New Orleans refugees go back

2005-10-05 21:35

New Orleans - New Orleans residents driven into exile by hurricanes were allowed to return to all but the city's hardest-hit neighbourhood on Wednesday.

Roadblocks were lifted and the curfew extended from sunrise to 20:00 to allow the city's refugees to "look and leave", a reference to checking on what the twin blows of hurricanes Katrina and Rita did to their homes.

Residents were advised to treat returns as if going survival camping, bringing with them bottled water, protective gear, food and sanitising supplies.

The city water was contaminated, the sewage system out of commission and electric service spotty.

Cleaning supplies for residents returning to mold and muck fouled houses were being given out at Red Cross trucks stationed in neighbourhoods.

The care organisation was also providing meals and bottled waters from trucks on city streets.

Residents were not being encouraged to stay in homes in areas where businesses remained boarded up and services scant, but were free to do so.

'Smelt like dead bodies'

Fernando Calix was atop a storm-battered home in the Lake View neighbourhood on Wednesday morning, fixing the roof.

The neighbourhood was among those officially reopened that day, but some property owners and hired clean-up crews went in after displaced residents were allowed into limited portions of the city five days earlier.

"It smelt like dead bodies," Calix said of the odour that greeted him and other workers hired by home owners to go into the restricted area and deal with the mess.

"It was horrendous."

Prior to the storms, Calix managed a restaurant in Lake View. He returned to find the restaurant destroyed.

"The bottles of Grey Goose vodka floated out with the water and the hostess station ended up at a traffic light," Calix said.

After more than a decade in the restaurant industry, he took a job working for those who could afford to pay others to do the dirty job of cleaning up wrecked houses.

'Beyond frustrating'

Police checkpoints remained at bridges crossing the Industrial Canal into the nearly obliterated Lower Ninth Ward neighbourhood.

The last of the flood water had yet to be pumped out of the poor, mostly African-American ward and a barge that swept in through a break in the levee sat atop crushed houses in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

"It's beyond frustrating," the area's councillor, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, told AFP. "It's not right."

Lewis wanted families to be allowed into the Lower Ninth, which was predominantly made up of working-class African Americans.

Some displaced residents from the Lower Ninth have defied roadblocks in recent days to glimpse what it left of their homes and salvage whatever they could.

"I believe we could have affected a comprehensive plan for all our families to have closure in a more timely manner," Lewis said.

"You don't build a house by putting in one nail or door.

"You can do things simultaneously. The entire house must be rebuilt."

- AFP