As the US struggles to restore order in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it seems the poorest citizens of New Orleans are paying the biggest price, writes Denis Staunton in Mississippi
As a born worrier, Richard Friedman always knew his house in New Orleans could disappear one day. But as he left the city last Sunday with his wife, their son and two dogs, he didn't expect to be gone for more than a few days. Now this fastidious, silver-haired, fiftysomething businessman thinks they'll be lucky to return to New Orleans in four months - and he has no idea what has happened to his house.
"People talk about the 'Big One' - which this turned out to be," he says.
Hurricane Katrina has taken lives and wrecked property throughout southern Mississippi and Louisiana, but in New Orleans, where the dead lie floating in the streets, thousands remain stranded without food, water, power or sewerage and armed looters run riot, the disaster could spell the death of one of the world's best-loved cities. As President George W Bush struggles to assert control over the crisis in New Orleans, many Americans are asking why the rescue effort has been so slow and ineffective, why warnings about the city's vulnerability were ignored and why the poorest, black citizens of New Orleans have paid the biggest price.
Along the 290km (180 miles) from Jackson, Mississippi's state capital, down to the gulf coast, Katrina's legacy is everywhere - in uprooted trees, tangled signposts and blown-away billboards. The damage becomes progressively worse as you approach the coastal towns of Biloxi and Gulfport, where entire seafront buildings were swept away.
Almost a week after the hurricane struck, close to a million people in Mississippi and Louisiana remain without electricity and thousands still have no running water. When previous hurricanes hit the coast, many evacuees took refuge in Jackson, but much of that city is still in the dark.
Throughout southern Mississippi, mile-long queues form outside service stations that are still selling petrol and word spreads quickly if a station receives a new tanker delivery.
Nobody talks of anything but the disaster that has happened, how they are coping and how much worse off others are. A local country music radio station has become one long phone-in, with listeners exchanging tips on how to survive and help others out. For many callers, the most important element in their survival kit is religious faith.
"I really don't know how people can get through something like this without God," the presenter says.
Much of southern Mississippi is under curfew as police and the National Guard seek to stamp out looting and keep order among the fraught drivers queuing for petrol for hours at a time. Unrest is spreading, however, as homeless survivors become desperate in their search for food, shelter and an idea of what to do next.
For many, the hurricane took not only their homes but their livelihoods too. A lot of the businesses that employed many low-paid workers along the coast have been wiped out. With no home and no future, most survivors know they have to move elsewhere, but many simply don't have the money to go anywhere.
Most of New Orleans' better-off residents left the city last weekend, crawling along highways for hours and seeking refuge with friends or in hotels. Others, such as the very poor and the disabled, had no such option, with no car of their own and no money for hotels.
To make matters worse, the city's Greyhound Bus station closed on Saturday afternoon, before it was clear how strong the hurricane was likely to be when it came. This left poor citizens with no affordable option for escape, dooming them to the hell that has taken over the city during the past five days.
AT FIRST, THE city appeared to escape Katrina's worst impact, as the hurricane changed course at the last minute and battered the Mississippi coast instead. But it soon became clear that the end of the hurricane was just the start of New Orleans' troubles.
Built on a swamp in the lower Mississippi river, New Orleans is almost surrounded by water and most of the city lies well below sea level. Environmentalists have warned for years that decades of flood control measures and the gulf region's huge oil and gas developments were eroding the coastal wetlands that could offer protection against hurricanes.
Three years ago, the daily New Orleans Times-Picayune warned that the city was becoming more vulnerable every day.
"It's only a matter of time before south Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane," it wrote.
The paper outlined a number of steps the city and its surroundings should take to protect itself against events like Katrina. The report won a number of awards but was comprehensively ignored by the authorities.
By Tuesday evening, when two of the levees that protect the city burst under pressure from the flooding that followed the hurricane, 80 per cent of New Orleans was flooded.
Thousands of people were stranded in attics and on rooftops, and thousands more who had sought refuge at the city's Superbowl sports stadium found themselves in a dark, overcrowded, stinking sea of lawlessness.
Outside, groups of looters - some of them drug addicts desperate for relief from withdrawal symptoms - broke into supermarkets and department stores, many of which stock guns. Armed and very dangerous, they shot at a helicopter as it tried to evacuate sick people from the Superbowl and spent much of Thursday night taking potshots at police officers on the roof of their headquarters.
The police lost control of the city almost immediately, and by the end of the week officers were handing in their badges, giving up hope of restoring order. Other police officers simply ran away.
Throughout the week, Louisiana's governor, Kathleen Blanco, and President Bush promised New Orleans all the help it needed to complete the rescue effort and start rebuilding the city. By Thursday, the city's mayor, Ray Nagin, had lost patience with the politicians, whom he accused of spinning for the cameras instead of saving lives in New Orleans.
"They flew down here one time two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kind of goddamn - excuse my French everybody in America, but I am pissed," he said.
Yesterday, as Congress rushed through a $10 billion (€8 billion) aid package and President Bush flew to the gulf coast to inspect the damage, thousands of National Guard troops were heading to New Orleans with orders to shoot to kill if necessary. Meanwhile, unrest was spreading beyond New Orleans with reports of looting and violence in Baton Rouge and in Jackson.
FOR THOSE LUCKY enough to get out of New Orleans, the next few months will be anxious as they consider if and when they should return.
George Nahas, who runs a shipping company in New Orleans and has taken refuge in Jackson, is impatient to get his office running again. He considered moving its headquarters to Baton Rouge but news of violence there has made him think again. He had hoped to go back to New Orleans next week to find out what has happened to his home but has now decided to stay away. "What would I do there? I couldn't get in anyway but if I could, I couldn't do anything," he says.
Jack Zewe, who trains electricians around the US but lives in New Orleans, believes there is no point in trying to rebuild a life in the city.
"It's gone. It's just gone. We're talking about knocking it down and it's a brand new city in 20 years," he says. Zewe knows four people who have already decided to move away from the city for good and are looking for somewhere else to buy. "They're not even going back to look at their houses. They know the city's just gone," he says.
As many residents are leaving New Orleans and other affected cities, American business is preparing to move in. By Thursday, teams of real estate agents had arrived in Jackson and were preparing to head south to snap up hurricane-hit bargains.
Once the rescue and recovery operation is complete, it will take at least three months for New Orleans to become habitable again. Even then, most of the buildings may have to be demolished. The city's port is likely to be working within a few weeks but other businesses could take years to recover.
Tourism, which has long been one of the city's biggest industries, will be hit especially hard, not least because so many hotels have been destroyed. The New Orleans convention centre, which brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to the city each year, will not be a popular conference venue for a long time.
Searching for a comparable disaster, some American commentators have recalled the destruction of Pompeii and the earthquake that wiped out the Japanese city of Kobe a decade ago. But most have focused on the earthquake and fire that almost destroyed San Francisco in 1906, killing up to 3,000 people and reducing the "Paris of the West" to a city of refugees' tents.
Friedman is determined to return to New Orleans and to help rebuild the city, no matter how long it takes or how difficult the task appears.
"The people of San Francisco came back. One hundred years from now, people will say that the people of New Orleans came back," he said.
New Orleans occupies a place in the American imagination unlike any other city and few can conceive of the death of the "Big Easy", the spiritual home of jazz that served as a muse to William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and serves up some of the most delicious food in the world. Even those who have never visited New Orleans feel an affection for the city the journalist RW Apple described as "a Caribbean city, an exuberant, semi-tropical city, perhaps the most hedonistic city in the United States. You see more orgies (and more nuns) in New Orleans than anywhere else in the nation."
Friedman describes fleeing the city and talking to fellow evacuees as "an almost spiritual experience" which has left him more certain than ever that New Orleans will survive the disaster and will emerge stronger than before. Then, as he considers what losing New Orleans would mean for America, he starts to cry.
"America would lose part of its soul, part of its heart," he says.