THE cost of rebuilding the vast area devastated by Hurricane Katrina and providing relief to its inhabitants is expected to exceed $200 billion (£109 billion), a sum comparable to the gross domestic product of Poland.

American politicians also claimed last night that the clean-up operation was costing as much as $700 million a day, more than three times the estimated $225 million daily expense of the military opera- tions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The estimates were made as President Bush requested a further $51.8 billion of economic aid for the hurricane-stricken region. The aid dwarfs the $10.5 billion of emergency funds handed over last week, which “is being spent more quickly than we even anticipated,” Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said yesterday.

It also emerged last night that the US Government is drawing up plans to issue debit cards worth $2,000 each to victims of Hurricane Katrina in an effort to help those who have lost their homes, possessions and livelihoods to get back on their feet.

The cash card programme was outlined by Homeland Security Department officials in a conference call with state leaders on Wednesday morning, sources close to the talks said. It is expected that the scheme will be approved by the end of the week.

Senator Judd Gregg, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said that it could take three or four years to complete the rebuilding work that needs to be done in an area about the size of the British Isles.

The clean up and rebuilding bill for Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is likely to exceed the $70 billion spent to recover from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

As well as the cost of rebuilding roads, oil pipelines and port facilities along with electricity, water, gas and telephone infrastructure, the federal government has to tackle the problem of helping to rehouse hundreds of thousands of people who were displaced by the storm.

Once the rebuilding is complete, jobs must be found for at least 400,000 people left unemployed by the hurricane, according to a report published yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office.

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