September 14, 2005, 10:19 Society

People are returning to Louisiana

Evgenia Malyar , Anastasia Makryashina Louisiana authorities are urging local residents to return to their homes. Together with work teams, they will have to repair destroyed buildings, build new houses and bury dead relatives. US President George W. Bush has already taken responsibility for all this chaos.

Parts of Louisiana parishes hit by Hurricane Katrina are opening up to local residents on Wednesday. As representatives of the administrations of three cities on the outskirts of New Orleans announced, residents of Gretna, Westwego and Lafitte can return to their homes. The travel ban in these cities will be lifted at 5 a.m. local time. Fifteen days after Hurricane Katrina, electricity, water and sewer service were restored, officials said. Only law and order issues may still arise, so local authorities have warned that a strict curfew will remain in place.

“We have a lot of work to do right now,” Westwego Mayor Robert Billiot explained to evacuated residents on WWL radio. “We're going to rebuild our city, so we can't wait for you to come home.”

All three cities open to local residents are in suburban Jefferson County, on the south bank of the Mississippi River, or as locals call it, the West Bank. Unlike the North Shore, where New Orleans is located, this area was not hit very hard. As Reuters reports , on Tuesday several traffic lights were already working on the still deserted streets of Gretna, a gas station was open, and repair trucks, National Guard vehicles and army vehicles were constantly moving along the central city highway. “Very soon we will clear all the rubble,” said the mayor of this town, Ronnie Harris, “in the near future we will provide all residents with a full range of city services.”

The neighboring district of Plaquemines has also opened to the entry of local residents. On Wednesday, local authorities said, people will be able to begin inspecting their homes or what remains of them and join in the restoration efforts. And there will be a lot of rebuilding and rebuilding in Louisiana. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, in New Orleans alone, 160 thousand houses were completely destroyed and cannot be restored.

The state Department of Health has released new data on the dead: according to doctors, there are already 423 hurricane victims in Louisiana. Another 218 people died in Mississippi and 7 people in Florida.

This brings the total number of Katrina victims in the southeastern United States to 648.

At the same time, it gradually becomes clear that many of these victims could have been avoided. For example, as in the case of the death of 34 residents of the St. Rita's nursing home in suburban Baton Rouge. Louisiana Attorney Charles Foti said Tuesday that "these people didn't just die a natural death - they drowned when they should have been evacuated." According to him, the owners of the shelter, Mable and Salvador Mangano, refused the authorities’ offer to provide buses for evacuation, which actually doomed the elderly to death. In this regard, the prosecutor's office has already charged them with murder by negligence. For each old man who dies, the accused faces up to five years in prison.

True, Mangano’s lawyer stated in response that they did not leave anyone to the mercy of fate and, on the contrary, did not know anything about the evacuation and were afraid that the elderly would die if they began to be urgently transported in conditions of complete chaos. The fact that there was chaos was acknowledged by the US President: “Katrina exposed serious problems in our ability to respond at every level of government, and I take responsibility for the federal government’s failure to do its job properly.” said Bush at a joint news conference with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.