Progress And Problems In New Orleans

Progress rebuilding the Gulf Coast is still overshadowed by the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina, senators said Tuesday, promising more federal help as they viewed broken levees and the shattered homes of victims trying to restart their lives.

Four months after the Aug. 29 storm, lawmakers said they were surprised to see how little progress has been made in places like Gulfport, Miss., where churches were gutted and trees uprooted, and in New Orleans, where piles of boards and rubble sit where homes used to stand.

Senators touring the destruction were decidedly less upbeat than President Bush was five days earlier, when he visited New Orleans for the first time in three months. During that trip, Mr. Bush called progress since August "pretty dramatic," but he was later criticized for visiting the city's wealthier neighborhoods, which escaped the brunt of the damage.

"It's good to say that we've made progress, but also important to say we've got a long way to go," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., on a daylong trip to some of Katrina's hardest-hit areas by members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

"I'm disappointed, coming back four months later, that you don't see more visible progress along the coast," Lieberman said after an aerial tour of Gulfport. "We can't kid ourselves, nor can we look the other way. This is a long-term commitment."

Meanwhile, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin apologized Tuesday for a speech in which he predicted that New Orleans would be a "chocolate" city once more and asserted that "God was mad at America."

"I said some things that were totally inappropriate. ... It shouldn't have happened," Nagin said, explaining he was caught up in the moment as he spoke to mostly black spectators, many of whom are fearful of being shut out of the city's rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.

Congress so far has approved $67 billion for the Gulf Coast, and Mr. Bush has called for an additional $1.5 billion to strengthen New Orleans levees. On Tuesday, none of the lawmakers said how much more federal aid will be needed, or for how much longer the government will have to help rebuilding the area.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chaired the congressional delegation, said she was surprised that more debris has not yet been cleaned up in Gulfport and New Orleans, despite a federal program that pays for all of the removal costs until March.

"When I learned that Mississippi still has 19 million cubic yards of debris to be removed, when we saw the mountains of debris in the (New Orleans) Ninth Ward, it underscores the lack of sufficient progress," Collins said. "And it's not a money problem, so that to me is a major obstacle, and I don't understand why we haven't made more progress."

At a hearing in Gulfport, senators grilled Don Powell, who has been coordinating government rebuilding programs, over whether the federal commitment to the Gulf Coast is enough.

"Hopefully it will be enough," Powell said of the money approved so far. However, he said bureaucratic red tape has hindered many authorities around the region, and acknowledged frustration from local officials trying to get answers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and elsewhere in Washington.

Frustrations continue to rise for Gulfport residents who are waiting for new flood insurance guidelines being drawn up by FEMA, said Mayor Brent Warr, a Republican elected shortly before Katrina hit. Without the guidelines, businesses and residents are reluctant to start rebuilding, he said.

"Things are pretty depressing, but they're still holding out hope for the federal government," Warr said. "Now the federal government needs to come up with some real answers for us quickly."

During Monday's speech for Martin Luther King Day, the holiday memorializing the slain civil rights leader, Nagin, who is black, said that the hurricanes that hit the nation in quick succession were a sign of God's anger toward the United States and toward black communities for their violence and infighting.

He also said New Orleans has to be a mostly black city again because "it's the way God wants it to be."

On Tuesday, Nagin said his comments about God were inappropriate and stemmed from a private conversation he had with a minister earlier. "I need to be more sensitive and more aware of what I'm saying," he said.

The mayor said his speech was really meant to convey that blacks were a vital part of New Orleans' history and culture and should be encouraged to return. "I want everyone to be welcome in New Orleans; black, white, Asian, everybody," he said.

Meanwhile, the resumption of classes at Xavier University in New Orleans served as a form of good news for the city's black community. Xavier, the only historically black Catholic college in the nation, was hardest hit by Katrina, reports CBS News Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.

Still, Smith reports that every single building on campus

Nagin said the other main point he had hoped to make Monday was that when blacks do return, they must work to stamp out the crime and political infighting that have held them back.

New Orleans was more than 65 percent black before Hurricane Katrina. The storm displaced about three-quarters of the city's population. Most of the estimated 125,000 residents who returned are white.

Nagin, a former cable company executive and political novice, was elected in 2002 with about 90 percent of the white vote, according to polls by Loyola University's Institute of Politics.

Nagin received less than half the black vote, Renwick said Tuesday, and the mayor's heaviest criticism since taking office has come from rival political factions in the black community, many of whom say he caters to the interests of white businessmen.

Nagin has been trying harder to gain the trust of black residents, Renwick said.

"But some of the remarks he made Monday will possibly dampen enthusiasm among some whites," Renwick said. "It seemed to be another Nagin-being-Nagin. He has a penchant for just speaking off the cuff and not thinking it through."