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Bush tries to stem storm fallout

Claudia Bridgewater wears protective gear as she removes photographs from her flood-damaged house in east New Orleans on Tuesday. Bridgewater and her husband, Alvin, returned from Austin, Texas, where they are staying with their daughter, to find the only thing salvageable after Hurricane Katrina was a handful of photographs. Researchers said on Tuesday that the floodwaters that filled New Orleans were less toxic than expected, but warned that it was still too early to give a clean bill of health on the sediment and sludge the waters left behind. PHOTO: AP

US President George W. Bush pitched in to help with hurricane reconstruction efforts on Tuesday, nearly six weeks after being blasted for the slow federal response to the disaster.

On his eighth visit to the area hit by hurricanes Katrina and Rita last month, Bush, wearing a tool belt, hammered nails into boards for a Habitat for Humanity home in Covington, Louisiana, and visited an elementary school in Mississippi that has just reopened.

"It's a sign that out of the rubble here on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi is a rebuilding," Bush said after shaking hands and chatting with about 50 schoolchildren.

After the sluggish response to Katrina, Bush has repeatedly visited the region to show his concern and make sure it was prepared to deal with the second hurricane, Rita.

But the fallout from Katrina has taken its toll on his popularity. A CBS News poll last Friday found 52 percent of those surveyed did not approve of Bush's handling of the disaster.

"I think we've seen the spirits change. I mean, the storm hit, it was an overwhelming moment for a lot of people. And ... the local people are beginning to realize there's hope, there's a chance to rebuild lives," Bush told NBC's Today Show.

Rebuilding plans

He spent Monday night at a luxury New Orleans hotel and had dinner in the French Quarter with local officials, including New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

"I don't think Washington ought to dictate to New Orleans how to rebuild," Bush said he told them.

"My message to them was, we will support the plan that you develop. The point is, is that it comes from the local folks. And I recognize there's an attitude in Washington that says, we know better than the local people. That's just not the attitude I have."

A poll by the Pew Research Center found that events surrounding the hurricanes remained high in American interest, with 73 percent of the public saying they are following news of the storms' aftermath very closely.

Sixty five percent of Americans also said they were tracking the high price of gasoline, the poll found.

As he has in the past, Bush said if a congressional probe finds the federal government was at fault in the initial response to Katrina, he would accept responsibility.

Bush is also trying to cope with other challenges like the Iraq war and soaring gasoline prices, which have pushed his job approval ratings down to 37 percent, according to the CBS News poll.

Floodwater tests

Meanwhile, tests of the floodwater that filled New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina show lower levels of toxic chemicals than had been feared, researchers reported on Tuesday.

But they added that concern about the sediment remained.

The researchers, from Louisiana State University, found that the water had high levels of bacteria but that concentrations of other contaminants like heavy metals and chemicals from gasoline were no worse than what typically washed down a New Orleans street after a hard rain.

"Our study shed some good news on that," said the lead researcher, John Pardue, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at LSU. "We were expecting to see much higher gasoline concentrations than what we saw."

The results, the first to appear in a scientifically peer-reviewed publication, are on the Web site of the journal Environmental Science and Technology (pubs.acs.org/journals/esthag/).

In a separate but similar finding, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported on Tuesday that tests of fish, water and sediment collected in the Gulf of Mexico two weeks after the hurricane showed little sign of contamination by E. coli, bacteria associated with fecal contamination, or by pesticides and other chemicals.

Toxic gumbo

After the storm and the flood that followed it, widespread fears grew over what many people called a toxic gumbo, a wide array of dangerous substances washing from sewers, gasoline stations, factories, dry cleaners, chemical plants and oil refineries.

Although the new findings seem to ease those concerns, there was wide agreement that it was still too early to issue a clean bill of health.

"Given the enormous amount of floodwater in New Orleans, it would be highly unlikely that any specific toxic chemical would be found in high concentrations due to the dilution factor," Rick Hind, legislative director for the Greenpeace Toxics Campaign, wrote in an e-mail message. "What should now be tested is the mud, silt and groundwater in communities surrounding thousands of suspect facilities such as gas stations, fertilizer storage facilities, refineries and chemical plants."

Pardue of LSU agreed that residents returning to their homes should treat the sediment and sludge from the flooding as potentially hazardous, particularly for microbes that might cause disease.

"I certainly wouldn't take a family back," he said. "There are still a number of unknowns."

The LSU researchers have also tested residues in the sediments. Pardue said those results were not ready.
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