SIGNIFICANT parts of New Orleans, one of America’s most cherished and historic cities, may be beyond repair, officials conceded yesterday — and it will be months before it is even habitable again.

Health and construction experts said that the scale of devastation, caused particularly by the toxic floodwater engulfing the city, was unprecedented in US history.

“There are people in New Orleans who will not be able to get back to their homes for months, if ever,” said Michael Brown, who is overseeing the federal relief effort for President Bush. Rebuilding the city “will be a Herculean undertaking”, he added.

“Tens of thousands of homes and businesses are beyond repair,” President Bush said. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana state senator, said: “There are places that are no longer there.”

Rebuilding cannot begin before the city has been pumped dry, which will take at least a month, the US Army Corps of Engineers said. Then the drinking-water system will have to be flushed through with chlorinated water, a job that will take several more weeks.

Crucial to a functioning sewage system and drinking water supply will be the restoration of electricity, a job beset with potential problems. Entergy, the city’s electricity company, said that it will be many months before supply is restored.

Randy Helmick, of Entergy, said that power cannot be restored to New Orleans until every house has been inspected for wire damage “to ensure we are not going to create a problem of re-energising. It’s going to be a huge, huge task.”

The controls on dozens of the city’s transformers are submerged and may be beyond repair. Electricians will have to watch for snakes and animals in the water, and protect minor cuts from turning septic in the toxic environment.

Even when the city has been pumped dry, the toxic waste left behind may render much of it uninhabitable for many more months. The floodwater still engulfing New Orleans is filled with industrial and human waste, and the bodies of dead people and animals.

“This is the worst case,” Hugh Kaufman, a senior analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, told The Washington Post. “There is not enough money in the gross national product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area.”

He said that the recovery of New Orleans may prove illusory because nothing on this scale had ever confronted him or other experts.

“You have dead bodies that are going to start to decompose, along with the material that was in industrial and household discharge, sewage, gasoline and waste oil. You have got a witch’s brew of contaminated water,” he said.

He said it was “an absolute catastrophic situation” that will take years to abate.

Meanwhile, America faced the question of what to do with the city’s 450,000 inhabitants, reduced to refugee status for months. Displaced school-age children will be admitted to Texan schools, said Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas.

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