Aftermath: New Orleans turned to the gruesome task of collecting its dead yesterday with rescue teams scouring flooded streets and homes to find survivors and recover thousands of corpses.
Six days after Hurricane Katrina ripped up the US Gulf Coast and sent flood waters pouring into New Orleans, no one knows how many were killed, but government officials say the number is surely in the thousands.
"When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood. People whose remains will be found in the street," US homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff said.
Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger: "We have been abandoned by our own country," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press. "It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans," he said. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now."
After a nightmare confluence of natural disaster and political ineptitude that al-Qaeda-linked websites called evidence of the "wrath of God" striking America, National Guard troops and US marshals patrolled the city that has been stricken by anarchic violence and looting.
Coast Guard helicopters hovered over devastated neighbourhoods yesterday and continued to pluck survivors from roofs.
Alfred Thomas (43), a resident of the Hollygrove neighbourhood, has used his small flatboat to shuttle food and water in and out since the storm hit. He said he had seen 17 bodies floating in the streets and that many others were inside houses. "You go down some streets and you can smell them, but you can't see them."
The streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after the exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighbouring Texas and other states.
Under fire for its slow response to the flooding, the Bush administration tried to save face by sending top officials to the disaster zone and pledging whatever it takes to clean up New Orleans and help refugees.
President Bush, who in a rare admission of error conceded the results of his administration's relief efforts were unacceptable, ordered 7,200 extra active-duty troops to the disaster zone.
Newsweek reported that former Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, whom it called a close Bush ally, rejected the president's claim that nobody anticipated the failure of New Orleans's levees, saying he talked to Mr Bush about it last year.
Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld toured a medical facility at New Orleans's international airport yesterday. He spoke and shook hands with military and rescue officials but walked right past a dozen refugees lying on stretchers just feet away from him, most of them extremely sick or handicapped.
"It will take many, many, many months and into years for this area to recover," Mr Rumsfeld said at the end of his tour.