Drowned city begins gathering up its dead

WITH the last weary refugees rescued from the Superdome and Convention Centre, New Orleans turned its attention yesterday to gathering up and counting the dead across a ghastly landscape awash in perhaps thousands of corpses.

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.