Bush Tours New Orleans Devastation

As President Bush got his first up-close look at the destruction in New Orleans, signs emerged Monday that hopelessness was beginning to lift two weeks after Hurricane Katrina plowed ashore.

Burnt-orange rubble from terra-cotta tiles, wrenched from roofs and scattered about the French Quarter, wait in neat piles for collection along the curb. Bourbon Street is cleaner than it ever is during Mardi Gras.

CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reports that some residents south of the city were being allowed to return to what's left of their homes.

"I don't want to cry," said Alefitha Black of Plaquemines Parish. "I cried so much in Tennessee" – where she and her family evacuated. "I'm tired. We've just been praying so much to keep the faith. That's all you can do."

With more pumps coming on line, more water is being drained from the city. Plaquemines Parish is expected to be dry by October 18 – 40 days earlier than projected.

After so much misery, any progress is good news. But there's so much damage: 60 percent of New Orleans remains under water.

The grim search for bodies is now in high gear. The abandoned city is a wasteland of debris and abandoned pets.

After viewing New Orleans only by air on his previous two trips, Mr. Bush toured several flooded neighborhoods Monday in a convoy of military trucks.

Mr. Bush denied there was any racial component to people being left behind after the storm, despite assertions by some that the response would have been faster if so many of the victims were not poor and black.

"The storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort," Mr. Bush said. "The rescue efforts were comprehensive. The recovery will be comprehensive."

The president testily replied to a reporter who asked whether he felt let down by federal officials on the ground.

"Look, there will be plenty of time to play the blame game," he said.

"That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to say somebody is at fault. And, look, I want to know. I want to know exactly what went on and how it went on, and we'll continually assess inside my administration."

Mr. Bush also rejected suggestions that the nation's military was stretched too thinly with the war in Iraq to deal with the Gulf Coast devastation. "We've got plenty of troops to do both," he said. "It is preposterous to claim that the engagement in Iraq meant there weren't enough troops."

"We're moving on, we're going to solve these problems," he said.

The president, on a two-day visit to hurricane-affected areas, started the day with a briefing on the federal response effort aboard the 844-foot USS Iwo Jima, a command center for military operations. The slideshow presentation, which covered the latest relief and recovery efforts in three states, was conducted in the ship's ward room by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who replaced embattled FEMA Director Michael Brown as federal hurricane commander last Friday.

Mr. Bush planned to tour the devastated town of Gulfport, Miss., later in the day.

The waters in New Orleans, which once covered 80 percent of the city, have pulled back far enough to allow for a scenic drive down Esplanade Avenue, past the handsome, columned two-story home where French painter Edgar Degas once lived to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park.

The same can be said for Saint Charles Avenue. While many homes are deserted and the old green street cars are gone, the beauty of the Greek Revival and Victorian homes, fronted by a canopy of live oaks, overwhelms the sight of debris piled along the roadway.

"I think it's livable," said John Lopez, who moved to New Orleans from the New York City area about a year ago. "If they got running water to all these buildings that are obviously inhabitable, they could get the city cleaned up a lot faster because people would be cleaning up their own blocks and their own neighborhoods."

Lopez and others are among those in the city who survived the hurricane at home, refused the subsequent order to leave and have started to clean up their neighborhoods. While they are worried about authorities forcing them to evacuate, there so far have been no reports that's happened in New Orleans.

Starting Monday, businesses owners in the central commercial district will be able to get temporary passes into the city so they can retrieve vital records or equipment needed to pay employees or otherwise run their companies, said state police spokesman Johnny Brown.

While there were clear signs of progress, floodwaters do remain in large areas of the city. And even those areas that finally dried out over the weekend were covered in a brown film emitting nauseating fumes, with little left to salvage.

Authorities raised Louisiana's death toll to 197 on Sunday, and recovery of corpses continued. Teams pulled an unspecified number of bodies from Memorial Medical Center, a 317-bed hospital in uptown New Orleans that closed more than a week ago after being surrounded by floodwaters.

Elsewhere, there were nuggets of encouraging news.

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport reopened for cargo traffic Sunday, and planned to open to limited passenger service starting Tuesday.

The city's main wastewater treatment facility was expected to running by Monday, said Sgt. John Zeller, an engineer with the California National Guard.

Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of active-duty troops engaged in hurricane relief, reiterated Sunday the number of dead would be "a heck of a lot lower" than initial projections of perhaps 10,000.

And residents of New Orleans were trying to re-establish pieces of the city's inimitable character. Some even found things to laugh about.

Barbara Hoover, who lives in the Faubourg-Marigny neighborhood just downriver from the French Quarter, said the military's ready-to-eat meals are "just as good, if not better, than the South Beach Diet. They're amazing."

Meanwhile, in the Mississippi coastal city of Biloxi, some fear that Katrina will force historic preservation efforts to take a back seat to the new Biloxi, including the need to get the all-important casino industry, which employs 14,000, back on its feet.

In Biloxi, Katrina demolished everything from the century-old shotgun shacks first populated by fishermen and cannery workers, to the Greek-revival mansions.

"One of the things that's so devastating about this storm is Biloxi was really being restored from the really grand, public historic buildings to the smallest vernacular cottages," said Lolly Barnes, the city's former historic administrator.

Biloxi officials estimate Katrina demolished at least 5,000 homes and buildings -- or 20 percent of the city. They expect that number to grow as building inspectors determine how many buildings that remained standing are no longer structurally sound.