New Orleans – The Big Easy faced more hard times Saturday as floodwaters continued to rush over levees into the deserted city.
Engineers said reconstruction had been set back by two to three weeks by the glancing blow from Hurricane Rita.
The hastily mended levee system was too weakened by Hurricane Katrina’s pounding a month ago to hold off an unexpectedly strong and early storm surge, said Col. Rich Wagenaar, chief engineer with Task Force Unwater of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Lisa Gabriel Powell, who had just returned with her husband, Ricky, from a Motel 6 managed by a relative in Lake Charles, La., near where Rita’s eye hit early Saturday morning.
Flooding was “8 to 10 feet deep” in some neighborhoods and would keep spreading until emergency repairs could be completed, said Wagenaar.
Water from the second storm was mostly covering areas that had previously been submerged by Katrina, but some houses were flooded for the first time in Plaquemines and Jefferson Parishes south of New Orleans.
Hundreds of people were rescued around the towns of Lafitte and Jean Lafitte after the storm surge of 6 feet or more swamped neighborhoods, police said.
In New Orleans, most residents have not returned after evacuating for Katrina, so the re-flooded houses were almost all uninhabited.
“The good thing is there was no human life in jeopardy,” said New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass.
There was no immediate indication that Rita’s heavy rainfall in the Mississippi River watershed could threaten New Orleans with river flooding.
Among survivors of the storms there was a sense of resignation.
“You can’t let it get you down. There’s nothing you can do about it,” said Megan Wesner, who works at the Camelot Lounge in suburban Metairie.
“This is the price we have to pay for living in this wonderful place,” Walter Maestri, chief of the Jefferson Parish Emergency Operations Center, said in a TV interview.
