AFTER hurricane, flood and looting, survivors in New Orleans woke up yesterday to a new terror: fire.

In the historic Garden District, home to some of the city’s oldest wooden structures, two houses disappeared in a roaring blaze as soldiers, unable to fight it, took photos.

“That’s the worst we’re afraid of now — fire,” John Odum, a resident, said as he stood smoking a cigarette and watching as the blaze leapt from a 15-flat apartment block to a beautiful wooden townhouse. The residents, who had been spared the flooding and the worst of the storm damage, wandered hopelessly down the street, New Orleans’ newest refugees.

“The hurricane was No 1, the lack of support was No 2 and this is No 3. You can’t fight this,” Mr Odum said.

Soldiers from the US Border Control force called for emergency services and evacuated neighbouring buildings, but with no water pressure in hydrants and communications in turmoil, there was little they could do except take souvenir shots on their pocket cameras. “Whole chunks of this city are going to go,” one soldier said.

After almost an hour, two fire trucks sped up, but could not hook their pipes up to the mains. Eventually two water tankers were summoned and firefighters struggled to contain the blaze, fearing that the whole wooden old city could go up in flames. One firefighter said that it would not be possible to contain a major blaze using only tankers.

Once again the city found itself at the mercy of shifting winds as the flames jumped across the street.

As troops in the Garden District struggled with a lack of water, army engineers started pumping flood waters out of the submerged central and eastern districts, a massive operation that could take months. Mayor Ray Nagin warned the city to brace itself for the horrors that lie under the murky waters, where he said up to 10,000 people may have died.

Later helicopters were deployed in the Garden District to drop water on the blaze.

A small wall of bricks from a crumbled building had been built around the edges to keep the tarpaulin in place and a white wooden cross erected at the head. One man prayed as National Guard trucks and long convoys of Wildlife Service rangers with boats on trailers rumbled past, heading for the drowned districts to search for the living and the dead.

Fred Fath, a police officer, said that there was nothing his men could do about the bodies in his area as the coroner’s office is under water and no mortuary trucks have arrived. Officer Fath’s police station was submerged and his force from the Sixth District had to fortify part of a looted Wal-Mart superstore as their new centre of operations.

The entrance barricaded by a stockade of overturned shopping trolleys topped with an American flag, the officers had formed perimeter walls with 18-wheel trucks and moved huge blocks of recycled cardboard into the windows of the foul-smelling mall to prevent street gangs, many of them on drugs, from shooting at them.

Inside, the Wal-Mart had been stripped of television sets, clothes, pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. “The books and magazines are still on the shelves,” Officer Fath said in disgust.

Outside, Jeff Drumberger, a local doctor in a sweat-stained M*A*S*H T-shirt, was painting red crosses on the roof and bonnet of a white hearse that he had turned into a mobile first-aid station with supplies taken from an abandoned clinic.

“There are a lot of people without blood pressure medicine, without insulin. I’m looking for tetanus and hepatitis vaccines now,” he said. “It’s a little disorganised.”

Most of the police officers were not in uniform as 90 per cent had lost their homes and all their possessions after they were called to emergency duty. Officer Fath, who fought two gun battles with looters in the rough area of the St Thomas housing development close to the city centre, said that his men had been worried about running out of ammunition as they waited day after day for the federal forces to arrive.

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