Power had yet to be restored to more than 900,000 homes and businesses in portions of Louisiana slammed by Gustav on Monday, and utility company crews were feverishly working to repair electric lines.

Jubilant New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin proclaimed that his city should have nearly all electricity restored by the end of the weekend and that residents who fled to safety in an evacuation of two million people from the coast will be brought back starting Friday.

Officials are so optimistic about reviving the area, and so eager to show the region is on the mend, that the New Orleans Saints football team will play a regularly scheduled game in the city's Superdome on Sunday.

"People are going to go to the dome for sure just because they have air conditioning and they can use the bathroom," Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard said.

"People want to vent. People want escapism. The Saints have always been good mental medicine for this region. We need that medicine."

Salvation Army volunteers provided meals outside the closed stadium Thursday to returnees that came home to find power out and most stores still shuttered.

"It's good to have something to eat," a freshly returned evacuee said over a Salvation Army lunch.

Situations were less optimistic in hard-hit areas such as St. James, Terrebonne and LaFourche parishes, where water and sewage systems were damaged.

Returning residents were warned to avoid flushing toilets and to boil water before using it for drinking or cooking.

While New Orleans residents were being urged to return, those who call Terrebonne home were told they can check on properties but not stay.

"As someone who has slept in a hot house every night taking cold showers and shaving in the dark, believe me when I say, you don't want to come back right now," said Terrebonne parish Mayor Vernon Bourgeois.

"You want to look and leave."

As the trickle of returnees became a heavy stream on Thursday, improvised aid stations distributed ice, water, tarps and military field provisions called meals-ready-to-eat (MREs).

At some stations, the lines of people waiting in cars stretched kilometers.

"We are running a lot of people through the queue and they are getting food, water and ice," said Tab Troxler of the St. Charles Parish office of emergency preparedness.

But, he said, stores will have to open soon to serve all the people who are returning.

"The businesses that are open are bustling," Nagin told a radio station.

"So any business person that is still out there, you better get your butts back because you are missing out on making a lot of money."

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal also said the state will lend power generators to businesses without electricity.

In the rush to recovery, people have to deal with vestiges of Gustav even while they warily track new hurricanes lining up in the Atlantic Ocean.

In Plaquemines Parish teams hustled Thursday to patch a private levee breached in Gustav's wake.

"We were lucky," parish President Billy Nungesser said. "The tide shifted and it kind of neutralized. We are going to get it capped today."

Only some 10,000 people are believed to have remained in New Orleans, a city of 300,000, when Gustav slammed the Gulf coast, amid fears of a repeat of the catastrophic flooding that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Nagin allowed residents to begin returning to the city Wednesday, lifting roadblocks more than 12 hours earlier than planned.

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