New Orleans – With Tropical Storm Rita bearing down on the Gulf of Mexico and growing political pressure from federal leaders, Mayor C. Ray Nagin said Monday that New Orleans residents could not return home after all and that anyone already in the city should evacuate.
Nagin had been allowing business owners to return over the weekend, and on Monday, residents of one dry neighborhood were to return to their homes. But Nagin reversed himself and ordered another mandatory evacuation just hours after President Bush questioned whether the city was safe enough for residents to return.
“We are suspending all re-entry into the city of New Orleans as of this moment,” Nagin said Monday afternoon. He said he backed away from his earlier decision to let residents return because of fresh fears about Rita, which forecasters said could become a hurricane by today.
“I’d rather err on the side of conservatism to make sure we have everyone out,” Nagin said.
The city’s levees, overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina, “are still in very weak condition,” and many of the pumps that are supposed to push floodwaters back into Lake Pontchartrain are not yet operating, Nagin said. If Rita were to dump 9 inches of rain on New Orleans, the result would be “3 to 4 feet of flooding in most parts of the city,” he said.
Current weather projections indicate that Rita, which was threatening Key West, Fla., on Monday night, could roar across the Gulf of Mexico and strike Louisiana by the weekend. If, as some suggest, New Orleans is on the “eastern side of the storm, we take the brunt of it,” Nagin said.
As New Orleans residents faced the grim prospect of an even slower recovery, state officials put the still-rising Katrina death toll at 736 in Louisiana and the overall death toll at 973.
Bush administration officials and Nagin have sparred over the mayor’s push to demonstrate that New Orleans will soon be back in business.
On Thursday, Nagin laid out a plan to permit up to 182,000 residents to return over 10 days.
Vice Adm. Thad Allen, the Coast Guard chief of staff tapped by Bush to lead the federal Katrina response, called that move “extremely problematic.” Allen said it was dangerous to invite tens of thousands back into a city with little clean water, a severely compromised sewer system, a manual 911 emergency-call system and few hospitals or traffic lights.
Nagin, interviewed over the weekend, questioned Allen: “Since I have been away a day or two, maybe he’s the new crowned federal mayor of New Orleans.”
That prompted Bush to reinforce Allen’s message, telling reporters he was taking the unusual step of commenting to be certain the mayor got the message. “We have made our position loud and clear,” he said Monday.
Initially criticized for failing to move many of the city’s impoverished black residents out the weekend before Katrina struck, Nagin promised a more aggressive approach to the evacuations set to begin Wednesday.
Although Nagin said he would turn to soldiers and the National Guard to help the city’s depleted Police Department enforce the new evacuation order, a Pentagon official said that is not the role of the military.
Throughout the day Monday, there were pockets of activity in Algiers, the neighborhood across the Mississippi River where residents were officially permitted to return. Even before Nagin’s announcement, most residents said they had no intention of staying.
“I just came to clean up, salvage as much as I can,” said Ramsey Washington, who drove in from his temporary home in Houston. “It’s not livable. They got no jobs. No banks are open.”
