Damaged Canals Sealed Off

Federal engineers scrambled to seal two key drainage canals Wednesday amid fears that New Orleans’ levees were so weakened by Katrina that they could be overrun by even a peripheral strike from Hurricane Rita, which appeared to be headed for landfall in Texas this weekend.

Steel barriers closing off two damaged canals were to be in place Wednesday night, the Army Corps of Engineers said. Those canals, at 7th Street and at London Avenue, had the worst levee breaches after Hurricane Katrina and were largely to blame for the city’s flooding.

The barriers -- interlocking 2-foot-wide, inch-thick pilings more than 50 feet tall -- were driven deep into canal beds along the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The barriers are designed to keep another wave of water from rushing into the damaged canals, which usually funnel water from the city into the lake.

The seals will remain until Rita passes and the New Orleans area is deemed safe, officials said. The corps said it also had more than 800 oversized sandbags in hand and 2,500 more on the way.

“Our greatest fear is a lake surge,” corps spokeswoman Susan Jackson said. “If the hurricane maintains its current course, this area will be OK. If it veers ... we’re not sure of the levee capability anymore.”

Many officials in the region said they did not hold out much hope the levees would hold.

In neighboring St. Bernard Parish on Wednesday, Oregon National Guard Maj. Arnold Strong stood near remnants of a levee that Katrina washed away. That breach -- along the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal, which spills into the Intracoastal Waterway and eventually the Mississippi River -- unleashed a 30-foot wall of water in the parish, destroying virtually every structure.

A barge that crashed into the levee was still parked over the living room of a crushed house. Another house had been lifted by the flood and dumped on top of a car.

Nearby was a 900-foot-long temporary barrier of sand and gravel that the corps and National Guard members had spent the last three weeks erecting. Strong said authorities feared the barrier would not hold up to even a modest hit from Rita. As little as 3 inches of rain, he said, could burst the levee again.

“They think Rita will wash the sand away,” Strong said. “They are anticipating the worst here.... The storm doesn’t have to hit here to cause damage.”

Significant rainfall would also pose problems in central New Orleans. Col. Duane Gapinski, who is overseeing the corps’ reconstruction effort, said that although the agency had pumped the city “essentially dry,” the infrastructure of 22 pumping stations was so badly damaged that the city, much of which is below sea level, now has just 40% of its normal pumping capacity.

Even as officials were bracing for the next disaster, they were still keenly focused on the last one.

At the Legislature, one Republican demanded Wednesday that Mayor C. Ray Nagin tell him when residents could return to New Orleans, days after federal officials suggested that the mayor was trying to repopulate too soon.

“We just really want to know when we can start to go home and salvage what we can find in our houses,” said state Rep. Emile “Peppi” Bruneau, who represents some of New Orleans’ most flooded areas, including Lakeview near the southern shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

“People just need to get those pieces of their lives that they can hang on to,” said Bruneau, whose own home he described as unlivable. “I think people ought to be able to go to their houses.”

Nagin acknowledged that the reconstruction effort seemed to be moving in “dog years.” The Democrat has been attacked from all sides as he tries to repopulate the city. He initially proposed letting about 180,000 return by the end of the month. That plan is on hold until Rita passes.

“It’s OK,” he said of local officials’ criticism that he is not moving fast enough. “I fundamentally think that it is our ... duty to try to get as many people as possible into the city of New Orleans so they can at least take a peek.”

But some neighborhoods, the mayor said, are covered with possibly toxic sludge.

He also said that body recovery efforts and even rescue efforts are continuing, pointing out that two officers found a couple in the Mid-City district Tuesday. John Lyons, 72, was alive. His wife, Leola, also 72, had died five days earlier, but her husband had refused to leave her.

In many areas, Nagin said, door-to-door searches for bodies have just begun. Many bodies might be hidden amid storm debris, he added.

“What about the bodies?” Nagin asked Bruneau. “What do you feel comfortable with, Mr. Bruneau? You tell me. There are no easy answers.”

Nagin said repopulation would resume in dry, safe areas as soon as Rita no longer posed a threat. He said returning residents must brace themselves to live in a city with little infrastructure -- few hospital services, a broken sewer system and a water system inoperable in many areas.

“It’s a totally different city,” Nagin said.

Also Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco asked President Bush to establish an independent commission, modeled on the Sept. 11 commission, to investigate the response to Katrina.

The White House has rejected the clamor of what it calls the “blame game.” Congressional Republicans want to lead their own investigation, a plan Democrats have blasted.

Blanco, a conservative Democrat, wrote in a letter to Bush that it was “not only appropriate but essential to initiate a full-scale examination of the preparation for and the response to Hurricane Katrina.”

“The American people deserve the facts,” she wrote. “After all, while this was an event caused by the forces of nature, it certainly exposed America’s vulnerabilities to foreign forces -- and those vulnerabilities must be thoroughly analyzed and corrected.”

Times staff writer Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report from Baton Rouge, La.