JAY CULBERTSON popped home to get his photo albums. It involved taking a boat ride into his neighbourhood, breaking into his buckled house, wading through foul water and floating furniture, climbing over a refrigerator and smashing down a door.

“I got two of them off a shelf just above the water line. Them and my wife’s jewellery box,” he said. His face crumpled at what he had just seen: virtually all his possessions wrecked, memories lost, his home beyond repair. “I guess I just needed to see it for myself, get some closure,” he said.

As he clambered from the boat on to dry land with his bin bag of treasure, Angela Cefalu was next in line. She wanted to salvage an antique rose bowl and brooches given to her by her prospective mother-in-law, who is 86.

Pastor Larry Beane, who set up the water-taxi service on Veterans Boulevard in Metairie, New Orleans, said: “If we can get people into their houses now, they can save a few things before the mould takes over.”

Funded by Lutheran Church Charities, a group from Illinois, the service provides residents with boats, pilots, wading boots, rubber gloves and axes to break into their homes.

Mr Beane said: “For each person it’s a horrific experience. They’re shaking and crying. We tell them, ‘Think carefully about what you’re going to look for, take your time in there’. We suggest pictures, mementoes, family heirlooms, a toy for the kids, things that are meaningful.”

Angela Bradshaw, who swung between hyperactive jollity and sobs, found a photograph of her one-year-old daughter, Carley. The water had soaked away the edges, but the child’s features were still clear. “My little baby,” she cried, stroking the picture.

She also extracted two pictures that belonged to her great-great grandmother, a bottle of wine, her pink-beaded stilettos and a singing statuette of the crooner Dean Martin that had brown water oozing from its feet. “I got Dean out!” she yelled, punching the air, but then started wailing.

Meg Adams retrieved a picture of a racing yacht from her lounge wall. Her husband, Orr, got his tennis rackets and albums of hockey team photos for their teenage sons, Tucker and Connor. The family’s meagre haul supplemented the handful of belongings that they took with them when they fled the hurricane.

“When we evacuated, each of us brought two or three sets of clothes and a personal item each,” Mr Adams said. “I like to cook, so I brought my cooking knives. The boys like paintball, so they brought their paintball guns.”

Mrs Adams brought her late mother’s wedding ring and her grandmother’s silverware. “We never thought to bring the pictures — all the boys’ baby pictures,” she said.

Archie Grefer headed on to the water in search of a wedding photograph of him and his second wife, and videos with footage of his first wife, who died of cancer nine years ago. His children had asked him to look for needlepoint pictures that their mother had made for them before she died.

He returned to shore with his goodies in a suitcase. “I couldn’t sit around and wait any more wondering what I’ve got left here,” he said.

“But now I know the answer — not very much.”

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