New Orleans – Four weeks after Hurricane Katrina emptied this city of its 470,000 people, New Orleans remains a deserted shell, struggling to restore basic services, patch up tattered levees and pump out floodwaters 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 C. 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 that 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 on Sunday to find much of their work 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 in Louisiana.
Most significant, teams from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers descended on the deep, wide Industrial Canal to repair temporary levees damaged by Rita. Working through the night Saturday, the Corps dropped 200 sandbags – weighing between 3,000 and 7,000 pounds each – into the largest breaks, said spokesman Mitch Frazier. It will likely take a week to pump out the Lower Ninth Ward, which 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 next June.
With nearly two months remaining in hurricane season, “we should be eternally worried until the levee structure has been repaired to pre-Katrina heights,” said Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen.
Allen, named by President Bush to oversee New Orleans’ recovery, publicly chastised Nagin a week ago when the mayor announced an ambitious plan to invite up to 280,000 people back into the city over a week’s time. This time, Nagin is pledging a more gradual approach.
“We will begin the re-entry plan with business owners and residents of Algiers,” he said Saturday. “Then we will stop, assess our progress and move on to the previously targeted ZIP codes.”
