A ghostly calm settled on New Orleans yesterday as the last survivors left the makeshift shelters in the superdome and the convention centre after a week in hell, writes Denis Staunton, in New Orleans.
A few yellow buses still stood outside the two buildings in what used to be the city's business district. The streets were almost deserted apart from scores of heavily armed soldiers, police and fire officers.
The surrounding streets remained waterlogged and strewn with every kind of debris - broken chairs, plastic sheeting and pieces of masonry that the hurricane had blown away.
The French quarter was still above water, although a massive tangled sheet of copper, part of a public sculpture, lay across the French market.
Fallen trees blocked many of the district's smaller streets but most of the city's best-known bars and restaurants appeared to be intact. One bar, Moll's at the Market, had opened for business, serving coffee to weary rescue workers and the foreign television crews that arrived in the city over the weekend.
Street after street was deserted except for a few bewildered figures, some of them pushing shopping carts in what appeared to be in no particular direction.
Further up town in the smart Jefferson parish most houses escaped with little damage apart from a few fallen trees. A gleaming glass fronted branch of Whole Foods, an upmarket grocery, looked brand new.
The municipal zoo nearby was in ruins, however, with upturned pagodas and shattered fences littering the streets. Almost half of the city remains under water and the emergency services are at the start of their most sombre task: recovering the bodies of what could be thousands of people who died in attics and rooftops waiting for help that did not come.
Isolated disturbances were still being reported. Police marksmen opened fire on a gang of eight people carrying guns on a bridge, killing five or six of them.
The last evacuees left the convention centre and superdome over the weekend to board buses with no idea where they were heading. Texas has declared that it can take no more refugees, or displaced persons, as the authorities prefer to call them.
As the rescue and recovery operation continued yesterday President Bush's administration sought to blame local and State authorities for the slowness in dealing with the aftermath of the hurricane. As public anger grew over the slow response to the disaster, however, most political analysts predicted Mr Bush would pay a political price for not having acted sooner.
Six days after Hurricane Katrina struck, no-one yet knows how many people were killed, but government officials say the number is surely in the thousands.
"When we remove the water from New Orleans, we're going to uncover people who died hiding in houses, who got caught by the flood - people whose remains will be found in the street," US homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff said. "It is going to be about as ugly a scene as you can imagine."
Battered and sickened survivors made no attempt to disguise their anger yesterday.
"We have been abandoned by our own country," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, just south of New Orleans, told NBC's Meet the Press.
As an international aid effort gathers pace, a spokesman in Dublin for the Defence Forces said contingency planning had started to send personnel to the Gulf Coast to assist, if requested to do so.