New Orleans braces for Rita

2005-09-20 07:12

New Orleans - Under pressure from President George W Bush and other top federal officials, the mayor suspended the reopening of large portions of the city on Monday and instead ordered nearly everyone out because of the risk of a new round of flooding from a tropical storm on the way.

"If we are off, I'd rather err on the side of conservatism to make sure we have everyone out," Mayor Ray Nagin said.

The announcement came after repeated warnings from top federal officials - and the president himself - that New Orleans was not safe enough to reopen.

Among other things, federal officials warned that Tropical Storm Rita could breach the city's temporarily patched-up levees and swamp the city all over again.

The news came as the state Health Department raised the death toll from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana by 90 to 736. 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.

The mayor said he had wanted to reopen some of the city's signature neighbourhoods over the coming week in order to reassure the people of New Orleans that "there was a city to come back to."

He said he had strategically selected postal codes that had suffered little or no flooding.

But "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 in a "very weak position."

- AP