New Orleans – The Army Corps of Engineers raced to patch New Orleans’ fractured levee system today and residents were forced to decide yet again whether to stay or go as a new hurricane threatened to flood the city anew.
“First it was come back, then it was go,” said Karen Torre, who returned to her Uptown home today to haul away debris and clean rotted food from her refrigerator before leaving again.
“We’re just trying to do what they tell us and get a few things done in between.” The new threat was Hurricane Rita, which strengthened into a 100-mph Category 2 storm as it barreled past the Florida Keys into the Gulf of Mexico. The storm was projected to cross the gulf and hit Texas by the end of the week, but engineers warned that even a glancing blow to New Orleans and as little as three inches of rain could swamp the city’s levees as early as Thursday.
“The protection is very tenuous at best,” said Dave Wurtzel, the Army Corps official responsible for repairing the 17th Street Canal levee, whose huge breach during Katrina caused the worst of the floods that wrecked the city.
In anticipation of another hurricane, the Corps drove massive metal barrier across the 17th Street Canal bed to prevent a storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain from swamping New Orleans again.
Although engineers have left a large opening in the wall to allow floodwater to continue to be pumped back into the lake, it will have to be closed quickly if Rita or another storm threatens.
“This is what we’re going to have to rely on to protect this canal and this part of the city,” Wurtzel said.
Government engineers and private contractors also worked furiously across New Orleans to repair the damage to the system of pumps, concrete floodwalls, earthen berms and canals that protect the below-sea-level city.
Rita’s threat to the levees already forced Mayor Ray Nagin to suspend the phased reopening of the city and order a new round of evacuations. In some areas where bars, restaurants and shops were opening their doors for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, people were boarding up windows and getting ready to leave town again.
“I’m worried about getting more rain,” Frank Wills said as he packed up to leave his 150-year-old Creole cottage in uptown New Orleans. “The ground’s saturated, and a lot of the storm drains are clogged up with garbage. If we get much at all, I think you’ll see flooding where you never saw it before.” In the French Quarter, 55-year-old Web site designer Jill Sandars still had her bag packed from Katrina, even though she did not evacuate. Weary from three weeks of recovery, she stood ready to flee Rita if she felt New Orleans was truly threatened.
“I don’t have the energy for highs and lows any more,” Sandars said. “I’m just maintaining day-to-day.” Even residents who have already been evacuated once faced the prospect of being uprooted again. At the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, emergency officials arranged to take the 1,000 refugees from the New Orleans area out on buses if Rita tracks north.
“Nobody here even wants to hear the word ‘hurricane’ right now,” said Carlette Ragis, who has not been back to her home on Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, since Katrina and has already enrolled her children, ages 11 and 7, in a Lafayette-area school.
“I’m concerned about them having to move again,” she said.
“I’m concerned about a lot of things. So many things are changing.
We can’t get any normalcy.” The call for another evacuation of New Orleans came after repeated warnings from top federal officials, including President Bush, that the city was not yet safe because of the lack of full electricity, drinkable water and 911 emergency service.
Nagin ordered residents who had slipped back into still-closed parts of the city to leave immediately. He also urged everyone already settled back into Algiers, the only neighborhood now open to returning residents, to be ready to evacuate as early as Wednesday. The city requested 200 buses to assist in an evacuation.
They would start running 48 hours before landfall from the downtown convention center and a stadium in Algiers.
But there appeared to be little effort to enforce Nagin’s new evacuation order today. Maj. Arnold Strong of the Louisiana National Guard said at this point, the National Guard is not planning to go through the neighborhoods to push people to evacuate. “We’ve been doing that for three weeks,” he said.
And some of the 20,000 National Guardsmen patrolling the city were preparing to withdraw or move to higher locations if Rita approaches.
“We want to handle this in an organized way,” Strong said, “so we’re planning for the worst.” President Bush made his fifth trip to the Hurricane Katrina zone today to meet with local business and political leaders in Gulfport, Miss., then went to New Orleans and received a briefing on Hurricane Rita.
Bush was also expected to meet with Nagin amid continuing tensions between the mayor and the federal government’s top official in the city, Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, over who is in charge, and conflicting information on whether people should come or go. At one point this week, Nagin said Allen apparently thought of his himself “the new crowned federal mayor of New Orleans.” Less than 20 percent of New Orleans was under water, down from 80 percent after Katrina hit Aug. 29.
The receding floodwaters allowed search crews to reach more of the city’s devastated neighborhoods, causing the death toll in Louisiana to jump by 90 to 736 as of Monday. The toll across the Gulf Coast was 973.
