Evacuees for Hurricane Gustav came home to New Orleans even if the electricity wasn’t available yet. Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered an immediate lifting of barriers blocking the residents’ entry on Wednesday morning. Nagin said that he didn’t agree for the residents to return yet if the city is still out of power.

The citizens who managed to enter their city on Wednesday afternoon returned to their dank homes on the empty streets destroyed by the hurricane as the city was still in dark at night, because of the lack of electric power.

The officials didn’t want to give any reason or response on where the electricity would be restored. Still, the citizens said that they had no choice but to return to their homes, as the staying at a hotel cost them too much.

Trevor Chase, a waiter at the Creole restaurant Dooky Chase, said that “it was just expensive, this whole hotel deal. We’d rather be without power.” The residents said that they had slept inside their cars as many of the  modest means in this poor city said they had run out of money to sustain a prolonged evacuation.

Even if the return was to be on Thursday, Nagin didn’t respond to the request for an interview on Wednesday. Still, during a conference on Tuesday night, the mayor said that he didn’t like the idea that the residents would come back while the city is out of electricity. “This is not something I’m excited about,” he said.

Other 18,000 residents who have a low income have slept inside buses or trains during the evacuation, but they’re expected to return to their homes probably this weekend.  80,000 other people remained in shelters in Louisiana and the states near it. Two million people have left their homes since Gustav passed through the Gulf Coast.