New Orleans ? Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina breached levees, flooding the city of New Orleans, Dr. Kelly Longdon, her husband and their three children are heading to Orlando, Fla.

And they’re not coming back.

Meadowcrest Hospital, just outside New Orleans, where Longdon worked, hasn’t reopened. With her husband’s job as an airline pilot and her marketable skills, the couple decided to leave the Big Easy.

“There’s just too many doctors and not enough places to put them,” she said. “We would have stayed. Our house wasn’t really damaged, but after all was said and done, we took a look at where we lived and decided it was just too miserable. The traffic was awful, you can’t always get food, we lost our child care and the schools are closed.”

Retaining professionals like Longdon is just one of the many challenges facing New Orleans as the city begins to rebuild after Katrina caused levees to breach, flooding 80 percent of the city and destroying or severely damaging 65 percent of its housing.

The lights of the central business of district New Orleans are show in this photo taken Friday. The city is in need of businesses and workers to help recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans still has the pillars of the local economy – tourism, shipping, manufacturing, and petroleum and chemicals. The French Quarter, the city’s tourism trademark, and central business district remain largely intact.

But the challenges are daunting.

Municipal revenues have been reduced to barely a trickle, which forced the city to fire 3,000 workers last week. Even the local Catholic archdiocese had to lay off almost 900 employees as the pews sat empty.

Businesses are struggling with a lack of workers, particularly unskilled and low-skilled ones, who were displaced by Katrina and have nowhere to live should they wish to return.

The destruction of the city’s two major hospitals and medical schools and the damage that has closed city schools have led some to fear that the skilled, highly paid professionals who worked there and in related industries may be persuaded to take their skills and families elsewhere.

And with the city council, the mayor and the governor each appointing a commission to study how to rebuild the city, no one vision has yet emerged to lead the way.

The good news, said James Richardson, a Louisiana State University economist, is that Katrina didn’t devastate the underpinnings of New Orleans’ economy.

The Port of New Orleans -the nation’s fifth busiest – escaped major damage, and barge traffic resumed this past week on the Mississippi River. Convention business is bound to bounce back, and Mardi Gras will go on in the French Quarter.

The key to getting back to business is finding workers, business leaders say. And that, they say, means finding a quick fix to the lack of housing.

Temporary housing has been set up in surrounding communities and even as far away as Baton Rouge, the state capital some 90 miles up Interstate 10. But business leaders say that with the price of gasoline hovering near $3 a gallon, they doubt many workers could afford lengthy commutes.