A Rude Return to 'Big Easy'

City Warns Residents Of Possible Hazards

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 16 -- Business owners and residents returning to New Orleans this weekend face an array of potentially dangerous conditions, including polluted drinking water, broken traffic signals, a shortage of hospital beds, an antiquated 911 emergency call system, contaminated soil and virtually no food, according to health, public safety and environmental officials.

Officials acknowledged the deteriorated state of their city in a briefing Friday, and warned that people entering in the next few days would come at their own risk. Nevertheless, they maintained it was important to demonstrate that New Orleans intends to return to its previous vibrant condition.

"Beginning Saturday, we will be on the path of bringing New Orleans back," said Col. Terry Ebbert, director of homeland security for the city. "We feel it's vitally important for this city to stay alive, for commerce to start moving in the right direction."

But state and federal officials, as well as other disaster recovery specialists, voiced concerns that the return of several thousand people immediately, and many more within a week, raised the specter of a second crisis. Public services are scant, and officials will begin to open areas on Monday that were once home to about 180,000 people.

"We're all very nervous about an overwhelming influx of people coming in and the potential health threats that exist," Mike McDaniel, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, said in a briefing Friday. Others detailed concerns about unsafe levels of E. coli bacteria, oil and gas in the sediment left behind as the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina are pumped from the city.

Just three hospitals in the region are operating, and the disaster wiped out Charity Hospital, the only one in the area licensed to handle the most severe cases, known as "Level 1" traumas.

"When you place all those people back in the city without a health care infrastructure, it is a risky proposition," said Peter Deblieux, an emergency physician and the last person to leave Charity after a four-day siege. "We're going to have a second disaster in this city."

As soon as people return to a city with no traffic lights and attempt to make repairs to property, there will be a wave of car accidents, broken bones, severed limbs, heart attacks and dehydration, he warned.

For now, telephone calls to the city's emergency 911 system are routed manually by workers with radios. The city's automated system, which handled more than 2,000 calls a day, was destroyed by the storm.

And if just three inches of rain falls on the Crescent City, flooding will again occur in "so many of the areas we've now emptied and are dry," Ebbert said. Despite Mayor C. Ray Nagin's announcement Thursday, Ebbert would not commit to opening the historic French Quarter by Sept. 26.

Although lights are flickering in parts of downtown and crews are removing downed trees, abandoned cars and rooftops tossed aside by Katrina, most of New Orleans still resembles a city that was abandoned in a hurry and inherited by heavily armed troops in camouflage.

Around the convention center, where more than 20,000 people lived in squalor for several days, traffic lights shone red and green simultaneously Friday. A building nearby was spray-painted: "Raw Sewage Danger."