New Orleans — This was a city once, of playgrounds, basketball courts, neighborhoods, restaurants, roads and people.

Today it is an enormous, rancid lake of death and destruction. Car roofs stick out of water as deep as 30 feet. Dark rainbows of spilled fuel shine on the putrid surface. The body of a gray-haired man in a maroon shirt floats face-down.

In Orleans Parish on Thursday, some of the city’s most destitute residents waited for rescuers in boats to pluck them off an overpass that once was the intersection of Airline Highway and Pontchartrain Boulevard and take them to safety.

There was Augusta Hagans, whose daughter Ashley, 21, was crying because she thought she would not be able to bring along her dog, Zoe. Hagans’ son Robert, 10, was weeping because he was terrified.

"He is just a very emotional child," Hagans, 43, who is unemployed, said as she hugged Robert on the rain-slicked overpass littered with shopping carts, piles of discarded wet clothes, coolers, stuffed animals and diapers. Then she started weeping herself.

Carlos Fajardo, 42, also wept — in anger.

"I’m leaving all my s — behind: my dog, my house, my everything!" he yelled, thrusting his fists in the air. "You know what? Today is my birthday! What a f — ing birthday I’m having!"

Others told of despair and death and how hours turned into days and no one came to help.

"We were at a women’s crisis center, and the National Guard flew over several times," said Natasha Jones, 29, her eyes wide with shock. "We lit candles, put out a white flag on the roof, and they left us!"

Jones said she swam two miles to reach the overpass — past floating tree trunks and jagged pieces of fallen signs and a dead body pushed by the current against a wall of a building.

"He had his hands like he was praying," she said. "I’m born and raised here, but I don’t want to live here anymore."

 

Sharita Brown, 22, a student from Los Angeles at Xavier University of
Louisiana whose apartment building was surrounded by water, had to swim
through debris and wade for a mile to get to safety. She had been waiting at
the overpass since Tuesday.

"I saw these people pumping this man’s body, and then they couldn’t bring
him back, so they just threw him on the sidewalk. There was blood coming out
of his eyes. He was dead," she recalled, shivering in her wet clothes.

"I’m grateful that they brought us out, but there are just too many
people left there," Brown said.

Thousands of New Orleans residents are still awaiting rescue on rooftops
and bridges, say Louisiana state authorities. Some estimate that hundreds of
people are dead; others put the figure in the thousands. In a frantic call to
National Public Radio, a doctor at the New Orleans’ University Hospital said
that about 200 patients and doctors were stranded at the hospital without food,
water or electricity, raw sewage lapping at their feet. The patients, the
doctor said, were dying.

"It’s nasty, nasty, nasty," said Ray Ayala, 56, a computer technician who
had come from Lafayette, La., two days earlier with two boats and six friends
to try to help.

"There’s garbage, some dead animals, a couple of dead people. One guy was
tied to the house, must have gotten entangled in something. But there’s more.
It gets real gruesome once they’ve been dead a day or two in this heat."

People were stranded in parts of the city too far to get to by boat, said
Jac Culver, 54, a retired mechanic from New Orleans who ferried people to dry
land in his airboat. He had been running the route between Metairie, on the
city’s western outskirts, and the overpass since Wednesday, putting four at a
time into his boat. His house was flooded, and a fallen tree had crashed
through his roof.

By Thursday afternoon, Culver had learned to navigate his boat expertly
past sunken trucks, stumps of broken lampposts and the body of the man in the
maroon shirt. Also on board was U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Reynaldo
Martinez from Georgia, who carried a 9mm handgun to protect the airboat
against looters.

Culver steered past a dilapidated wooden house where a man on the second-
floor balcony  —  now just inches above water  —  sat in a chair, smoking. A
wooden dinghy was tied to the balcony post. At another house, barely above
water, a woman came out onto her balcony to feed bread crumbs to pigeons on
the roof.

"They’re stayers," Culver said. "I’ve offered to take them a couple of
times, but they don’t want to go."

When his boat approached the overpass, weeping refugees came toward the
boat, carrying their driver’s licenses, spelling out their names: Ovi Portillo,
30, and his mother, Nora, who did not speak English; Arnaldo Barrientos, 51;
Son Ngoc Hoang, 68, and his friend Truong Van Nguyen, 66.

"Where are we going here, man?" asked Hoang.

A stranger offered Nora a cell phone so that she could call her family in
Honduras and tell them she was safe.

Carlos Fajardo embraced the Portillos, strangers made close by a disaster.
"I love you! I love you!" he said, weeping. His wife and daughters had
evacuated before the hurricane struck, and he missed them. He did not know
where they were.

Martinez appeared from the other side of the overpass, commanding, in
Spanish, two women carrying infants to get onto a boat.

"You should have seen this," he said, shaking with emotion. The women and
their babies had spent four days on a rooftop of their house without water or
food.

"I got a son of my own," Martinez said. "I can’t stand seeing this."

As boats ferried refugees away, new people came, their clothes soaked,
the water, slimy with gas and rot, slippery inside their soggy shoes.

Fajardo got on a boat. Before he left, he used a stranger’s cell phone to
send a text message to his daughter, Brittany. It said: "Carlos is alive.
Going to Houston."

But the cell phone network was gone, and the message did not go through.

"Is New Orleans pretty much over, or what?" he asked.

E-mail Anna Badkhen at abadkhen@sfchronicle.com.