New Orleans mayor: Please don’t come home yet

Anxious evacuees across the country clamored to come home Tuesday after Hurricane Gustav largely spared New Orleans and southern Louisiana, but they were cautioned to wait for the restoration of power and other critical services knocked out by the storm.
Officials set up checkpoints around the city and hard-hit neighborhoods and promised the National Guard and state police would stop people not authorized to return. The city didn’t expect to reopen until Thursday at the earliest.
“I can’t get upset, because this is an emergency, you know,” said 88-year-old Malvin A. Cavalier Sr., who was turned away as he tried to return to his home in the city’s Desire neighborhood. “I just have to be calm and try to do the best I can. If I have to sleep in my car again tonight, I have to do it.”
A day after the city’s improved levee system kept the streets dry as a disorganized and weakened Gustav passed overhead, there was quiet pride in a historic evacuation of nearly 2 million people. Only eight deaths were attributed to the storm in the U.S. The toll from Katrina three years ago exceeded 1,600.
“The reasons you’re not seeing dramatic stories of rescue is because we had a successful evacuation,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “The only reason we don’t have more tales of people in grave danger is because everyone heeded ... the instructions to get out of town.”
The focus turned to getting those 2 million people back home. Gov. Bobby Jindal said officials are focused on taking care of the roughly 1,000 critical needs medical patients evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes, while also working with utilities to restore the more than 1.4 million power outages the storm left behind.