US: Residents along the US southeast coast, where Hurricane Katrina landed yesterday, struggled as high winds and heavy rain continued from early morning.
On the south shore of Lake Ponchartrain, entire neighbourhoods of one-storey homes were flooded up to the roof. The Interstate 10 off-ramps nearby looked like boat ramps amid the whitecapped waves. Rubbish cans and tyres bobbed in the water.
Two people were stranded on the roof as murky water lapped at the gutters.
"Get us a boat!" a man in a black slicker shouted over the howling winds.
Across the street, a woman leaned from the second-storey window of a brick home and shouted for assistance.
"There are three kids in here," she said. "Can you help us?"
"I'm not doing too good right now," Chris Robinson said via cellphone from his home east of downtown New Orleans. "The water's rising pretty fast. I got a hammer and an axe and a crowbar, but I'm holding off on breaking through the roof until the last minute. Tell someone to come get me, please, I want to live."
Elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, the storm flung boats on to land in Mississippi, lashed street lamps and flooded roads in Alabama, and swamped highway bridges in the Florida Panhandle.
At least a half-million people were without power from Louisiana to Florida's Panhandle, including 370,000 in southeastern Louisiana and 116,400 in Alabama, mostly in the Mobile area. At New Orleans's Superdome, home to 9,000 storm refugees, the wind peeled pieces of metal from the golden roof, leaving two holes that let water drip in.
People inside were moved out of the way. Others stayed and watched as sheets of metal flapped and rumbled loudly 19 storeys above the floor.
Building manager Doug Thornton said the larger hole was 15 to 20 feet long and four to five feet wide. Outside, one of the 10ft concrete clock pylons set up around the Superdome blew over.
Elsewhere in the city, the storm shattered scores of windows in high-rise office buildings and on five floors of the Charity Hospital, forcing patients to be moved to lower levels.
At the Windsor Court Hotel, guests were told to go into the interior hallways with blankets and pillows and to keep the doors to the rooms closed to avoid flying glass.
In suburban Jefferson Parish, Sheriff Harry Lee said residents of a building on the west bank of the Mississippi called emergency services to say the building had collapsed and people might be trapped. He said deputies were not immediately able to check out the building because their vehicles were unable to reach the scene. By midday, the brunt of the storm had moved beyond New Orleans to Mississippi's coast, home to the state's floating casinos, where Katrina recorded a 22ft storm surge and washed sailboats on to a coastal four-lane highway.
Trees were blown across streets and on to houses, utility poles dangled in the wind and billboards were shredded. Windows of a major hospital were blown in and the Beau Rivage Hotel and Casino, one of the premier gambling spots in Biloxi, had water on the first floor.
Artist Matt Rinard, who owns a business in the French quarter, took refuge on the fifth floor of a Canal Street hotel and watched the storm roll in.
He said pieces of sheet metal and plywood, billboards and pieces of palm trees flew down Canal Street, as huge gusts of wind blew through the city.
"It's blustery. You can see the speed of it now, it's unbelievable. The power went out about an hour and a half ago and so now I'm just watching the occasional dumbass walking down Canal Street."