Life Among the Ruins

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The survivors face uncertainty of their own. The city is too quiet for some, who fear their neighbors won't return. Told that it may take the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 80 days to "unwater" the rest of the city and as much as six months to clean it, most residents had no choice but to leave and take jobs elsewhere. But across the condemned city last week, there were moments of fleeting defiance, staged by those unable to imagine life outside the Big Easy--or perhaps unwilling to ponder the possibility that it might not come back. On Bourbon Street in the French Quarter last week, slightly sauced survivors sat on the bar stools of Johnny White's, a tavern they say has never closed in its 14-year history. "Why are they making us leave? Did they evacuate Iraq?" asks Greg Rogers, known as Squirrel. "Why didn't they just give us a job? Say, 'Here, dude, if you're going to stay, get busy'?"

The first of the dead--26 bodies--arrived six days after Hurricane Katrina, in refrigerated trucks at a temporary mortuary set up in the tiny town of St. Gabriel, to the northwest of New Orleans. Fearing the worst, Nagin ordered 25,000 body bags. By then, most of the 1.3 million who lived in New Orleans and its suburbs had been bused or airlifted out. But a week after the levees broke, at least 10,000 were believed to be still in the city--some determined to stick it out, others inaccessible to rescuers. Health officials tested and found E. coli bacteria in the floodwaters, raising fears that diarrhea could spread. Fires set off by broken gas mains raged untamed, and hooligans controlled some zones. City officials--stung by criticism of their failures to clear the city before the storm--took no chances this time. On Tuesday, Nagin instructed police and the National Guard "to compel the evacuation of all persons" from the city.

By Wednesday, National Guardsmen went door to door, banging on mansions on historic St. Charles Street and shotgun shacks in Uptown, rousting the holdouts. TIME went along with a Louisiana narcotics officer as he led a team of Texas National Guardsmen and Michigan cops on a search-and-evacuate mission through postbellum homes gussied up by modern-day gentrifiers. "Police! Police! Open up," one officer yelled as another stood nervously in the street, holding his gun at the ready. They busted in the door on several clapboard homes after smelling something foul, fearing that bodies were inside. "One lady told us to go to hell," says Staff Sergeant Vincent Rodney of the Oklahoma National Guard, "but they're all gonna have to leave."