New Orleans suspends reopening of city
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-20 18:59

Bars, restaurants and shops had just begun showing signs of life when the mayor once again ordered everyone to leave town as a new tropical storm headed toward the Gulf of Mexico, bringing the threat of more flooding.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin listens to a question at a news conference in New Orleans Monday Sept. 19, 2005. The mayor ordered an evacuation for most of the city due to Tropical Storm Rita. [AP]

The call for another evacuation came after repeated warnings from top federal officials — including President Bush himself — that New Orleans was not safe enough to reopen. Federal officials warned that Tropical Storm Rita could breach the city's weakened levees and swamp the city all over again.

Mayor Ray Nagin did not offer any specifics about how he plans to enforce the renewed evacuation order, and some business owners who started selling cleaning supplies and serving po' boys wanted to stay put.

Del Juneau, owner of a Bourbon Street lingerie shop in the once-raucous French Quarter, said it would be premature to order another evacuation based on the storm nearing Florida. "Where are you going to go? What are you going to do?" he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

President Bush was to make his fifth trip to the Hurricane Katrina zone on Tuesday to get an on-the-ground briefing on Rita and to visit a business trying to get back on its feet.

The death toll in Louisiana spiked by 90 to 736 on Monday, as receding floodwaters allowed search and recovery crews to accelerate their probes into the city's decimated neighborhoods. The toll across the Gulf Coast was 973.

The mayor reversed course even as residents began trickling back to the first neighborhood opened as part of Nagin's plan, the lightly damaged Algiers section.

"Now we have conditions that have changed. We have another hurricane that is approaching us," Nagin said. He warned that the city's pumping system was not yet running at full capacity and that the levees were still very weak.

Nagin ordered residents who slipped back into the still-closed parts of the city to leave immediately. He also urged everyone already settled back into Algiers 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.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, in a televised address Monday, urged residents of coastal southwest Louisiana also to make preparations to leave.

"We will pray that Rita will not devastate Louisiana, but today we do not know the answer to that question," Blanco said.

Tropical Storm Rita was headed toward the Florida Keys and was expected to become a hurricane, cross the Gulf of Mexico and reach Texas or Mexico by the weekend. But forecasters said it also could veer toward Louisiana and New Orleans' weakened levees.

"We're watching Tropical Storm Rita's projected path and, depending on its strength and how much rain falls, everything could change," said Col. Duane Gapinski, of the Army Corps of Engineers task force that is draining New Orleans and repairing the levees.

Brig. Gen. Robert Crear said the Corps hopes to have the levees back to being capable of handling a Category 3 storm by June, the start of the next hurricane season.

Under the mayor's original plan, the Garden District, the French Quarter and Uptown were supposed to reopen one ZIP code at a time between Wednesday and next Monday, bringing about 180,000 of New Orleans' half-million inhabitants back.

The dispute over the reopening was just the latest example of the lack of federal-local coordination that has marked the disaster practically from the start.

Nagin saw a quick reopening as a way to get the storm-battered city back in the business of luring tourists. But federal officials warned that such a move could be a few weeks premature, pointing out that much of the area does not yet have full electricity and still has no drinkable water, 911 service or working hospitals.

With the approach of Rita, Bush added his voice, saying he had "deep concern" about the possibility that New Orleans' levees could be breached again.

"The mayor — you know, he's got this dream about having a city up and running, and we share that dream," the president said. "But we also want to be realistic about some of the hurdles and obstacles that we all confront in repopulating New Orleans."

The concerns also were echoed by the top federal official in charge in New Orleans, Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who repeatedly warned that city services may not be able to handle the influx of people.

About 20 percent of the city is still flooded, down from a high of about 80 percent after Katrina, and the water was expected to be pumped out by Sept. 30.

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