Residents glad for publicity from visit

The city's levee system contains dozens of breaches, experts said.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, flew into New Orleans on Friday for a brief glimpse of the ravaged city and a chance to meet a few of the hundreds of thousands of residents whose lives were turned upside-down by Hurricane Katrina.
After an airport ceremony to greet their flight from Washington, the couple went to the impoverished lower Ninth Ward, which was all but obliterated when water breached one of the levees that protected the city.
Standing atop a patched 20-foot levee, they shook their heads in disbelief at the destruction: splintered homes, chunks of concrete, overturned cars. The couple also met residents and rescue workers.
Tommy and Gloria Jones, who lost their house in the disaster, presented Charles and Camilla with a gift of a Mardi Gras doll and a picture frame.
Later, at a stop in the French Quarter, a woman presented Charles with a baseball hat emblazoned with "Bring New Orleans back." Another gave him a string of Mardi Gras beads, which he wore over his blue suit.
Despite the inconvenience the visit caused to the recovering city, some residents said it was worthwhile.
Reaction
Mary Prinz, 66, said she had thanked Charles "for coming and giving us some publicity. We need people to come down here and see how bad it is. Maybe the senators and congressmen from up north will come down now that he's led the way."
Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, also were to meet children and parents at the Cathedral Academy in the city's French Quarter -- the first school in the area to reopen after the storm -- before flying on to San Francisco later Friday.
The tightly choreographed visit was scheduled to last barely two hours. But vice principal Peggy LeBlanc, whose flood-destroyed school was merged with Cathedral after the storm, said it was still significant.
"For people who have lost everything, something like this means a lot," she said.
"My impression is it's very important for the prince that this be centered on the children, and that this is a humanitarian act," she added.
More than 1,300 people died across five Gulf states when Katrina hit in late August, the vast majority of them in Louisiana. Eighty percent of New Orleans was inundated by floodwaters.
Bad condition
Engineering experts say that despite extensive repairs, dozens of breaches remain in the city's levee system more than two months later. Sen. Susan Collins, chairwoman of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee, warned this week that the repairs might be insufficient to protect residents if another storm should strike this season.
On Thursday, Charles said he and Camilla were "utterly horrified to see the terrible scenes of destruction wrought by the hurricane across New Orleans and the surrounding area."
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