The search for the helpless and the hiding continued across New Orleans yesterday as President George W. Bush promised to streamline the government bureaucracy to speed relief to the hundreds of thousands displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
"We have much more work to do," said Bush whose administration has been under attack ever since the storm for the scope and speed of government help.
He promised to make access to special relief payments and existing government programs as easy as possible.
The US House of Representatives yesterday approved Mr Bush's request for an additional $51.8 billion to fund rescue and relief efforts. The federal government has exhausted a $10.5 billion fund approved by Congress just a week ago.
The Congressional Budget Office said 400,000 jobs could be lost and the nation's economic growth slashed by up to one percentage point by the disaster.
But not long before Mr Bush spoke, refugees among the thousands housed at the Astrodome in Houston were complaining of long lines and cranky machinery that produced hours of waiting with no real help.
In New Orleans, once home to 450,000 people, rescue teams hunted door to door for what may be as many as 10,000 people, some refusing to leave despite an evacuation order and others perhaps still trapped.
CNN reported that fishermen found 14 bodies inside an abandoned hospital in the city. Earlier 30 corpses were found inside a nursing home.
Officials have 25,000 body bags on hand for the gruesome clean-up operation, and while some have speculated the toll could reach into the thousands no one knows for sure. Some say victims may have been washed out to sea or buried under sludge.
"We saw a lot of dead people, both in the water and in buildings," said South Carolina game warden Gregg Brown, whose team scoured flooded New Orleans neighbourhoods by boat.
Rescue teams tied floating corpses to trees or fences for future recovery, and a morgue set up outside the city stood ready to receive more than 5,000 bodies.
In the bohemian neighbourhood of Bywater, which escaped relatively unscathed, troops stepped up the pressure on residents to abandon the city.
Helicopters clattered overhead and National Guard troops peered into windows of homes in search of the sick or dying, the dead, and those resisting efforts to evacuate them.
So far, the official death tolls stand at 83 in Louisiana and 201 in Mississippi, but officials say they expect to find thousands of bodies in the attics of flooded homes and the rubble of destroyed towns and cities.
US Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday toured the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and expressed confidence in Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's performance in handling the crisis.
Mr Cheney made his first trip to the disaster zone, the latest in a series of high-ranking Bush administration officials to visit the region.