Death awaits for those too scared - or naive - to flee

HE IS somebody's loved one, though we may never know whose. He may have said a prayer as he flailed against the tide, or cried for help as he heaved his portly frame through the rising torrent, searching for higher ground. But no-one answered.

Now his body floats in the fetid floodwaters of New Orleans, rocked by the wake from passing rescue boats that speed back and forth. Their priority is to save lives; there is no time to lay the dead to rest.

So the man in blue jeans and a maroon polo shirt who bobs face down in six feet of water on Airline Drive will remain just another harrowing feature of this city's apocalyptic landscape. He will rot anonymously, or maybe an alligator will end this undignified spectacle.

Below him and around him, there are so many more, uncounted and unseen. The air is rank with the smell of decay.

Perhaps the survivors who now loll at the windows of their homes, waving away the rescue boats and refusing to leave in the mistaken belief that the water will disperse in a day or two, might finally realise the enormity of their predicament if only they could see the corpses.

As we skim along Airline and on to Tulane Drive in an air-boat, we pass straight over the roofs of sunken cars, past a submerged "Jesus is Lord Plumbing Company" truck, through a sea of waterborne refrigerators from an elec-trical store.

We encounter survivors by the dozen, peering from their first-floor windows, and perspiring in the heat. Many are grateful to jump into the boat, or swim through their front doors to reach us.

But others shake their heads, unable to grasp that evacuation is their only hope.

"Now I am not stranded - I have a roof over my head," says one woman as Harold Speed, a volunteer air-boat operator who has come from Oklahoma to assist the search-and-rescue effort, manoeuvres his vessel alongside her window-sill.

Giving her name only as Tina and introducing her new husband Will - whom she married two weeks ago - she explains that she still has some bottled gas left and is busy cooking chips on her stove. At night, they sit around a flickering candle and pray together.

She has heard on the radio that there was violence at the Superdome, and prefers to stay where she is, refusing to believe that the water surrounding her apartment may still be there in 30 days.

"In the Bible, the land was flooded for 40 days and 40 nights and God chose those who survived," says Tina. "I'm trusting him. He never let me down yet."

It is a frustrating scene for Mr Speed and other volunteers like Del Powell, who is riding alongside him with a pistol strapped to his leg in case we run into any of the gangs that have been terrorising the downtown area. "There's a fine line between faith and stupidity," he mutters, as Tina spurns help.

Others follow suit - a man wading in water up to just below his shoulders by City Hall, who says that he cannot leave because his wife wants to stay in their house with their pet dog; a family camped on their first-floor balcony in Baudin Street with an awning to protect them from the scorching sun, an old man in Claiborne Street who shuffles to his window smoking a cigarette and tells us: "Bless you for coming... but no thanks."

The rescuers are in no doubt that those who sit here are doomed unless they accept help. Many boatmen are refusing to hand out water, hoping thirst will ultimately force them out.

"If you give them water, they'll never leave," says Bruce Barton, who is here from Pennsylvania as a volunteer boatman with Rescue International. "Death is just along the road for these people if they stay."