Along Gulf, Aiding the Living and Counting the Dead

Allen's appointment in New Orleans came as the president moved to reassert his leadership in the wake of withering criticism about what many local officials and residents saw as his administration's lethargic response to the deadly storm. Bush made his second visit since Friday to the devastated region, talking to evacuees in a church-run shelter and meeting with disaster-relief officials in Louisiana before speaking to emergency personnel in Poplarville, Miss.

"I understand the damage. I understand the devastation. I understand the destruction. I understand how long it's going to take," Bush said in Mississippi. "And we're with you. That's what I want you to know."

As Bush visited the region, rescue workers continued their search for survivors. As choppers maneuvered overhead, rescuers trolled debris-strewn city streets in flat-bottom boats, going house to house, peering in windows and knocking on doors in an effort to evacuate the estimated 10,000 New Orleans residents thought to still be in the city.

Often, they found people who refuse to leave.

Keith Edwards, a rescue worker from Arkansas, tried in vain to talk an elderly woman into abandoning her home in a public housing complex not far from the Superdome. Sitting at a table in her darkened apartment, the woman refused his offer to be evacuated by airboat. "Hon, you don't know how dangerous this is?" Edwards said. ". . . the water out in your front yard will kill you."

One New Orleans police officer said the search was still focused on the living. "We're going up to buildings looking for people," said the officer, who said he was not authorized to speak on the record. "When you break the window and the smell comes back at you, you know they're dead." And they move on. "You just can't worry about the dead right now," he explained.

But other workers are. The bodies of those left dead in Katrina's wake were scheduled to start to arrive Monday in a massive warehouse outside Baton Rouge. Lifted from the fetid waters swamping this city, they will be transported in refrigerated trucks to the temporary morgue. A similar morgue has been set up in Mississippi.

As officials forged ahead with the recovery work, Bush spent the day near the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast. Some critics said the impression of a slow federal response to Katrina was only deepened by the president's visit to the region last week, during which Bush seemed tentative in his comments and was kept away from some of the most dire misery spawned by the storm.

Some civil rights leaders have questioned whether the response to the storm was hindered by the fact that many of those most severely affected are poor and black -- a charge dismissed by federal officials. In the face of the growing denunciations, senior administration officials have fired back by blaming local officials for the inadequate response to the hurricane.

Bush seemed intent on rising above the finger-pointing during his visit, saying that "all levels of government are doing the best they can" to restore order and to address basic needs of the storm victims.

"So long as anybody's life is in danger, we've got work to do," Bush said. "That's why I want people to be assured we're going to do it."

Bush posed for pictures with children and talked with several of the 800 people staying at Bethel World Prayer Center in Baker, a few miles north of the Baton Rouge airport. Some asked the president about the growing use of the word "refugee" to describe them.