As the last refugees escape, New Orleans turns to its dead

No one knows how many people were killed by Hurricane Katrina and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating in the ruined city, crumpled in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.

"We need to prepare the country for what’s coming," homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff said on Fox News Sunday. "We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Echoing a prediction made by mayor Ray Nagin last week, governor Kathleen Blanco said Saturday she expected the death toll to reach the thousands. And Craig Vanderwagen, rear admiral of the US public health service, said one morgue alone, at a St Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.

Yesterday morning, a woman’s body remained lying at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street — a business area in the lower Garden District with antique shops on the edge of blighted housing. The body had been there since at least Wednesday.

As days passed, people covered her with blankets or plastic.

Yesterday, a short wall of bricks had been built around her body, holding down a plastic tarpaulin. On it, someone had spray-painted a cross and the words, "Here lies Vera. God help us." Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death and another commit suicide at the Superdome. Womack was beaten with a pipe and treated at the airport centre, where bodies were kept in a refrigerated truck.

"One guy jumped off a balcony. I saw him do it. He was talking to a lady about it. He said it reminded him of the war and he couldn’t leave," he said. Three babies died at the Convention Centre from heat exhaustion, said Mark Kyle, a medical relief provider.

But some progress was evident. The last 300 refugees at the Superdome left Saturday evening, eliciting cheers from members of the Texas national guard who had been standing watch over the facility for nearly a week as some 20,000 hurricane survivors waited for rescue.

The Convention Centre was "almost empty" after 4,200 people were removed, according to Marty Bahamonde, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Earlier estimates of the crowd climbed as high as 25,000.

Thousands of refugees dragged their meagre belongings to buses, the mood more numb than jubilant. Yolando Sanders, who had been stuck at the Convention Centre for five days, was among those who filed past corpses to reach the buses.

"Anyplace is better than here," she said. "People are dying over there."

Nearby, a woman lay dead in a wheelchair on the front steps. A man was covered in a black drape with a dry line of blood running to the gutter, where it had pooled. Another had lain on a chaise lounge for four days, his stocking feet poking out from under a quilt.

By mid-afternoon, only pockets of stragglers remained in the streets around the Convention Centre, and New Orleans paramedics began carting away the dead.

The exact number of dead won’t be known for some time. Survivors were still being plucked from roofs and shattered highways across the city.

US president George W Bush ordered more than 7,000 active duty forces to the Gulf Coast on Saturday.

"There are people in apartments and hotels that you didn’t know were there," Army brig gen Mark Graham said.