In New Orleans, a Desperate Exodus

"He's really elderly and sick, and I'm just trying to get to him," Marks said. "I've been up for 40 hours."

Another refugee, Sarah Hall, said her house just outside the French Quarter was destroyed in the flooding. Hall said she had been staying at a Sheraton in the city and was heading for another hotel in Baton Rouge.

"Where we lived it was over the sidewalk, a foot, foot and a half deep," she said. "Yesterday it wasn't covering the sidewalk. Overnight it moved two blocks."

One of the most unusual rescue efforts Wednesday happened at Orleans Parish prison, where flooding and sanitation problems led officials to begin evacuating the facility. As of late Wednesday, nearly half of the 5,100 prisoners had been moved to other jails, officials said.

The inmates "haven't eaten for two days and they're not very happy people," Pam Laborde, a representative for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, said before the evacuation operation began. "And we're not dealing with any Boy Scouts here."

Authorities said a troopship, the USS Bataan, was dispatched to New Orleans to provide communications and medical facilities. Mortuary teams have also been sent to try to retrieve dead bodies, said Mark Smith, spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

While authorities in Houston readied the mothballed Astrodome for an influx of refugees, thousands of others were already streaming into Baton Rouge, about 90 miles north of New Orleans. To the surprise of Red Cross officials, for example, five busloads of Superdome evacuees showed up Wednesday afternoon and were placed in the capital city's River Center complex along the Mississippi River. With as many as 100,000 refugees already placed in shelters across the region, refugees must travel increasingly long distances for accommodations, emergency management officials said. In Alexandria, a city of 50,000 residents about 150 miles northwest of New Orleans, about 6,000 refugees are being housed, and officials have been told to expect up to 30,000 more. "That's half the city," said City Council member Roosevelt Johnson.

Construction worker Michael Roberts, 43, was already hitting the streets looking for work after settling into a shelter Wednesday in Alexandria. After all, he said, "we might be living here."

Eggen reported from Washington. Staff writers Ann Gerhart and Peter Slevin in New Orleans, Jacqui Salmon and Peter Whoriskey in Baton Rouge, and Christopher Lee in Biloxi, Miss., contributed to this report.