NEW ORLEANS – With Hurricane Rita gone, the mayor picked up where he left off with his plan to reopen New Orleans, inviting people in one largely unscathed neighborhood to come back Monday and “help us rebuild the city.”
A line extended out of a Winn-Dixie supermarket as locals stocked up on ice, milk and other staples in Algiers, the first New Orleans neighborhood officially opened by Mayor Ray Nagin.
Unlike most of the rest of the city, Algiers has electricity and clean water.
The mayor said a curfew would be in place from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. and warned there were limited police and firefighting services and no critical care hospital services.
Nagin also invited business owners in the central business district, the French Quarter and the Uptown section to inspect their property and clean up. But he gave no timetable for reopening those parts of the city to residents.
Electricity has been restored in the central business district, and power was restored Monday in the French Quarter.
In neighboring St. Bernard Parish, so heavily damaged by flooding that many buildings will have to be demolished, officials allowed residents in Monday to see their sodden homes.
Nagin had opened Algiers last week as part of a plan to get the city up and running again quickly, but he was forced to backtrack as Hurricane Rita closed in.
Some already-devastated neighborhoods, including the abandoned 9th Ward, were swamped all over again. The Army Corps of Engineers continued pumping out the 9th Ward on Monday and said it expects to have the water out by the weekend.
Meanwhile, National Guard spokesman Maj. Ed Bush on Monday said some reports of criminal behavior at the evacuee-packed Louisiana Superdome and Convention Center had been exaggerated.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified rapes and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of amplified reports.
Follow-up reporting has now discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Convention Center, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.
Ten bodies were recovered from the Superdome and four from the Convention Center, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health &Hospitals.
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