Flooding: The city may have escaped a second hurricane disaster but the big clean-up has been set back, Ceci Connolly reports in New Orleans.
Once again, the water was the villain. Not the hurricanes with the friendly sounding names, but the water - rising in Lake Pontchartrain, gushing over makeshift levees, swallowing up small cars, front steps and patches of Interstate 10 - just as it did nearly one month ago.
The city that had finally reached a point that resembled dry was wet again this weekend, the tumultuous winds of Hurricane Rita causing flooding in some 30 per cent of New Orleans. This time there was damage to the wealthier neighbourhoods along the lake - about a foot of water.
But here on the St Claude Avenue Bridge, the entry to the city's impoverished lower ninth ward, the water was back in a horrifying repeat of the pain inflicted by Hurricane Katrina.
"It is just incredible it happened twice," said Police Supt Eddie Compass, standing atop this bridge after a boat tour of the neighbourhood many officers called home. "I'm at a loss for words."
Hurricane Katrina left the city levee system "battered and beaten", in the words of Mayor C Ray Nagin. Although the US army corps of engineers worked frantically over the past three weeks to repair the breaches, the temporary dykes could not withstand Rita's 8-ft tidal surges.
As Rita lumbered toward the Texas-Louisiana border on Friday, the outer reaches of the storm swept away a new layer of gravel, sending water cascading from the industrial canal into the lower ninth.
"The water rose at a level I don't think anyone anticipated," Nagin said. "We thought we were in pretty good shape. Obviously, Mother Nature had a different idea."
High winds over the weekend slowed a new round of repairs until late afternoon when military helicopters began dropping 3,000-lb sandbags into the stricken dykes. About 20 dump trucks also delivered massive rocks to one section of the dyke near the city's shipyard.
But for much of the day, water from the deep, wide shipping channel flowed steadily, turning streets such as Florida Avenue, Jordan Avenue and Tupelo Street into lakes for the second time in a month.
Using landmarks as measuring tools, the consensus on the bridge was that the water levels ranged from 3 feet (fire hydrant height) to 12 feet (second-storey windows). The water stretched from the ninth ward to Arabi, Chalmette and other communities in St Bernard's parish, which was already decimated by Katrina.
The water does not seem to have caused any new deaths, but it did set back the city's recovery effort by about five days, said Nagin. He hopes to allow business people and residents of the dry Algiers neighbourhood to return within a few days.
For the people of New Orleans, the St Claude Avenue Bridge - banged up and under military guard at one end, submerged in muck at the other - is now the demarcation line between salvageable and not.
"Any structure that had significant flooding and sat for two weeks with water is a structure that pretty much won't survive," Nagin said. "Now that they've gone under a second time it's a huge setback."
Though it has been obvious to visitors that little, if any, of the historic lower ninth could be saved, Rita forced even loyal residents to concede.
Earl Brown, an officer for the New Orleans harbour police, thought after Katrina he might be able to repair his house at the intersection of St Maurice and Royal streets.
"Now, no," he said, standing at the water's edge. "This pretty much sealed it; we'll definitely be moving now."
Even without this weekend's reflooding, the subject of water dominates most conversations.
National Guardsmen and Salvation Army volunteers cajole workers to take a free bottle to keep from dehydrating. Hotels are trucking water in or mixing their own chlorine potion to treat it. Guests arriving at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in the French Quarter step into a bleach bath to remove contaminants from their shoes.
Although the city's main water purification plant is operating, numerous breaks in the pipes mean it still is not potable by the time it reaches a tap, New Orleans officials said. The sewer system too is strained.
To his "great delight", the mayor took a shower in the downtown Hyatt Hotel after making do with sponge baths, he announced.
There was some comfort on Saturday that temporary steel plates inserted near two other levees blown open by Katrina were holding. Army Corps engineers detected minimal "seepage" that was to be expected, said spokesman Mitch Frazier. He said engineers were watching Lake Pontchartrain, which had risen four feet above the water levels inside the city's flood walls and levees.
By June, the Corps expects to have the levees rebuilt to pre- Katrina height, said New Orleans homeland security chief Col Terry Ebbert. "I'm not so sure pre- storm levels is where you want it," he mused.