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NEW ORLEANS - President Bush called on Americans on Monday to conserve fuel and cut nonessential car trips in the wake of two major hurricanes as residents and business owners of this storm-ravaged city trickled into reopened neighborhoods to resume the massive challenge of restarting lives and rebuilding the Big Easy.
Bush also directed federal agencies and departments to cut nonessential travel and urged federal employees to use car pools or mass transit to get to work.
Bush said everyone can ''pitch in'' by ''being better conservers of energy,'' a remarkable shift in policy emphasis for an administration that has placed a premium on expanding supplies of oil even as gas prices spiked in recent months.
''People just need to recognize that the storms have caused disruption,'' Bush said after meeting with officials at the Energy Department.
The Bush administration was assessing the impact of Hurricane Rita, which roared through the Gulf Coast region Saturday and cut a swath through an area that accounts for some 29 percent of the country's domestic output of crude oil production. There were reports, though, that refineries in the hurricane zone came through the storm without significant damage.
Rita came on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, large areas of Louisiana and Mississippi and parts of Alabama.
''The storms have shown how fragile the balance is between supply and demand in America,'' Bush said.
He also said he was still considering the appointment of a ''reconstruction czar'' for the storm-battered Gulf Coast, with reconstruction expected to cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars. ''Now there's going to be a lot of federal involvement because we're going to spend money - wisely, I might add,'' Bush said.