Hurricane Katrina claims at least 5 lives

At least five deaths were blamed on Katrina — three people killed by falling trees in Mississippi and two killed in a traffic accident in Alabama. And an untold number of other people were feared dead in flooded neighbourhoods, many of which could not be reached by rescuers because of high water.

"Some of them, it was their last night on earth," Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, said of people who ignored evacuation orders. "That’s a hard way to learn a lesson."

Katrina weakened overnight to a Category Four storm and made a slight turn to the right before coming ashore at 6.10 am CDT near the Louisiana bayou town of Buras. The storm passed just to the east of New Orleans as it moved inland, sparing this vulnerable below-sea-level city its full fury and the apocalyptic damage that forecasters had feared.

But there was plenty of destruction in New Orleans, and a clearer picture of the damage emerged after the storm had passed: Mangled street signs, crumbled brick walls in the historical French Quarter, fallen trees on streetcar tracks, highrises with almost all of their windows blown out.

White curtains that were sucked out of the shattered windows of a hotel became tangled in treetops.

An estimated 40,000 homes flooded in St Bernard parish just east of New Orleans.

Katrina recorded a storm surge of more than 20 feet in Mississippi, where windows of a major hospital were blown out and billboards were ripped to shreds. In some areas, authorities pulled stranded homeowners from roofs or rescued them from attics. In Alabama, exploding transformers lit up the early morning sky and muddy, six-foot waves engulfed stately, million-dollar homes along Mobile Bay’s normally tranquil waterfront.

"Let me tell you something folks: I’ve been out there. It’s complete devastation," said Gulfport, Mississippi, Fire Chief Pat Sullivan.

Emergency officials had not been able to reach some of the hardest-hit areas to determine the number of injuries or deaths. Officials across the region sent water rescue teams out and stood ready to dispense ice, water and meals to hurricane-stricken residents.

At 3 pm EDT, a rapidly weakening Katrina was centred about 20 miles southwest of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, moving northward at about 19 mph. Its winds had dropped to about 95 mph, making it a Category One storm.

Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the hurricane centre, estimated that the highest winds in New Orleans were about 100 mph. Louisiana Gov Kathleen Blanco said her office had reports of as many as 20 building collapses in New Orleans, and scores of residents stranded in attics or on rooftops.

At least a half-million people were without power from Louisiana to Florida’s Panhandle, including 370,000 in southeastern Louisiana and well over 100,000 each in Alabama and Mississippi.

Katrina was the most powerful storm to affect Mississippi since Hurricane Camille came in as a Category five in 1969, killing 256 people in Louisiana and Mississippi. In New Orleans’ French Quarter of Napoleonic-era buildings with wrought-iron balconies, water pooled in the streets from the driving rain, but the area appeared to have escaped the catastrophic flooding that forecasters had predicted.

Katrina hit the southern tip of Florida as a much weaker storm Thursday and was blamed for 11 deaths. It left miles of streets and homes flooded and knocked out power to 1.45 million customers. It was the sixth hurricane to hit Florida in just over a year.