New Orleans Shows Modest Signs of Life

The steady ebb of floodwaters allowed cleanup crews to tackle mountains of debris and press ahead with recovery efforts Sunday, while President Bush flew to the hobbled Crescent City to review a mounting federal relief effort still mired in conflict.

The president arrived Sunday afternoon at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which resumed cargo flights after two weeks of curtailed air service. He was met by New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin; Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, the new point man for the federal relief effort; and Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, who commands military troops mobilized along the portion of the Gulf Coast struck by Hurricane Katrina. Bush is to take his first tour of the city today by military convoy and then travel to Gulfport, Miss.

Allen, who replaced besieged Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown as the man in charge of hurricane aid, said on “Fox News Sunday” that “things are working wonderfully here on the ground.” But he acknowledged in an ABC interview that he was “finding a lot of frustration, and it’s a lot easier to deal with frustration than with anger.”

New controversy flared over the pace of FEMA’s efforts to provide housing to some of the 1 million people in the region displaced by the hurricane. Louisiana emergency officials charged Sunday that temporary housing promised by FEMA for 58,000 displaced residents had yet to materialize. FEMA officials denied there was a problem, insisting that 1,000 housing units were already on the way.

Nagin questioned FEMA’s motives, criticizing the agency for its plans to build a temporary tent city for thousands of New Orleans evacuees deep in rural Louisiana. “For the most part,” Nagin told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “that would be a huge mistake because [flood victims] are getting much better care -- hospital care, housing care, support” in Texas.

Almost two weeks after New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the city’s downtown displayed the first frail pulses of a city on the mend. Portable generators droned and air drills whined as work crews swarmed through the French Quarter, corralling mounds of street trash and starting repairs on hotels flayed open by Katrina’s 140 mph winds.

There were glimpses of normalcy, too, in the suburbs. In Belle Chasse, La., a milelong column of cars brought thousands of evacuees back to Plaquemines Parish -- the first state residents allowed to return to their homes permanently. Many who returned to the parish discovered their homes barely damaged and plunged into old rites, firing up lawn mowers and leaf blowers.

After 13 days underwater, New Orleans’ wastewater treatment plant was expected to reopen today. And federal public safety officials said that a military C-130 cargo plane was to begin spraying clouds of insecticide across the city Sunday to kill a growing population of disease-bearing mosquitoes. Authorities said the aerial spraying would not pose a health threat to emergency workers and the city’s remaining population.

On Louisiana Superdome ramps that were used as teeming outdoor campgrounds last week by thousands of hurricane survivors, mechanical street-sweepers were carving broad pathways through garbage. Beeping backhoes tore into crumbled Sheetrock outside the old Hotel Chateau Dupre, where two workmen argued about the city’s future as they trudged up four flights of stairs to repair waterlogged walls.

“Betcha a lot of people aren’t coming back,” taunted Marvin Bell, 40.

“It doesn’t matter,” replied Pedro Palma, 63. “The people they need are tourists, and they’re gonna come back.”

But the bustling signs of renewed life downtown were deceptive, the false front of a still-shattered metropolis. Just blocks away, the staccato of construction crews faded, replaced by the hush of ghost neighborhoods where floodwaters lapped and screen doors creaked in the breeze.

On Elysian Fields Avenue, not far from Interstate 10 north of the city center, abandoned houses bore telltale marks left behind by troops prowling for residents reluctant to leave and corpses. A row of cars newly liberated by retreating floodwater were caked in grime.

Along one row of water-marked clapboard houses, “9/11” was scrawled on door after door, an indicator that troops had visited earlier on Sunday -- the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks -- and found no one home.

City officials have held off on plans to forcibly evacuate an estimated 5,000 residents, but soldiers and emergency volunteers still prowled downtown and remote neighborhoods on Sunday, searching for the dead while still trying to persuade holdouts to leave.

Although the city remained under mandatory evacuation orders, Capt. Marlon Defillo, a New Orleans police spokesman said, “we will not force anyone out of their homes.”

In the French Quarter, Joe Salazar, one of those refusing to leave, joined a horde of volunteer sanitation workers, scraping away at rubble-heaped cobblestone streets with brooms and shovels. “We have no reason to leave. We’re not in any danger,” Salazar said. By day’s end, he pointed proudly to piles of neatly tied bags, waiting for trash trucks that began running again for the first time in two weeks. “All this was done by people like us.”

Search teams of police and military troops were the only ones moving in the city’s emptied neighborhoods. On newly dried city blocks, soldiers kicked in doors of vacant houses, searching for the dead and trying to persuade stragglers to evacuate.

“Oh, it’s bad in there,” said Oklahoma National Guardsman Bobby Cunningham as he emerged from a house reeking with the stench of 2-week-old refuse. “You’re out of air anyway from kicking the door down, and then that smell hits you.”

In remote flooded stretches, troops patrolling in airboats and amphibious vehicles scanned for signs of urban life. Los Angeles firefighters navigating a boat near the 17th Street Canal levee, which was breached but has been repaired, dropped off food and water for some holdouts. The crew returned later with two men who agreed to evacuate, said Jack Wise, a battalion chief with the Los Angeles Fire Department.

The search team found several corpses in Lakeview, not far from Lake Pontchartrain. Another firefighter said the crews have encountered “a couple hundred” corpses across the city since arriving in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck. Firefighters have marked their positions on global positioning devices and tethered bodies to trees, signs and fences so they would be found by mortuary teams recovering the dead.

In the town of Chalmette, La., across the river from New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish, some officials feared the massive cleanup effort would result in the discovery of a high number of corpses. Sixty-seven bodies have already been removed and “we haven’t really started searching the attics,” said Dr. Paul Verrette, medical director for St. Bernard Parish’s office of emergency preparedness. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

But Verrette, a former parish coroner, holds out hope that the death count will be lower than expected. “With the initial accounts that came out of the number of people we saw on top of houses, we assumed there was an equal number that didn’t make it up,” Verrette said. “As it turns out, they were more resourceful than we gave them credit for. The survival instinct is strong.”

Honore, the top federal military official in New Orleans, said Sunday that Katrina’s death count in New Orleans would be substantially lower than the 10,000 estimated in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Honore said databases were being compiled after a methodic search of the city’s houses last week and he expected firmer numbers within three days.

“I think it’s going to be a lower number, much lower than the 10,000,” Honore told CNN’s “Late Edition.” “That’s a number we’ll be very happy to be wrong about.” As of late Sunday, Katrina’s death toll in Louisiana was at 197; Mississippi’s was 214.

Honore and Allen said that all branches of government were finally working together effectively and that a measure of stability was returning to the devastated region. “I’m enabled to make decisions down here. I feel empowered,” Allen said.

But FEMA’s performance drew new fire Sunday from Louisiana officials unhappy with the pace of temporary housing promised by the agency. Col. Jeff Smith, a National Guardsman who is deputy director for Louisiana’s Office of Emergency Preparedness, said FEMA was moving too slowly, idling evacuees in isolated shelters far from extended families and friends.

“We do not feel the process is moving fast enough,” Smith said. “There needs to be trailers rolling and things happening,” he said. “We asked them to start thinking outside the box.”

Louisiana is sheltering about 58,100 evacuees in nearly 300 shelters. Smith said the state had hoped to house evacuees in apartments or trailers by now. “Our hope is to get people in something more solid than a tent,” he said. And Nagin and other officials questioned FEMA’s intentions to house evacuees in tents in an isolated stretch of central Louisiana.

David Passey, a FEMA spokesman for the recovery effort, defended the agency’s work. He said 10 families moved into trailers Sunday in Patterson, La., in St. Mary’s Parish, and added that 1,000 manufactured homes were on the way.

Passey said that there was no timeline to evacuate shelters housing displaced Louisianans, and that FEMA housing sites had to have acceptable electric, water and wastewater service before families could move in. Passey said FEMA does own housing units, adding that the agency might have to procure more because of the scale of the disaster.

Federal officials had better news to report on the steady retreat of floodwaters. A day after Army Corps of Engineers officials said the city could be pumped dry within 37 days instead of their original estimate of 80 days, federal and state water officials said flood levels were dropping by as much as a foot a day in some areas.

Mark Lambert, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Transportation, said pumps were draining the city at a rate of 5,276,093 gallons of water a minute. The Army Corps cautioned that the drainage effort “will remove most, but not all the water. There will be some isolated pockets of water,” the agency reported, but it will not affect “restoration of critical services.”

In Chalmette, the water had receded so dramatically that boats were beached everywhere, including on the tops of houses. A 24-foot aluminum flatboat sat halfway up the courthouse steps, where it was removed by forklift.

Concerned about swarms of mosquitoes and flies breeding as the floodwaters dry, authorities said they would begin aerial spraying of standing water to prevent West Nile fever and other insect-borne illnesses. Spraying would also be conducted elsewhere in the southern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama flood zones, said FEMA and U.S. Public Health Service officials.

An Air Force reserve C-130 aircraft will spray naled, an insecticide also known as Dibrom, across the city to kill all mosquitoes, flies and bees. Spraying will continue for at least six weeks, starting on the east bank of Orleans Parish and moving to other surrounding parishes.

Naled is commonly sprayed by airplanes and trucks to kill mosquitos in Louisiana. It poses a “small, small potential risk” for humans who come in contact with the chemical, said Rear Adm. Craig Vanderwagen, Emergency Response Team commander for the U.S. Public Health Service, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The insecticide can cause eye irritation, and its effects on the population still inside New Orleans will be monitored, officials said.

Riccardi and Barry reported from New Orleans, and Powers from Baton Rouge, La. Times staff writers David Zucchino in New Orleans, Greg Miller in Belle Chasse, La., and Peter Gosselin and Stephen Braun in Washington also contributed.