Hope Returning To New Orleans As Cleanup Continues; President Visits

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – More than half of southeastern Louisiana’s water treatment plants were up and running again Monday, and business owners were issued passes into the city to retrieve vital records or equipment as New Orleans continued to stir back to life.

Two weeks after the city got slammed by Hurricane Katrina, traffic was heavy on the only major highway into the city that was still open, and vehicles were backed up for about two miles at a National Guard checkpoint across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.

To prevent looting, authorities required business owners to obtain passes to enter the city’s central business district and take what they needed to run their companies. Among the businessmen allowed back was Terry Cockerham, owner of Service Glass, which installs windows at businesses downtown.

He has been working out of his house because his business was destroyed by looters and flooding. “This is about the most work I’ve ever had,” he said. “We’ll work seven days a week until we get this job finished. I don’t want to get rich. I just want to get everything back right.”

There were also signs of life at businesses elsewhere in the city. In the French Quarter, Nick Ditta was at Mango Mango, the bar he manages on Bourbon Street, searching for time cards. “It’s a mess man. There is no doubt about it,” Ditta said. “But our people are going to get paid. That’s all I’m worried about.”

President Bush got his first up-close look at the destruction in New Orleans on Monday, taking a tour that took him through several flooded neighborhoods. Occasionally, he had to duck to avoid low-hanging electrical wires and branches.

The president denied there was any racial component to the way the government responded to the disaster, disputing assertions that Washington was sluggish because so many of the victims were poor and black. “The storm didn’t discriminate and neither will the recovery effort,” Bush said.

He also rejected suggestions that the nation’s military was stretched too thinly with the war in Iraq to deal with the Gulf Coast devastation. Though 50 percent of New Orleans remained flooded – down from 80 percent during the darkest days – and teams continued to collect hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses, there were clear signs of recovery.

Over the weekend, trash collection resumed, and the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport reopened for cargo traffic. It planned to open to limited passenger service starting Tuesday. A plane carrying equipment to rebuild New Orleans’ mobile phone networks took off from Sweden on Monday after waiting more than a week for a go-ahead from the United States.

The shipment included network equipment donated by the Swedish cell phone giant LM Ericsson. “Each day there’s a little bit of an improvement,” Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, commander of the New Orleans relief efforts, told NBC on Sunday night. “And in the end run, maybe a week, two weeks from now, someone’s going to wake in the morning and have something they didn’t have the day before, and that’s hope.”

State officials said Monday that 16 of southeast Louisiana’s 25 major wastewater treatment plants were up and running again. In the effort to drain the flooded area, 41 of 174 permanent pumps were in operation, and officials expected an increase in temporary pumps within 24 hours.

As of late Sunday, water in many parts of the metropolitan area was going down at least a foot a day, the Army Corps of Engineers said. Once the streets are dry, crews can begin removing debris, checking buildings and other structures for soundness, and restoring utilities.

Military cargo airplanes were set to begin spraying the area on Monday to kill flies and mosquitoes. The standing water from Katrina is expected to worsen Louisiana’s already considerable mosquito problem. Before the storm hit, the state had logged 78 cases of mosquito-borne West Nile virus and four deaths from the disease this year.

Insurance experts doubled to at least $40 billion their estimate of insured losses caused by Katrina – a figure that would make it the world’s costliest hurricane ever. Risk Management Solutions Inc. of Newark, Calif., put the total economic damage at more than $125 billion. In the French Quarter, burnt-orange rubble from terra-cotta roof tiles sat in neat piles for collection along the curb.

Bourbon Street was cleaner than it ever is during Mardi Gras. And Donald Jones, a 57-year-old lifelong resident, said he was no longer armed when walking his street. “The first five days I never went out of my house without my gun. Now I don’t carry it,” Jones said over the weekend. “The only people I meet is military.”

The waters in New Orleans have pulled back far enough to allow for a scenic drive down Esplanade Avenue, past the handsome, columned two-story home where the French artist Edgar Degas once lived to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park. The same can be said for Saint Charles Avenue.

While many homes are deserted and the old green street cars are gone, the beauty of the Greek Revival and Victorian homes, fronted by a canopy of live oaks, overwhelms the sight of debris piled along the road. “I think it’s livable,” said John Lopez, who moved to New Orleans from the New York City area about a year ago.

“If they got running water to all these buildings that are obviously inhabitable, they could get the city cleaned up a lot faster because people would be cleaning up their own blocks and their own neighborhoods.” Lopez and others are among those in the city who survived the hurricane at home, refused the subsequent order to leave and have started to clean up their neighborhoods.

While they are worried about authorities forcing them to evacuate, there so far have been no reports that has happened in New Orleans. Authorities raised Louisiana’s death toll to 197 on Sunday.

Teams pulled an unspecified number of bodies from Memorial Medical Center, a 317-bed hospital in uptown New Orleans that closed more than a week ago after being surrounded by floodwaters.

Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of active-duty troops engaged in hurricane relief, reiterated Sunday the number of dead would be “a heck of a lot lower” than initial projections of perhaps 10,000.

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By BRETT MARTEL Associated Press Writer

Associated Press writers Erin McClam, Mary Foster, Colleen Long, Warren Levinson and Howie Rumberg contributed to this report.

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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