US: At a converted warehouse in the small Louisiana town of St Gabriel, refrigerated trucks roll up every few hours, carrying the dead from New Orleans, 80km (50 miles) away.
The makeshift morgue is sealed off by a two metre high chain-link fence, draped in black plastic sheeting and topped with barbed wire.
A lawsuit on behalf of CNN has forced the federal government to lift a ban on journalists reporting on or photographing the effort to recover the dead. But officials have been told to offer no co-operation to the press and reporters are not allowed to accompany teams recovering bodies in New Orleans.
The authorities justified the ban on showing corpses by arguing that relatives should not see their dead loved ones on television first. But CNN pointed out that broadcasters and newspapers can disguise the features of the dead, accusing the government of seeking to interfere with press freedom.
The ban would have helped to limit the political damage from the most shocking image of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath - bodies floating for days in a great American city. As the recovery operation gains pace, rescue workers report that fewer may have died in the disaster than expected and that the final death toll could be much lower than the 10,000 suggested by New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin.
A police officer in St Gabriel said the number of trucks arriving at the morgue was smaller than most people had feared. "It's on and off. It's not as bad as we thought." he said.
The recovery operation, which is likely to take weeks, is slow and difficult, with teams of soldiers and forensic experts navigating the flooded streets in flat-bottomed boats. They stop at each house, breaking down doors or climbing through windows to get inside, sometimes using cadaver dogs to seek out the dead.
When they finish searching a house, the recovery workers mark it with a cross and, if there is nobody inside, two zeros - no survivors and no dead.
Two weeks after the hurricane came to New Orleans, there is little hope of finding more human survivors but rescue teams are still trying to find pet animals left behind by their owners.
Water is being pumped out of the city more quickly than expected and it should be dry by early October, almost two months earlier than predicted. Water and electricity are returning to parts of the city centre but homeowners are still not allowed to enter the city to inspect the damage to their property. In a sign that, despite rapid progress in pumping the water out, New Orleans will remain uninhabitable for a long time, Mr Nagin revealed yesterday that he has enrolled his children in schools in Dallas, Texas.
In an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the mayor said that he now believed race and class played into the slow official response to the disaster.
""If it's race, fine, let's call a spade a spade, a diamond a diamond. We can never let this happen again. Even if you hate black people and you are in a leadership position, this did not help anybody," he said.
Mr Nagin has faced criticism for failing to evacuate the city earlier but he said yesterday that his biggest mistake was to believe that the state of Louisiana and the federal government would put the necessary resources behind the rescue effort.
He pointed out that he was the only political leader who stayed in the city and visited the Superdome during the terrible days that followed the hurricane.
"I saw stuff that I never thought I would see in my lifetime. People wanting to die. People trying to give me babies and things. It was a helpless, helpless feeling.
"It's unbelievable that this would happen in America," he said.