reinforcements. And I think, frankly, the priority now isn’t property. The priority has to be people and people’s lives. The police are there protectively, I think, in case things escalate even further. But they’re powerless, they’re powerless in this situation.

The other thing — we’ve talked a lot about the flooding and the flooding is the biggest story, don’t get me wrong. But to go through the dry areas of the city was also startling. I’ve covered other hurricanes, I’ve seen hurricane destruction. I have stopped and said, oh my gosh, look at that building, we have to get a picture. Today, every building looked like that. There were cars smashed to smithereens. There were buildings that had totally collapsed. It — I have trouble coming up with the words to describe it. Even in the dry areas of the city, things are horrible. It’s going to take a lot of work to get that put to rights.

We did see, as we were coming back, help going in. We did see tree removal trucks, electric trucks. Help is beginning to come in. We even saw — this was a very strong image — Air Force One, or what we believed was Air Force One. A lot of us have covered the White House, and if it wasn’t, I’m shocked. You know more about the president’s schedule than I do, but we believe we saw Air Force One flying over the city as we were leaving. And that was an image to us because we’ve been out of communication, unaware, really, of what’s happening in the outside world, and a sign that you’ve heard. You’ve heard, you’ve listened.

Another thing that sticks with me is what’s going on in the hotels. Our hotel was magnificent, in terms of how they handled the situation.

And today they evacuated all the people in our hotel to another hotel that was dryer. But some of the hotels, I know, just have to be in quite dire straits. They were booked to the hilt. You’ve got people living in very crowded conditions, whole families in rooms. They do not have plumbing of any type. It is going to become a health hazard in the hotels, if those people aren’t given some assistance sometime soon. And I don’t know about the food and water situation in some of those other hotels.

Some of them were right near the water, some of them had a lot of glass. I know at least one of them, one of those that was heavily glassed was fully booked. I don’t know what’s happened to those people. They must be having a difficult time of it, too — Wolf?

BLITZER: I’m going to let you collect your thoughts, Jeanne. But one quick note: two days ago on this program, you described the situation as apocalypse, your words, what you saw. Only in the past hour or so, we heard the mayor of New Orleans — I don’t know if you know this yet — Ray Nagin say that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, he believes, are now dead in New Orleans. You saw this unfold with your very eyes. Give us your quick reaction to what the mayor of New Orleans has just said.

MESERVE: He’s absolutely right. And when I was out there on I-10, looking at those houses flooded to the eves, I believe I said on your show, This is life and death, and it’s going to be a lot more death than life. It’s — I have no doubt that it’s in the thousands. No doubt at all. And there could be, as everyone has been talking, a secondary set of catastrophic events — the disease and the death that that could bring — Wolf?

BLITZER: I think you said Armageddon instead of apocalypse, but what’s the difference at this stage? Jeanne Meserve — we’ll check back with you. Thank you very much.