THEY sat with their heads in their hands, faces screwed into expressions of misery, bewilderment — and relief.

Some were shirtless, some shoeless. Many were soaked from long hours spent in the swamp that used to be their city. Others were so old, frail or shellshocked that they simply lay prostrate on the road.

It was like a scene from a war zone, but at least these 1,000-odd refugees had survived the most terrifying ordeal of their lives.

“This is the spot where our biggest nightmare ends and our next biggest nightmare begins,” said William Autry, 73, who was trapped in water up to his shoulders at his home on the south bank of Lake Pontchartrain before a rescue boat brought him here.

He was sitting in the middle of Highway 10, a once-bustling New Orleans commuter route that now disappears into the floodwaters. The last dry stretch is the hub of a huge search-and-rescue operation that plucks those still clinging to rooftops and crouched in attics from the rising flood water. Others are being ferried here from hospitals and from the Pontchartrain road bridge, where officials say a “sea of humanity” is waiting for help.

Lines of ambulances, firetrucks and buses choke the road. Navy, Coast Guard and National Guard helicopters land so frequently that they are forming noisy traffic jams in the sky. They swiftly unload their weak and bedraggled passengers, then lift off to resume the race against time that the evacuation of New Orleans has become. The sick and wounded are placed on gurneys and hooked up to drips and oxygen. Two gazebo tents form makeshift hospitals.

“Most of those we are treating are older people who have been without their vital medicines — diabetics, asthmatics, people with heart conditions, kidney patients who have not had dialysis for days. Many people are coming in very dehydrated. A couple of women came here in labour,” Ken King, of the Louisiana Ambulance service, said.

“We are having to strip our ambulances for equipment so people can be treated on the helicopters. Some are so weak they can’t even walk from the helicopter to the roadside. They are telling us, ‘There are hundreds more people in our neighbourhood, please help them’. We have cellphones that don’t work, we have satellite phones but they’re not working either, and the Emergency Medical Services radio system is overtaxed. It is a very, very trying situation.”

Mr Autry is waiting to be put on a bus and moved with his two dogs – the only possessions he brought with him as his house disappeared under the deluge. One of them, Cookie, has a congestive heart condition and is panting for life. “I don’t think he’s going to make it,” Mr Autry said. “But then hey, so won’t a lot of people.”

On the radio we hear reports of the chaos inside the city: dozens of carjackings by survivors desperate to escape. Armed gangs ransacking jewellers and clothing shops; the entire gun stock of a Walmart store looted; staff and patients at a children’s hospital huddled behind locked doors as looters tried to break in; shots fired at a rescue helicopter.

National Guard troops were called on to help to control the crowds of frustrated refugees last night as the authorities admitted that they were overwhelmed by the scale of the emergency. Ann Marie Dusang, a Louisiana State Trooper, said: “We are totally, totally overwhelmed and overstretched. We are doing our very hardest for these people but in this situation your very hardest just isn’t good enough. The crowd is getting frustrated, they want transport and they desperately want more water.

“The Salvation Army has been giving out water but some of these people haven’t had a drink for 24 hours. The crowd has been good so far but we are afraid of what’s to come.”

Hundreds of homeless people are arriving by the hour on boats and in helicopters, some of them severely weak and all of them gasping for water.

Every time a bus or military truck arrives to move them westwards, the crowd jostles and attempts to push against the doors, some crying and begging for a seat.

At the hospital tent, row upon row of sick patients sit on chairs, sweating and clutching medical cards marked “urgent” as paramedics attempt to treat them. Medical staff scramble for help as critically ill pensioners are brought in on stretchers, barely clinging to life. One woman arrived on a helicopter screaming with her little child apparently lifeless.

A man of about 50, wearing boxer shorts and a ripped T-shirt, limps by. He is barefoot, his beard matted with mud. He is barely coherent. “There were bodies, there were bodies,” he wept. “They were all tangled up in the debris, bobbing around. What happened out there?”

TURBULENT PAST

The city has suffered disasters before: it was rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1788, and occupied by Union troops during the Civil War

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