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But the smell of urban disintegration is the most powerful sensation. In residential neighbourhoods, where homes were damaged but not destroyed, there is a scouring stench from an invisible cloud discharged by rotting foods in half a million refrigerators.

In the Lower Ninth Ward where the flooding was worst and where hundreds, perhaps thousands perished, sewage, human decay and toxic waste combine to produce one of those smells so powerful it jumps the sensory boundary and becomes a taste: an acrid, gagging scrape against the back of the throat.

New Orleans was always a nature-defying monument to man’s pride, and faith in his ability to overcome nature. When Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the Frenchman who founded the city 300 years ago, chose the site, his advisers pleaded with him to find somewhere else, somewhere not quite so like a pudding basin, ready to collect water from the rivers and the lakes around. But he ignored the warnings.

New Orleans is not dead. Even in its agonies Bienville’s optimistic successors are already out in the streets. Nina Reins, a young German immigrant who moved here three years ago to study engineering now works for Shaw Coastal, one of the first companies into the city after Katrina. “I never wanted to live in another American city,” she said. She is working 16-hour days helping to repair the city’s battered infrastructure.

But for now the city stands as a crumbling inundated monument to man’s hubris. Bienville’s statue, untouched by the waters, still stands at the entrance to the French Quarter, a reminder of another memorial to the impermanence of man’s grandest designs, immortalised now only in statuary and words.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

By numbers

450,000 The population of New Orleans before the hurricane struck

32,000 The number of people rescued from the floods triggered by the hurricane

$10.5 billion - the amount authorised by Congress as an initial emergency aid package

$51.8 billion - the additional amount since released by Congress to aid victims

10,000 The number of people potentially feared dead as a result of the hurricane and its aftermath

14,000 The number of troops in New Orleans

17 The number of New Orleans pumping stations that are currently operating

174 The number of permanent pumping stations in New Orleans

400,000 The number of homes in the city still without power

11 The number of fires that burned across the city on Thursday

90 The number of countries which have offered aid to the US

160,000 The number of homes in Louisiana destroyed

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