One month after Katrina forced most of the city's half million people to flee, Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen said residents should be allowed to at least check on their properties, as long as they are warned about the risks.

"Sooner or later the people have to come in and be able to have some kind of an assessment of what's happened in their home," said Allen, who had previously urged caution in allowing residents back into the ruined city.

"It's time to let the citizens in and see what the status of their homes are," he said.

Mayor Ray Nagin invited business owners to return Thursday to the least flooded areas of New Orleans, which has been drained of the water except for the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward in the east side.

He said residents of the French Quarter and other downtown neighborhoods could come back Friday, while the remaining residents - except those from the Lower Ninth Ward - could return October 5.

"Come in, inspect your property, if you want to stay, you're free to stay," Nagin said. "We're also allowing people to come in to look and leave, and those areas will be the areas that are flooded."

The Lower Ninth Ward remains "off limits," Allen said.

The neighborhood was flooded after Katrina broke a canal wall and had been nearly drained when a second hurricane, Rita, sent waves over a patched up levee.

Across the Mississippi River from the beleaguered ward, residents of the least affected neighborhood of Algiers, which escaped the floods, have been allowed to return since Monday.

But returnees are being handed fliers warning them they are returning to the city "at your own risk."

Officials have urged the elderly and children to stay clear.

Returning residents "need to be advised, first of all, that schools will not be operating and that there are certain threats to public health they have to keep in mind," Allen said.

"We feel it's a permissive environment for those folks to come in and assess their houses and start putting the pieces of their life back together," he said.

He added that the city had agreed to an evacuation plan which made it "OK to go forward" with the city's resettlement.

Nagin wanted to start repopulating his city last week, but was forced to suspend his program as Hurricane Rita swirled across the Gulf of Mexico.

While Rita mostly spared New Orleans, it devastated the Gulf of Mexico coastline, adding to the ranks of the hundreds of thousands left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

Allen said he had flown over the Louisiana coastline and saw the destruction in the southwest parishes.

"I can tell you the devastation down there is pretty extreme," he said, adding that it reminded him of the destruction caused by Katrina in Mississippi "where these coastal towns have basically, pretty much been wiped off the map."

Rita has left at least 10 dead. Katrina's death toll has risen to 1,132, including 896 people in Louisiana.

Only 340 of the 896 Louisiana bodies have been identified and 32 released to their families, state authorities said.

New Orleans business owners meanwhile are, like so many here, starting over from scratch - or close.

"It is like being a multimillionaire one night, and you go to sleep and when you wake up you are down a couple of million dollars," said Benny Baghi, 39, who owns eight businesses including an antiques shop.

While his store was the least damaged of his enterprises, Naghi said "I used to do a lot of wholesale and the people (who bought), they have lost everything they had."

Naghi and his brother Efi, 31, are Iranian Jews who fled with their parents after the 1979 Iranian revolution. "Katrina is so similar, it wipes everything out," he said.

Down the street, Hammy Halum inspected his two clothing stores, "Mirage" and "Mirage Express."

"Damage? A lot of looting, flooding and Mrs Katrina," he said, estimating that it would cost him "millions of dollars," far beyond his insurance coverage, to reopen before year-end.

A team of men he hired to help clean up was already at work, using a tractor to push mounds of glass, mouldy clothes, belts, shoes and mannequins into trucks waiting to haul the debris away.

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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