Vice Admiral Thad Allen said districts still lacked potable water and reliable power and there were high levels of the diarrhoea bacteria E. coli in the environment.

Allen said he would reaffirm fears also shared by government health and environment in a meeting with Mayor Ray Nagin on Monday.

"Our collective counsel is for him to slow down and take this at a more moderate pace," Allen said on Fox Television. He added that he would give a "frank, unvarnished assessment" to the mayor.

Hundreds of people died in floods after the hurricane hit the city and breached protective dams around New Orleans.

Allen said, "Everybody supports the mayor in wanting to get New Orleans started again. In the view of the federal community, which I represent down here, it's more of a matter when you are ready to go in.

"There are significant health and safety issues related to the quality of the potable water. There is no potable water.

"The standing water has high concentrations of E. coli and the levees have been weakened to the point where if you bring a significant amount of people into New Orleans you need to have an evacuation plan and how you're going to do that?

"Those are the things we are talking to the city about, before moving into a larger general population re-entry to the city, those plans need to be locked down."

Business people were allowed back to the city's French Quarter and other central districts this weekend.

But only a tiny trickle of entrepreneurs showed up.

Jewellery stores, antique shops, restaurants and souvenir stores remained boarded up while garbage crews pressed ahead with a massive cleanup, picking rubbish, trees, food and other debris.

"It will take another three weeks to clean up," said Roy Waytowich, managing a crew of people clearing out the freezers of Dominique's, a hotel-restaurant in the French Quarter.

Nagin's plan - unveiled last Thursday in full media glare - is to breathe life back into a city that was turned into a ghost town by Katrina.

People would return on a district-by-district basis to the city's least-hit areas, so that some 180,000 people, out of a pre-storm population of half a million, would be back by the end of the month.

Those returning will cross checkpoints and be handed a two-page information package which lists warnings.

Residents are being advised to bring in all the food and water that they need, the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, said on its website on Sunday.

The only place where residents will be able to drink and bathe from piped water is Algiers, a district lying across the Mississippi River from downtown.

A total of 880 people were killed when Katrina slammed into the Gulf of Mexico coastline of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, according to the latest toll given Sunday.

Around one million people left their homes and around 100,000 are still living in shelters. Tens of thousands of others are staying with relatives or in temporary accommodations.

As for the economic cost, estimates of the final tab remain speculative, with some figures in the region of 200 billion dollars.

President George W. Bush was plunged into one of the worst crises of his presidency by Katrina.

His opinion-poll standing sunk to new lows as voters widely faulting him for failing to help tens of thousands of people trapped in New Orleans as floodwaters rose, food and water supplies ran out and looters took over the streets.

Last Thursday he promised that the city would be rebuilt, and pledged US federal government support to rebuild infrastructure, tax incentives for investors and financial aid to help returnees rebuild their lives.

Bush will visit the Gulf disaster zone on Tuesday, his fourth to the region, the White House said.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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