At the same time, police and National Guard forces armed with M16 automatic rifles moved from door to door to begin the forcible removal of up to 10,000 stragglers still in the devastated city.

With the White House under relentless attack from Democrats and Republicans over its response to Hurricane Katrina, Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, flew to New Orleans.

Army engineers began to drain the streets, even though only 23 of the city’s 148 permanent pumps were working. As they began the task of drying out the city, which could take four months, they reported a new and grisly problem: the difficulty in preventing bodies being sucked in to the grates at the giant pump outlets.

“We’re expending every effort to try to ensure the integrity of the remains as we get this water out of the city,” said John S. Rickey, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers. “We’re taking this very personally. This is a very deep emotional aspect of our work down there.”

As officials renewed warnings about the threat of disease — the floodwaters are filled with sewage, bodies and industrial waste, and gas fires contune to break out — rescue teams resorted to tying floating corpses to trees or fences for future recovery.

“We saw a lot of dead people, both in the water and in buildings,” said Gregg Brown, a South Carolina game warden whose team scoured flooded neighbourhoods by boat.

A temporary mortuary set up at a former industrial warehouse in St Gabriel, 70 miles from New Orleans, was designated to receive up to 1,000 bodies a day. Then refrigerated lorries, escorted by police, began to deliver unidentified corpses to the site. By lunchtime yesterday, 59 bodies had been delivered. Nobody knows quite how many victims will be found in houses and streets as the water recedes, but Ray Nagin, the Mayor, and Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Director, have predicted up to 10,000 victims.

“We need to prepare the country for what is coming,” Mr Chertoff said. “It’s going to be about as ugly a scene as I think you can imagine”.

In the coming months, forensics teams will work round the clock on the nightmarish job of identifying the victims, using dental records, body marks and, if possible, fingerprints.

“The bodies are not a pretty sight,” said Kevin Ambeau, St Gabriel’s police chief. A second temporary mortuary was set up at a road junction in the city.

As workers trying to restart essential services came under sniper fire, 100 police officers, flanked by seven armoured personnel carriers, captured an armed suspect.

Mr Cheney toured the devastated Mississippi coast cities of Gulfport and Biloxi before heading to New Orleans. He defended Mr Chertoff, whose performance had received severe criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats.

Mr Cheney, who was confronted by heckling in Gulfport, has also been under fire. Until yesterday he had scarcely been seen since Katrina struck 11 days ago, and had made no public statement.

The political furore over the Administration’s slow response intensified as it emerged that Mr Chertoff, caught off camera during a series of talkshow appearances on Sunday, boasted to aides that “I have this down”, referring to his tactic of deflecting questions about who was to blame for the disaster.

There were growing calls by Democrats for the resignation of Michael Brown, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) director.

Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, referred on the Senate floor to Mr Bush’s statement last week that nobody expected New Orleans’s defensive levees to break. “Everybody anticipated a breach,” including the authors of a study funded by the Bush Administration, she said.

A fresh poll also made uncomfortable reading for the White House. The CBS News poll said that 65 per cent of Americans thought Mr Bush was too slow to respond to the disaster, and 58 per cent disapproved of his performance.

Laura Bush, the First Lady — and perhaps Mr Bush’s greatest political asset — was also dispatched to the region.

Bill Frist, the Republican Senate leader, announced a joint, bipartisan House-Senate investigation of the catastrophe. Democrats continued to push for an independent commission.

The $10.5 billion (£5.7 billion) emergency hurricane relief passed by Congress on Friday ran out yesterday. Another $51.8 billion was last night approved on Capitol Hill as federal disaster spending hit $2 billion a day. The total relief bill for the federal Government is expected to reach $200 billion, a record.

Fema was handing out $2,000 debit cards — $100 million worth — to tens of thousands of evacuees. Over 400,000 people have applied for federal disaster relief.

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