New Orleans Residents Begin Returning

That is the history of New Orleans

"My daddy's tree stayed up -- I didn't expect that," she said, gesturing at a sweeping live oak. "My daddy planted that oak from an acorn when we moved in, in 1967."

By JULIA SILVERMAN
Associated Press Writer

September 27, 2005, 4:14 AM EDT

NEW ORLEANS -- The on-again, off-again official reopening of New Orleans was back on track as the mayor welcomed residents back to the Algiers neighborhood, where they found a curfew, limited services and no critical care hospital services.

A steady line of cars waited 20 to 25 minutes Monday to get through police checkpoints, said police spokesman Capt. Marlon Defillo. Defillo had no estimate of how many people had returned.

Only scattered handfuls of people even bothered to return to neighboring St. Bernard Parish. They came to salvage what they could from homes where the waters from Hurricane Katrina topped the attics, where mold is blooming on the walls like abstract art and toxic sludge covers the floors. Many said they wouldn't be back, not after the double blow of Katrina and Rita, which reflooded parts of the parish.

"There's just too much devastation," said Dionne Thiel who wept in the middle of her block. "There's no way we could rebuild all this."

Marlene Costanza, 72, climbed in the front window of her shattered home, but could save only a teapot her parents got as a gift for their 50th wedding anniversary, the date embossed in gold.

"My daddy's tree stayed up -- I didn't expect that," she said, gesturing at a sweeping live oak. "My daddy planted that oak from an acorn when we moved in, in 1967."

At a Texaco station in Algiers, owner Mohammed Mehmood found damage both from the storm and from looting. His gas pumps were vandalized, his computers did not work and his ceiling was about to collapse.

"I have immediate problems," he said. "I have no money. They broke and stole everything."

The neighborhood of 57,000 people lies across the Mississippi River from the main part of New Orleans and largely escaped flooding from Hurricane Katrina and Rita. Unlike most of the rest of the city, Algiers has electricity and clean water.

Mayor Ray Nagin also invited business owners in the central business district, the French Quarter and the Uptown section to inspect their property and clean up. But he gave no timetable for reopening those parts of the city to residents.

Nagin, who had to delay his plan to opened Algiers as Rita closed in, said a curfew would be in place from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. and warned there were limited police and firefighting services and no critical care hospital services.

Many residents came home far ahead of his timeline, slipping past security checkpoints. "Because of my connection to this city, I could never just stay away," said Denise Taylor.

Taylor and her husband grew tired of wandering after Katrina, so they loaded their SUV with generators, bottled water and Ramen noodles. On Sunday, they evaded police and moved into the French Quarter building that the family has owned for a century.

Katrina's death toll for Louisiana stood at 841. Police and federal workers planned to complete a second sweep of the city's homes within a couple of days.

"We've searched every place once, so the likelihood of finding a body now is not very good," said group supervisor Richard Deir.

The Army Corps of Engineers continued pumping water from the Ninth Ward back into the Industrial Canal. It expects to have the water out by the weekend, said Mitch Frazier, an Army Corps spokesman.

Also on Monday, the corps began removing temporary barriers from the mouths of two other canals where levees were breached during Hurricane Katrina. The barriers protected the levee repairs from Hurricane Rita's storm surge, but prevented the city from pumping rainwater out into Lake Ponchartrain.

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Associated Press writers Michelle Roberts and Dan Sewell contributed to this story.

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