NEW ORLEANS – Four weeks after Hurricane Katrina emptied this city of its 484,000 people, New Orleans remains a deserted shell, struggling to restore basic services, patch up tattered levees and pump out flood waters as business owners and residents of the Algiers neighborhood prepared to return for a second time today.
Hurricane Rita pushed the New Orleans recovery effort back by about five days, Mayor Ray Nagin said. But he remains determined to resume a re-entry plan that federal officials have questioned as too ambitious given the fragility of the city’s utilities, hospitals and traffic controls.
“We want to bring New Orleans back,” he said, acknowledging the process will begin only with healthy, hardy, adults. “We’re talking about people who are mobile. We’re not asking people to come back who have a lot of kids, a lot of senior citizens. That’s going to be the reality of New Orleans moving forward.”
After evacuating for Rita last week, crews trickled back into New Orleans Sunday to find much of their work had been undone. In the wealthy Garden District, tree removal experts were hauling away limbs and branches from streets that had been cleared. Utility trucks returned to reconnect power in the city’s West Bank and body recovery resumed, although state officials said the Katrina death toll remained at 841.
Most significantly, teams from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers descended on the deep, wide Industrial Canal to repair temporary levees damaged by Rita. It will likely take a week to pump out the Lower Ninth Ward that was submerged for two weeks by Katrina and reflooded by Rita over the weekend. That would be sooner than expected as officials had projected it would take two weeks.
Even with those rapid repairs, the Corps does not expect the city’s levee system to return to pre-Katrina levels until June.
Along the central Louisiana coastline, where Rita’s heavy rains and storm-surge flooding pushed water up to 9 feet in homes and into fields of sugarcane and rice, weary evacuees slowly returned to see the damage. Staring at the ground, shoulders stooped, clearly exhausted, many came back with stories of deer stuck on levees and cows swimming through seawater miles from the Gulf of Mexico.
“All I got now is my kids and my motorhome,” said Tracy Savage, whose house in rural Vermilion Parish was four feet underwater. The 33-year-old diesel technician was able to salvage a toolbox and a few life vests, but not much more. “We’ve never had this much water, we’ve just never seen it.”
An estimated 1,000 people were rescued in Vermilion Parish, said chief sheriff’s deputy Kirk Frith.
Authorities were having trouble keeping residents with boats from entering the parish. “How are you going to stop them from going to their home to check on their dog or something like that?” Frith asked.
In Cameron Parish, just across the state line from Texas and in the path of Rita’s harshest winds east of the eye, fishing communities were reduced to splinters, with concrete slabs the only evidence that homes once stood there. Debris was strewn for miles by water or wind. Holly Beach, a popular vacation and fishing spot, was gone.
In one area, there was a flooded high school football field, its bleachers and goal posts jutting from what had become part of the Gulf of Mexico.
“In Cameron, there’s really hardly anything left. Everything is just obliterated,” said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who has asked the federal government for $34 billion to aid in storm recovery.
Nearly all of the parish’s 9,200 residents evacuated before Rita arrived, leaving behind only a few holdouts.
Back in New Orleans, officials acknowledged a severe financial crunch is affecting teachers, the district attorney’s office, hospital workers and the police. Schools are not expected to reopen before January.
The Orleans Parish district attorney’s office announced it would lay off more than half its “non-essential, nonlegal” staff primarily because the city of New Orleans has been unable to make its quarterly payment to the office.
The city received $102 million in immediate salary assistance, but under federal rules the money may only be used for overtime.
“We don’t know how we’ll pay base salaries,” Nagin said. Police officers were paid Friday but the mayor said it will be difficult to make the next payroll.
After a Sunday briefing with Blanco in Baton Rouge, President Bush said: “I know the people of this state have been through a lot. We ask for God’s blessings on them and their families.”
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