Senior US officials have indicated today that the death toll from the Hurricane Katrina disaster may not reach the catastrophic levels first predicted.

The official toll in the storm's aftermath currently stands at 322, but fears that thousands of rotten corpses would emerge in New Orleans as emergency crews went house-to-house have not yet been borne out.

"There’s some encouragement in the initial sweeps. Some of the catastrophic deaths some people have predicted may not have occurred," Colonel Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans, told a news conference.

"The numbers so far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000." Those estimates have come mainly from Ray Nagin, the outspoken Mayor of New Orleans. The official dead count - bodies already lodged with coroners - stood at 118 in the city today.

But rescuers have reported seeing scores of dead floating in the city’s floodwaters. The toll in Mississippi was 204 and the Red Cross said nearly 138,000 people had registered on its website for missing persons, up from 100,000 at the beginning of the week.

Relatives of the missing are hoping that the final toll will be far less than the initial estimates, as was the case after the September 11 attacks. After the collapse of the World Trade Centre, up to 20,000 were feared dead. The official death toll from the Twin Towers disaster is 2,752.

A New Orleans police spokesman said: "The numbers of [bodies found] are relatively minor," he said. "There is some encouragement in what we’ve found in the initial sweep that some of the catastrophic predictions may not occur."

In New Orleans today police and soldiers were prepared to use force to evacuate thousands of people who refuse to leave their homes, as questions were raised about the qualifications of those in charge of the much-criticised disaster relief effort.

Officials estimate that as many as 10,000 people still remain in the city, where toxic floodwaters are gradually receding.

Although no residents have been removed by force yet, some of those evacuated yesterday said they had been put under extreme pressure.

Some of the "holdouts" are refusing to leave without their pets. "The ones who wanted to leave, I would say most of them are out," said Detective Sergeant James Imbrogglio.

"They were all insisting that I had to leave my home," said Shelia Dalferes, who said she had 15 minutes to pack before she and her husband were evacuated. "The implication was there with their plastic handcuffs on their belt. Who wants to go out like that?"

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