Katrina drowns a city & wounds a superpower

Hundreds of people in stretchers wait to be evacuated at Louis Armstrong International Airport near New Orleans, Louisiana Saturday. Rescue workers used baggage carts to transport people from helicopters to a medical facility, where they were treated and then boarded on waiting planes. PHOTO: AFP

In the process, Hurricane Katrina laid waste to a region of the US Gulf coast the size of Britain, submerged New Orleans in corpse-strewn floodwaters and triggered a law-and-order meltdown that shocked the world.

There was horrified disbelief at the scenes of destruction and suffering more usually associated with Third World disasters, that played out in the richest and most powerful country on the planet.

The succession of images and first-hand testimonies -- each seemingly more harrowing than the last -- was unrelenting.

Towns and cities devastated, armed gangs looting, raping and killing with impunity, bloated bodies left to rot, storm shelters swimming in human excrement and the sick and infirm dying for lack of medicine.

Thousands are believed dead and the economic loss could top 100 billion dollars, according to some predictions.

"It's as if an atomic bomb was dropped," US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Saturday.

Powerful hurricanes are no stranger to the Gulf Coast and Katrina offered little hint of the devastation to come when it bruised Florida little more than a week ago and slipped into the Gulf of Mexico as a relatively innocuous tropical storm.

Fuelled by the gulf's warm waters, it rapidly reached hurricane category four, sounding alarm bells through coastal Louisiana and, in particular, the southern jazz capital, New Orleans.