KATRINA-WRACKED, cash-strapped New Orleans appealed for corporate donors to underwrite its 150th Mardi Gras celebrations, beginning tomorrow. But the only company to step forward was — appropriately — one that makes rubbish sacks.

The Big Easy has removed 6.3 million cubic yards of debris since Hurricane Katrina wrought its devastation in August. There is another 50 million left to go. Vast tracts of the city are still lifeless wasteland, scores of neighbourhoods remain uninhabitable, only a third of the population has returned and the coffers are bare. More than 700 of the city’s inhabitants lost their lives.

In the circumstances, not everyone thinks that eight days of bacchanalian revelry are appropriate.

Police overtime, security and street-cleaning during the festival will cost roughly $2.7 million (£1.5 million) — money that the city council does not have. The one hospital to reopen in downtown New Orleans did so only this week, and on a limited basis. Critics complain that Mardi Gras will divert resources from the more pressing business of recovery and convey a false picture of a recovered city.

Mechanical diggers and dumper-trucks that were clearing ruined residential streets have been redeployed closer to the party sector in recent days “just so we can give this ‘New Orleans is back’ message to the visitors,” complained Wade Rathke, chief organiser of Acorn, a community campaign group.

“What we have done is build a Hollywood set, like in the old Westerns where you have the fake façade of a storefront and behind it there’s nothing but desert. That’s what New Orleans has become,” he said.

“There’s a thin ribbon of activity along the higher ground where the storm wasn’t as devastating and if you stay within that strip you know no different. If you keep your eyes on the street party, and your hands around that beer, you wouldn’t know that a few hundred thousand residents are still absent and awaiting help.”

But those who favoured holding Mardi Gras argue that pressing ahead with the world-famous festival is the best way of showing that New Orleans is back. “It is a tale of two cities — there’s the real good and there’s the real bad — but to not do Mardi Gras would be to admit defeat,” said Arthur Hardy, a local authority on the carnival tradition.

“For those of us who live here it’s group therapy. It’s going to get us out of that funk we’ve been in since Katrina. It’s also going to announce to the world that we are on our feet again. Sure, we’re not 100 per cent, but we’re not drowning any more.”

Getting the parades rolling and the daiquiris flowing is also crucial to the bankrupt city’s economic survival — a key factor in the decision of Ray Nagin, the mayor, to face down his critics and give Mardi Gras the go-ahead, albeit in a truncated form.

The official Mardi Gras celebration usually lasts 12 days, draws a million visitors and generates more than a billion dollars. This year, the schedule has been shortened by four days, the crowd will be half the size and the financial benefit estimated at $150 million.

Of the usual 34 parade clubs — known as krewes — 28 will be back on the streets this year, though many members are having to come long distances to participate because they lost their homes in the flood and still have nowhere to live in New Orleans.

Big Chief Donald Harrison has been without his Indians for six months. Mr Harrison, a renowned jazz musician, is head of the Congo Nation tribe — one of several traditional African-American groups that make up the Mardi Gras Indians krewe whose members are drawn from some of the poorest black neighbourhoods.

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