New Orleans – After nearly two weeks of crisis, officials and workers here and in other devastated parts of the Gulf Coast began making small but meaningful strides Saturday in restoring services and rebuilding the shattered infrastructure.
About 700 city residents were temporarily allowed to return to their homes Saturday to check their property and to retrieve valuables in largely affluent neighborhoods such as Spanish Fort on the northern edge of the city along Lake Pontchartrain and the Lower Garden District, flush along the crescent the Mississippi River forms around this city.
At City Hall, running water had been restored, and one engineer said he expected the building to have power soon. Workers carted city property records from the basement, saying they would be refrigerated to prevent mold from damaging them.
Health officials revised the death toll to 154, from 118 a few days earlier, but said it would not be the final count.
They said that caution, accuracy and respect were their goals and that they would not work hastily.
“I’m not going to make estimates,” said Melissa Walker, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospital Services. “These are individuals who perished in a storm, and each one is very important.”
But whatever the final number, officials said Friday that their first systematic sweep of the city had found far fewer bodies than expected and that the toll would probably be much less than the 10,000 that some officials had initially feared.
Across the region, efforts to restore basic services continued haltingly.
The Postal Service said it had resumed limited mail service in the three states affected by the storm.
In Mississippi, work began Friday on a temporary road to handle two-way traffic on U.S. 90, which runs along the state’s Gulf Coast and was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
Federal transportation officials said the first phase of that project is to be completed in 90 days. Officials also were set to begin work on the Interstate 10 bridge in Louisiana that connects New Orleans with Slidell. They hoped to have one-lane, two-way traffic flowing within 45 days and two-lane, two-way traffic within 120 days.
When completed, the project will restore road access into New Orleans from the east.
In New Orleans, power was being restored bit by bit to parts of the city, including the central business district. And by the end of the day Saturday, a rail link to New Orleans was expected to be reconnected, the U.S. Department of Transportation said.
Norfolk Southern Railroad has been working to repair a rail bridge across Lake Pontchartrain to reconnect the city by rail from the east for the first time since the storm hit Aug. 29.
One man recruited to help move property records from City Hall said he had evacuated and returned to find work.
“I wanted to see the city and help the city,” said Anthony Condoll, 21.
President Bush plans to make his third trip to the region today and Monday.
WASHINGTON
Katrina’s toll could approach $300 billion
One storm could end up costing almost as much as two wars.
Although estimates of Hurricane Katrina’s staggering toll on the Treasury are imprecise, costs are certain to climb to $200 billion in the coming weeks. The final accounting could approach the more than $300 billion spent in four years to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Analysts inside and outside government agree that the $62 billion that Washington has spent so far was merely the first installment of perhaps an unparalleled sum.
“I cannot put a cost figure on it,” Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday in a visit to the hard-hit states.
The government never has dealt with a disaster of this scale: 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast affected, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and an entire metropolitan area under water.
In 1992, the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in Florida and Louisiana cost $35 billion.
Members of the Louisiana congressional delegation say it could cost $100 billion just in New Orleans.
AUSTIN, Texas
Cheney visits shelters for evacuees in Texas
Vice President Dick Cheney toured Hurricane Katrina shelter operations in Texas’ capital Saturday.
While he was at the Austin Convention Center shelter, about two dozen protesters gathered outside chanting, “Cheney, Cheney, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
Cheney also visited the Texas State Operations Center, where state officials orchestrated the intake of more than 240,000 people last week after floodwaters rose in New Orleans.
At the convention center, where 1,500 evacuees remained, Cheney met briefly with 23-year-old Telisha Diaz, who told him she spent four days at the New Orleans convention center before being brought to Austin a week ago.
“It’s overwhelming that the state of Texas is giving so much, just giving us everything – jobs, food,” Diaz told the vice president, who was surrounded by local officials and congressmen.
Cheney said Diaz’s sentiments of gratitude were echoed by all evacuees he had spoken with.
He brushed off media questions about the federal government’s slow response to hurricane victims in the hours and days after the storm and about the removal of Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown from his command post in Louisiana amid the criticism and questions about his qualifications.
LOUISIANA
State lost much of its oyster, shrimp industry
Hurricane Katrina wiped out about a third of the state’s oyster beds and about 40 percent of its shrimping industry, which provides almost half the nation’s supply.
John Roussel, fisheries expert for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said it would take a year for the shrimp and finfish industries to recover in the storm-damaged coastal areas and at least two years for the oyster beds to become harvestable.
“Preliminary estimates show a possible $1.1 billion loss in retail,” Roussel said Friday at the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. “The majority of product is exported around the country and around the world,” he said, so restaurants and fish markets elsewhere soon could see a shortage.
The financial damage estimate doesn’t include the emotional devastation.
Roussel said fishermen are an independent lot and most have no insurance on the boats, nets and other gear they made themselves, so they won’t be filing claims for their losses.