Mayor aims to reopen Big Easy

NEW ORLEANS' mayor has the authority to let residents return to his hurricane-damaged city, but the Coast Guard official in charge of the federal disaster response said yesterday that all the information from health and environmental experts recommends against it.

Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen plans to meet with Mayor Ray Nagin today and develop 'a logical plan to repopulate the city'.

If Allen gets his way, that repopulation won't start today, as the mayor planned, but it will be soon.

"I wouldn't want to attach a time limit to it, but it includes things like making sure there's potable water, making sure there's a 911 system in place, telephone, a means to notify people there is an approaching storm so you can evacuate it with the weakened levee situation," Allen said on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday.

"We can do that, and we can do that fairly soon, but it's very, very soon to try and do that this week."

Nagin didn't appear ready to back down on Saturday as he defended his plan to return up to 180,000 people to the city within a week-and-a-half despite the short supply of drinking water and heavily polluted floodwaters.

"We must offer the people of New Orleans every chance for a sense of closure and the opportunity for a new beginning," he said.

He wants the Algiers, Garden District and French Quarter sections to reopen over the next week-and-a-half, bringing back more than one-third of the city's half-million inhabitants, though city officials have backed off a specific date for reopening the famous French Quarter.

Nagin said his plan was developed in cooperation with the federal government and balances safety concerns and the needs of citizens to begin rebuilding.

But Allen said he had spoken personally with the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the director for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and returning now wouldn't be advised.

A prime public health concern is the tap water, which in most of the city remains unfit for drinking and bathing, he said.

"It's a matter of timing that will allow us to do this safely," Allen said.