Residents return to New Orleans

Pam Lair looks for salvageable items at the Katrina devastated home Lair shared with her husband and three sons yesterday in the Lakeview District of New Orleans. The wall was knocked out by the raging water rushing from the 17th Street Canal when the levee broke during Hurricane Katrina. PHOTO: AFP

"We're moving out of this stinking city," Billy Tassin snarled as he loaded his daughter's belongings into a truck, a day after finding his home fouled with knee-deep mud. "They can finishing destroying it and burning it down without us."

Most areas of the city are clear of bacteria-laden floodwaters, but residents and business owners are coming home to the stench of garbage, undrinkable tap water and a broken sewage system.

Roads are littered with downed branches and broken-down cars that were flooded by Hurricane Katrina a month ago. Stretches of the city are pitch-black at night and homeowners are finding mouldy walls and refrigerators oozing foul-smelling liquid.

Along St. Charles Avenue, its famous streetcars still idled, Maury Strong and her husband were elated to return home and find they had electricity.

"I came back to air conditioning and CNN, so I'm happy. The fridge is on, the beer is cold," she said. "I've been sobbing back in California for two or three weeks. I thought it was going to be much worse."

Despite the misgivings of state and federal authorities, Mayor Ray Nagin opened the French Quarter and the Uptown section as part of an aggressive plan to get the city back on its feet. Algiers, a neighbourhood across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter, reopened to residents on Monday.

Altogether, the neighbourhoods account for about one-third of New Orleans' half-million inhabitants. Most of the reopened areas have electricity, but only Algiers has drinkable water.