Evacuees return to city in need

NEW ORLEANS – Thousands of residents returned Friday to a city that only vaguely resembled the one they had left weeks earlier.

The French Quarter’s usual sounds of laughter, horse-drawn carriages over cobbled streets and rock music blaring from bars were replaced by silence, punctuated with the rumble of military trucks and the hum of generators.

In Uptown, an oak tree that once lined St. Charles Avenue had crashed onto a front porch. Foul smells wafted from discarded refrigerators sitting on medians as residents raked leaves and patched windows.

Those who were just returning vowed to sort through the mess they found – mostly shattered windows, fallen trees, torn roofs, mildew-covered rooms – one day at a time as they resurrected their homes. They just needed time.

Despite the misgivings of state and federal authorities, Mayor C. Ray Nagin threw open the French Quarter and the Uptown section as part of an aggressive plan to get the city back on its feet. Algiers, a neighborhood across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter, reopened to residents on Monday.

Altogether, the neighborhoods account for about one-third of New Orleans’ half-million inhabitants. Most of the reopened areas have electricity, but only Algiers has drinkable water.

Serious hazards remain because of bacteria-laden floodwaters, a lack of clean water and a sewage system that has not been fully repaired. The stench of garbage piled up in some areas was overpowering, and stretches of the city are pitch-black at night.

On Friday, Nagin named a 17-member commission of local business and civic leaders to produce a reconstruction plan within 90 days.

“I know there’s this great debate about whether New Orleans should be rebuilt,” Nagin told a press conference, flanked by members of his “Bring Back New Orleans” commission. “I know there’s some spin doctors out there basically saying that, `You know New Orleans’ and Louisiana’s colorful past – we shouldn’t trust that the money will be well spent. Well, we have behind me people … of the highest integrity.”

The advisory commission, a diverse panel including blacks, whites, Hispanics and religious and educational leaders, hopes to guide the rebuilding of a city that, before Hurricane Katrina struck, was starkly divided along racial and economic lines and was home to some of the worst slums, and the worst schools, in the nation.

But one of the first tasks confronting the panel, which includes musician Wynton Marsalis, may be deciding how much of the city is even habitable.

More than 80 percent of New Orleans was covered by floodwaters after several levees protecting the below-sea-level city burst. Water rose to rooflines in some neighborhoods, including the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward and the better-off Lakeview community. In some areas, experts believe, not a single home may be salvageable.

But the mayor added that officials would not wait to repopulate their city until the levees that protect New Orleans can be rebuilt to withstand another Category 4 or 5 hurricane – a process that will require tens of billions of dollars and many years to complete.

“This is not just about Bourbon Street,” Nagin said, noting that a third of the nation’s oil and natural gas is either drilled, refined or pumped through the region. “This is about the commerce of this country.”

Ginger Hitt, 55, returned to the French Quarter Thursday night to assess her shoe store business and her home of 15 years. On Friday morning, she made herself a cranberry and vodka cocktail and put it in a plastic cup, known locally as a “to-go cup.” Then she went for a stroll to survey the damage.

“It’s not like we have to go to work or do anything,” she said, “so let the good times roll.”

But the silence and the putrid, piling garbage bothered her. If only they could collect the trash, she said.

“The empty streets and the silence are deafening. We are used to the hustle and bustle,” she said. “It’s hard when there’s not work to get to, there’s no job, there’s nothing.”

Hitt stopped in to check on friends at the Ol’ Toone’s Saloon, which had reopened four days earlier.

“It’s getting better each day. Little by little, it’s getting better,” said owner Keith Cloyd, 59, of the Quarter.

Ann Cloyd offered Hitt a refill on her to-go cup.

“This is my finest Cajun crystal, darling. Don’t knock it,” Cloyd, 59, joked about the plastic. “We’re all drinking more,” she said. “You’re worried about your house. You’re worried about your business, and there’s nothing to do.”

A few blocks away in the French Quarter, Melvin Schaefer had just been fired from his job at an air conditioning company. He carried a can of light beer as he surveyed the damage to his home Friday.

“We have nothing to celebrate,” he said. “There’s a lot of false hopes. How do you let people come back when people had 6 feet of water in their houses?”

In Uptown, Keith Cruise, a 34-year-old clinical psychologist, worked to save his church. His home had not been severely hurt by the storm, but the damage to century-old oak trees particularly saddened him.

Heaps of trash filled many corners of Uptown – refrigerators, chairs, carpeting, tree trunks. Some houses still had boarded-up windows.