US President George W. Bush will tour the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast region tomorrow and has asked his father, former President George Bush, and former President Bill Clinton to lead a private fund-raising campaign for victims.
"This is an agonising time for the people of the Gulf Coast," Mr Bush said tonight as he stood with the two former presidents in the White House. He urged Americans to be prudent in their consumption of energy, but called the hurricane a "temporary disruption" to petrol supplies.
The president will fly to Mobile, Alabama then survey the Alabama and Mississippi coast by helicopter before visiting some sites on the ground in Mississippi. He then plans to go to New Orleans for an aerial tour.
His administration declared a public health emergency amid concern about outbreaks of disease and began working with Congress on emergency legislation to assist recovery efforts from the disaster.
"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting, or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving, or insurance fraud," Mr Bush said in an interview on ABC television.
"If people need water and food, we're going to do everything we can to get them water and food. But it's very important for the citizens in all affected areas to take personal responsibility and assume kind of a civic sense of responsibility so the situation doesn't get out of hand, so people don't exploit the vulnerable," Mr Bush said.
"We are dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation's history. This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years," Mr Bush said.
He said had New Orleans suffered more damage than New York did in the September 11th attacks and promised a government recovery effort of unprecedented scale.
The storm was having a national impact as gasoline prices soared; the hurricane cut through a region responsible for about a quarter of the nation's oil and gas output.
The administration said it would release oil from the nation's strategic reserves to offset losses in the Gulf of Mexico, where the storm had shut down production.
The US Coast Guard reported at least 20 oil rigs or platforms missing in the Gulf of Mexico, either sunk or adrift, and officials estimated 95 per cent of regional oil and natural gas production shut down.
Several crude pipelines on the Gulf Coast remained out of service due to power outages, damage and flooding.
Earlier, Mr Bush called on looters plundering stores in New Orleans and elsewhere to be treated with "zero tolerance".