Life Among the Ruins

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The abandoned houses are marked with crude red Xs, their windows spray-painted with the number of bodies found inside. The French Quarter and the Garden District lie dark and deserted, a wasteland of downed power lines, cars with flat tires, massive Spanish oaks toppled at their roots and scattered reminders of the city's former self--a cookbook open to a recipe for ham croquettes, strings of Mardi Gras beads. What little life remains in New Orleans is largely devoted to counting the dead, a task so vast and grim that even the city's coroner, Frank Minyard, doesn't hazard a guess at what lies beneath the receding waters. "We don't really know what's in the houses," Minyard says, sitting on an overturned fishing skiff in the shadow of the Superdome. He stares down an empty street as two ambulances creep through brackish waters toward Tulane University Hospital and its morgue. Near him, five men in white haz-mat uniforms wait on dry ground to collect bodies. Minyard extends his hand by way of introduction to his city. "Tough place," he says.

For those too loyal, stubborn or unlucky to find a way out of New Orleans in the days after Katrina hit, nothing could prepare them for what the hurricane left behind. With the city all but emptied, it is no longer the party town of popular imagination. Nor is it the teeming mess of violent desperation it became in the storm's wake. Much of it remains under water, stewing in a putrid mix of chemicals and corpses. But in parts of the city, the floodwaters receded sufficiently last week to reveal something strange and new: part frontier outpost, part fetid deathscape, where the drowned and the saved coexisted for days because neither had any other place to go.

The smell of bloated bodies and swamp rot permeates the air, especially in the suburbs to the north and east, as sewage laps at the doors and windows of homes, hospitals and amusement parks. In the hardest-hit area, St. Bernard Parish, to the east, searchers navigated the floodwaters looking for submerged bodies, often coming up empty, then finding horror: of the 67 known dead there, 27 perished in one nursing home. In one hospital, a single doctor was found caring for 57 patients in 10 ft. of water. Eleven patients had died. "You don't need dogs or detection devices to find bodies," says sheriff Jack Stephens. "You can smell it."

It's all the more remarkable, then, that rescuers believe the death toll may be much lower than initially feared. In the early days of the crisis, Mayor Ray Nagin predicted that New Orleans and its environs would see 10,000 dead. But by Saturday fewer than 200 bodies had been found, leading retired U.S.M.C. Colonel Terry Ebbert, the city's homeland-security director, to declare that "the numbers so far are relatively minor compared to the dire predictions" of Nagin and others. Ebbert says it will take authorities two weeks to make a reliable estimate of the casualties, and the precise figure will take longer. Minyard says identifying each and every corpse may take as long as five years.