Chris Henderson’s squad of undercover narcotics officers was finding the going tough. Assigned to house-to-house search and recovery as the floodwaters receded from New Orleans, officers who had previously spent their time trying to infiltrate drug rackets were now struggling to break down doors to ensure that no survivors were still hiding or trapped.

As they started battering a security grille blocking yet another door, they heard a cry. The team crashed through the door but the single-storey house appeared empty.

Then someone looked in the attic. An elderly man had tied himself to the rafters, apparently afraid that he would collapse or fall asleep and topple into the water that had risen to within a few feet of his perch.

He had then become so weakened by dehydration and lack of food that he was unable to untie himself. “His limbs were bloated where the ropes had gouged into his flesh,” said Henderson. “But we got him out alive.”

As the team left, it spray-painted an orange cross on the front door. In one quadrant an officer sprayed “DEA”, for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He added the figure 1 — one person recovered alive. In the bottom quadrant, reserved for the number of corpses, he put a zero.

All across New Orleans yesterday, houses were being sprayed with similar symbols as the chaotic and much-criticised relief operation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina turned at last into a systematic search for bodies.

As more and more zeroes were painted around the city, hopes rose that the final death toll would be significantly lower than the 10,000 or more forecast by local politicians.

In east New Orleans, where the damage from the flood was compounded by a catastrophic oil leak from a Mississippi refinery, one coroner even joked that he didn’t know what to do with the 8,000 body bags that officials had supplied. Bryan Bertucci said he hoped he would need no more than 150 — “maybe fewer, if we’re lucky”.

The man saved by Henderson’s team on Thursday turned out to be one of the last rescues from a once-vibrant American city that has been reduced to a toxic wasteland. Yet few in America were in the mood to celebrate the end of the evacuations. The relief operation was ending almost as shockingly and incompetently as it had begun almost two weeks ago.

More than 70,000 troops headed into New Orleans last week, led by tough-talking three-star general Russel Honore, a “John-Wayne dude”, said Ray Nagin, the city’s mayor. “He came off the chopper and he started cussing and people started moving.”

The soldiers came in bristling with weapons and ready to take on shooters and looters. They were so eager that Honore found himself bellowing at a truck full of young men, “Put those guns down!” Yet the gung-ho men in uniform left the corpses on the streets. This weekend, the death toll remains hopelessly confused. It could be in the hundreds — the latest official figure is 347 dead in five states — or in the thousands.

On Thursday and Friday alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 500 new cases of parents looking for their children or vice versa, bringing the total on its database to 1,500. Of these only 258 have been resolved.

With 400,000 refugees from the area now scattered across 13 states, it will be weeks, perhaps months, before the final toll is known.

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