There are hundreds of people from the National Guard here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We're seeing people from all the agencies. They're waiting to deploy.

Their sense is that the condition inside New Orleans is so unstable they don't want to be sending people into harm's way.

Some state officials, though, have been getting into the center of town.

One of them, for example, got in with a bus. He saw one woman who was so desperate she actually handed her 2-month-old baby to another woman and said, "Take my child. I can't get on this bus, but you've got to try to save the child."

The woman promised her she would take care of that baby.

Living like animals

Posted: 1:07 p.m. ET
CNN's Chris Lawrence in New Orleans, Louisiana

It's hard to believe this is New Orleans.

We spent the last few hours at the New Orleans Convention Center. There are thousands of people lying in the street.

We saw mothers holding babies, some of them just three, four and five months old, living in horrible conditions. Diapers littered the ground. Feces were on the ground. Sewage was spilled all around.

These people are being forced to live like animals. When you look at the mothers, your heart just breaks.

Some of the images we have gathered are very, very graphic.

We saw dead bodies. People are dying at the center and there is no one to get them. We saw a grandmother in a wheelchair pushed up to the wall and covered with a sheet. Right next to her was another dead body wrapped in a white sheet.

Right in front of us a man went into a seizure on the ground. No one here has medical training. There is nowhere to evacuate these people to.

People have been sitting there without food and water and waiting. They are asking -- "When are the buses coming? When are they coming to help us?"

We just had to say we don't know.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/09/01/scene.blog/index.html

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes