The federal government dispatched helicopters, warships and elite SEAL water-rescue teams in one of the biggest relief operations in US history, aimed at plucking residents from rooftops in the last of the "golden 72 hours" rescuers say is crucial to saving lives.
As fires burned from broken natural-gas mains, the skies above the city buzzed with National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters frantically dropping baskets to roofs where victims had been stranded since the storm roared in with a 230kph fury Monday. Atop one apartment building, two children held up a giant sign scrawled with the words: "Help us!"
Hundreds of people wandered up and down shattered Interstate 10 -- the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east -- pushing shopping carts, laundry racks, anything they could find to carry their belongings.
On some of the few roads that were still open, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway.
Nagin, whose pre-hurricane evacuation order got most of his city of a half a million out of harm's way, estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people remained, and said that 14,000 to 15,000 a day could be evacuated in ensuing convoys.
The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80 percent of the city, in some areas 6m deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, gasoline and garbage.
Around midday Wednesday, officials with the state and the Army Corps of Engineers said the water levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain had equalized, and even appeared to be falling. But the danger was far from over.
The Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 6,800kg bags of sand and stone into a large gap in the failed floodwall.
But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.
The full magnitude of the disaster had been unclear for days -- in part, because some areas in both coastal Mississippi and Louisiana are still unreachable, but also because authorities' first priority has been reaching the living.
In Mississippi, for example, ambulances roamed through the passable streets of devastated places, in some cases speeding past corpses in hopes of saving people trapped in flooded and crumbled buildings.
On the flooded streets of New Orleans, dozens of fishermen floated in on caravans of boats to pull residents out.
One of those rescued was 40-year-old Kevin Montgomery, who spent three days shuttling between the attic of a one-story home and a canopy he built on the roof. Every once in a while, Mongtomery would see a body float by. But he cannot swim and had to fight the urge to wade in and tie them down.
"It was terrible," he said. "All I could do was pass them by and hope that God takes care of the rest of that."
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