The breach triggered rapidly rising floodwaters in the city's downtown and prompted at least one hospital to evacuate patients by air.
The death toll was expected to climb from one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in half a century. Fifty of the deaths occurred in one county in Mississippi, CNN confirmed.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin confirmed the breach in a local TV interview. City fire officials said the break was about 200 feet long in the levee surrounding the 17th Street Canal.
"The city of New Orleans is in a state of devastation. We probably have 80 percent of our city underwater. With some sections of our city, the water is as deep as 20 feet."
The state Department of Emergency Preparedness said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was holding a meeting on the breach.
A hospital across from Tulane, Charity Hospital, was evacuating its 90 patients by air, she said. The hospitals are in the city's central business district.
Water at Tulane's hospital had been rising at the rate of a foot an hour, Caraway said, and had reached the top of the first floor.
"It's dumping all the lake water in Orleans Parish," she said. "It's essentially running down Canal Street. We have whitecaps on Canal Street.
"We now are completely surrounded by 6 feet of water and are about to get on the phone with Federal Emergency Management Agency to start talking about evacuation plans," Caraway said.
"The water is rising so fast, I can't even begin to describe how fast it is rising."
She did not know whether any pumps had been turned on to pump the water but said, "They're not going to be able to compete with Lake Pontchartrain."
The storm's survivors face months of displacement.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is preparing to house "at least tens of thousands of victims ... for literally months on end," the agency's director, Michael Brown, said Monday night.
Lakes and rivers were still spilling over levees late Monday, and "it's going to get worse before it gets better," Brown said.
Veteran FEMA staffers who have surveyed the destruction are reporting some of the worst damage they have ever seen, he said.
The American Red Cross said it is launching the largest relief operation in its history.
Blanco said she had ordered state police to block re-entry routes to all but emergency workers. She said preliminary reports indicate Katrina "devastated" parts of at least six parishes in Louisiana.
In Mississippi, streets and homes were flooded as far as 6 miles inland, and the eastbound lanes of Interstate 10 between Gulfport and Biloxi were impassable because of storm debris.
Both states experienced looting.
A crowd of about 50 to 75 people swarmed through a supermarket in New Orleans, taking out shopping carts full of goods before police arrived.
Looting was reported by police in
Gulfport, where the storm surge left downtown streets under 10 feet of water.
Katrina's outer bands spawned tornados in Georgia Monday evening. Three twisters were reported in Georgia, one in central Peach County and two in the northwest counties of Carroll and Paulding. One person in Carroll County was critically injured.
After topping levees in New Orleans, Katrina inundated the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts with a 20-foot storm surge.
In Mobile, Alabama, the storm pushed water from Mobile Bay into downtown, submerging large sections of the city, and officials imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
An oil drilling platform broke away from its moorings and lodged under a bridge that carries U.S. Highway 98 over the Mobile River.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina/
