NEW ORLEANS — Search teams pressing to evacuate the living and find the dead after a full week under the high-water sway of Hurricane Katrina found their efforts complicated Monday by the refusal of hundreds of residents to leave the paralyzed city.
President Bush returned Monday for a second tour of the disaster zone, praising emergency workers in Baton Rouge, La., and stressing the work of religious charities during a visit to a church packed with evacuees. Federal officials said relief operations were proceeding apace, but Bush's tour was soured by an ongoing feud with Louisiana's governor over who would manage National Guard troops in the state.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday September 07, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
New Orleans street -- A photo caption on the front page of Tuesday's Section A with coverage of Hurricane Katrina said a rescue boat was on Elysian Fields Avenue. The street was near Elysian Fields, but the rescue team was not on that thoroughfare.
A senior New Orleans police official said Monday that some 10,000 inhabitants remained in the city, hidden inside flooded residences, apartments and housing projects, surviving on foraged scraps and food drops by the military. Searchers have been frustrated by hundreds of holdouts who have refused to leave their homes, fearing possessions will be pillaged, pets will die and their way of life will be erased.
"There are, to our surprise, thousands of people still in the city that we're trying to identify and locate," said Deputy New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley. "We're trying to convince them there's nothing for them here -- no food, no jobs, nothing to let them live the way they're used to."
But there were nascent signs of progress too. The gaping break in the city's 17th Street Canal levee was finally stopped up by metal sheets, tons of earthen fill and a strand of massive 3,000-pound sandbags. Engineers and contractors working on the breach and two other levee ruptures said water levels dropped by as much as a foot Monday in some parts of the city. The next step is "de-watering," the removal of water that is expected to take months.
More than 50,000 anxious evacuees began returning for the first visit to their submerged homes in Jefferson Parish, which borders the city on the west and the south. They waited for hours in cars lined for miles along a clogged highway.
"I was scared to come back," said Mike "Opie" Johnson, 37, who retrieved a pillow-case full of his mother-in-law's jewelry. "I heard there were looters everywhere, but turns out there weren't too many looters in this parish."
