New Orleans A Lot Less Flooded

Bush Is There; He'll Visit Gulfport, Miss., Later In The Day

(CBS/AP)  All over the nation, and in many parts of the world, the plight of Katrina's evacuees was center stage - literally - over the weekend as the six major networks including CBS, a division of Viacom, and four Viacom-owned cable channels - BET, MTV, VH1 and CMT - held benefit telethons. Another concert is planned for Monday night in Hollywood and other fundraisers are in the works, including one to be held in Mississippi at a date yet to be determined.

In New Orleans Sunday, numerous residents were able to visit their homes for the first time, however briefly, as floodwaters receded and work crews cleared trees, debris and downed telephone poles from major streets.

In some of the places where the floods are gone, something else has been left behind: a brown film covering everything, emitting nauseating fumes, leaving little left to salvage.

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.

Crime, which had surged in the first few days after the floods, is less of a problem now with the military in control and most of the city evacuated, except for a few thousand holdouts.

Donald Jones, a 57-year-old lifelong resident, is no longer armed when walking the street.

"The first five days I never went out of my house without my gun, now I don't carry it," Jones said, starting to laugh. "The only people I meet is military."

Floods have receded enough to allow for a 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.

A bullhorn-wielding volunteer led relief workers in a chorus of "Amazing Grace." "You see the cleaning of the streets. You see the people coming out," said the volunteer with the bullhorn, Norman Flowers. "The people aren't as afraid anymore."

Some holdouts, trying to re-establish pieces of the city's inimitable character, have even found things to laugh about.

Barbara Hoover, who lives in the Faubourg-Marigny neighborhood just down river 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."