New Orleans gripped in apocalyptic aftermath of Katrina

"And lead us not into temptation," she bellows hoarsely to the unhearing throng, "but deliver us from evil ..."

But temptation is everywhere in this crippled city. And so, it seems, is evil.

Five days after Hurricane Katrina came and went, necessity has forced police officers to become looters; gangs hijack the boats of volunteers who have come to rescue them. Naked babies wail for food as men get drunk on stolen liquor.

A walk through New Orleans is a walk through hell — punctuated by moments of grace.

Along the debris-choked Mississippi River, pharmacist Jason Dove watches as people scramble in the parking lot of the downtown convention centre for cases of airlifted water and shakes his head. "We created this Frankenstein," he says. "It’s showing how fragile this society is in a frilly jail." Historical markers on Napoleonic-era houses share billing with signs that warn: "You loot, we shoot!"

When water began rising in predominantly black neighbourhoods, many jumped to the conclusion that the levee had been purposely breached to preserve the old city and its hotels.

"F... the Quarter!" a black man shouts as he walks beneath a balcony where a resident lounges with a cold beer as a generator roars away in the otherwise deathly night silence. "They always protect the Quarter."

Katrina’s winds have left behind an information vacuum, and that vacuum has been filled by rumour. There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the convention centre. That two babies had their throats slit in the night. That a seven-year-old girl was raped and killed at the Superdome.

One officer calls these human cattle yards "lawless countries unto themselves."

After several days in the street with little water and less food, people around the convention centre began imagining that the storm was somehow a vehicle for ethnic cleansing. One black man insists that authorities want everyone corralled into the convention centre — not to facilitate an orderly evacuation, but so police can ignite the gas and blow them up. "They want us all crazy so they can shoot us down like dogs!" a woman shouts.

Police point their guns at the crowds and tell them to back off. The people take it as aggression. But when you look into these officers’ eyes, there is real fear.

Officer Kirk LeBranche cowered on the roof of his flooded hotel in New Orleans East for three days as the night time hours became a shooting gallery.

"Anarchy and chaos," he says. "People are desperate."

Officers deserted their posts. Many of them lost everything but their lives to the storm, and they refuse to gamble those on a seemingly lost city.

Katrina has not just robbed people of their homes. It has taken their dignity.

At the convention centre, where thousands have camped in the streets since Monday awaiting buses out of the city, the despair feeds on itself like a voracious beast.

When National Guard helicopters attempt to land supplies in the parking lot, waiter Bob Vineyard joins a self-appointed ground crew attempting to set up a safe perimeter. The crowd surges past them with an almost feral intensity, and the chopper crew is forced to take off.

The soldiers drop cases of water and self-heating meals from ten feet in the air. Many of the bottles burst on impact, the precious water left to evaporate in the hot sun.

"We would have had a whole helicopter full of food if you had stayed back!" Vineyard shouts at the crowd, with disgust. "Hey, y’all. I did my best." Carl Davis wonders why someone can’t just truck the food in and hand it out in an orderly fashion. Rather than taking comfort in the food drops, he finds the process insulting, demeaning.

"They’re giving it to us like we’re in the Third World," he spits. "This should never have happened. It didn’t happen in Iraq, and it didn’t happen in the tsunami."