Lack of Cohesion Bedevils Recovery

What complicates the overall relief effort is the fact that officials still lack hard answers to even the most basic questions about displaced survivors: Exactly how many are there, and where are they located? State officials in Louisiana and Mississippi initially guessed that more than 1 million people were homeless, but no one is really sure, and efforts to develop a more accurate tally have been hampered by logistical problems.

In his Thursday speech, Bush implored evacuees to call the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Red Cross to register themselves, because "we need to know who you are." Bush was referring to people such as Steve Lacourt, whose mobile home in Pass Christian, Miss., washed away.

Lacourt has tried to do just what the president asked -- for more than a week. One night, the 42-year-old mechanic said, he drove to a highway overpass, where his cell phone got some reception, and speed-dialed the toll-free numbers for FEMA and the Red Cross for six hours straight, from 8 in the evening until 2 in the morning.

He could not get through.

Survivors such as Louise Dilsenroth and Sandra Brent, who has diabetes, have had similar problems in Mississippi. The women spent hours last week waiting in line to get a number that would allow them to enter a Red Cross facility to speak with an official. Brent said she had spent three days so far, trying to get a number. She has not had access to insulin since the hurricane hit.

Lacourt, the mechanic, said he has used up two tanks of gas driving around the region looking for housing assistance. A rumor of help in Laplace, La., turned out to be false. In Ocean Springs, Miss., FEMA officials working out of a former Kmart gave him FEMA's toll-free number again.

"That's completely useless," he said he told them.

"That's all we can do," he said he was told.

Other missteps have spilled into the relief program: FEMA chartered cruise ships, at a cost of around $200 million, to house evacuees -- but many survivors refused to board, partly because living on a ship would have made it hard to find jobs and schooling. After leaving thousands of berths empty, FEMA is housing relief workers on them. Last week, after New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin jubilantly announced that Children's Hospital was reopening immediately, he was contradicted a short while later by a hospital official.

"There was one blitz where FEMA was giving debit cards, which was not a good idea because it started rioting in Houston," said Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, who has criticized the lack of guidance and help from state and federal authorities. Miller said her city had been relying on private charity to help thousands of evacuees but warned that it could not last.

"When Congress approves $12 billion in two to three days of the hurricane, and two weeks later, none of the communities whose population has swollen by 25,000 has received any of that money, you have to wonder what is going on," she said. "Is it a bureaucratic problem? It sounds like it is."

Bruce Hunter of the American Association of School Administrators, who has heard from numerous school superintendents in the hardest-hit states, said many school districts in Louisiana and neighboring states are struggling to cope with the tide of evacuees.