'They left us to die, all of us - it was hell'

Key points

• Bush accepts full responsibilty for failures in the wake of Katrina

• Grim discovery of bodies in hospital and old people's home

• No evacuation policy for old or infirm in place prior to hurricane

Key quote

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels, and to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility" - PRESIDENT BUSH

Story in full GEORGE Bush last night said he took "full responsibility" for failures in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as the grim discovery of 45 bodies at an abandoned New Orleans hospital and more than 30 others at an old people's home raised new questions over why the sick, elderly and infirm were not evacuated before the storm hit.

A nurse at the New Orleans hospital yesterday accused his management of abandoning staff and patients to die during the hurricane, as an investigation was opened into the discovery of the corpses on the premises.

Some patients were evacuated in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, but the nurse, who declined to give his name, described scenes of fear and desperation inside Memorial Medical Centre as eight-foot floodwaters rose around the building, stranding many patients and carers on their wards in stifling temperatures.

Nurses battled to keep patients alive in temperatures of 106F after the power supply was knocked out and the fresh-water supply dried up. They struggled to carry many of them down seven flights of stairs, because there was no electricity to run the lifts, and decanted them into boats manned by volunteer rescue crews. After four days, the building reeked of "sewage and death", staff have claimed.

"It was hard. It was hell. It was hot - life-threateningly hot," said the male nurse yesterday, standing in the muddy street outside the red-brick hospital from where the floodwaters have now drained, leaving a foul reek and a tidemark of filth.

"It was bad in there, I find it hard to think about. We were left here to die, all of us - the patients and staff. We had no communication, we had no help from those you'd have expected to help. It was just volunteers coming in, trying to help us get people off on boats."

Tenet Healthcare, which owns the hospital, could not explain yesterday why it did not get all the patients and staff from the 317-bed hospital to safety before the storm. There was also no explanation of how 45 people had died - and why their bodies were only extracted on Sunday, nearly two weeks after the storm hit.

But investigators who are already considering a criminal inquiry into the drowning of 34 residents at the flooded St Rita's Nursing Home in New Orleans's eastern St Bernard Parish will look closely at the circumstances of the hospital deaths and whether the patients could have been moved to safety.

Other staff said they believed that some of the dead may have been cancer patients. When the morgue became full, they piled the bodies in the hospital chapel.

One dietician ripped off his shirt, soaked it in water and pressed it to the head of a dying patient to keep him cool.

Dr Frank Minyard, coroner for Orleans Parish, will perform post-mortem examinations on the bodies. The Louisiana State Department of Health and Hospitals said 45 cadavers had been taken from the building, though Memorial's assistant administrator, Dave Goodson, said there were 44, plus three more that were found in the grounds.

"These patients were not abandoned," Mr Goodson said, describing how family members and staff stood over the sick, fanning them to try to keep them cool.

Around 2,000 people were in the hospital before the storm struck, despite warnings from the National Hurricane Centre that Katrina had gathered steam over the Gulf of Mexico and become a 165mph "monster" capable of wiping out the city.

The storm hit in the early hours of 29 August and the hospital was turned into an island the following day when levees holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain burst.

Joanne Lalla, an oncology nurse, told the Los Angeles Times that she "couldn't understand why nobody was coming to help us" as the days wore on. Helicopters landed on the roof, she said, but they brought more people - many of whom had been plucked from rooftops and one of whom had been stabbed during rioting. Outside, staff could hear the sound of shooting and glass breaking as cars were looted in the hospital garage.

She suspects that many of the dead came from the critical care unit, where patients required life-support equipment that would have relied on an electricity supply. "We had to pile the patients who passed away in the chapel," she added. "We slept in the hall outside the chapel. It was a strong smell. It was the smell of sewage and death."

The male nurse at Memorial Medical Centre claimed that Tenet "is abandoning us again now, just like it did after the storm".

"They are saying they will cut off our benefits and cut off our pay cheques, and that's it and we're on our own," he said.

The discovery of the bodies at the hospital is the largest so far by search crews, and lifted the death toll in Louisiana to 279, and to 512 including other states. The figure is certain to rise further, but officials are hopeful that the final toll will be well short of the 10,000 deaths once feared.

Yesterday, the Foreign Office confirmed that one Briton, a long-term resident of New Orleans, was among the dead.

Meanwhile, Mr Bush said he would accept the blame for the shortcomings in the government's response to the disaster.

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels, and to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," he said.

"I want to know what went right and what went wrong. I want to know how to better cooperate with state and local government to be able to answer that very question that you asked: 'Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack or another severe storm?' And that's a very important question and it's in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on so we can better respond."

As for accusations of mistakes in the federal response, Mr Bush said: "I'm not going to defend the process going in. I am going to defend the people saving lives."

He praised relief workers at all levels. "I want people in America to understand how hard people worked to save lives down there," he said.

Critics have said authorities were too slow to act, waiting several days to send in troops to quell lawlessness in New Orleans and evacuate tens of thousands from the squalor of the Louisiana Superdome, the city's designated shelter of last resort.

The relief operation moved forward with a new leader yesterday following the resignation on Monday of Michael Brown, the beleaguered head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Mr Bush named David Paulison as acting director of FEMA in a bid to win back public support, having seen his popularity rating plummet to 40 per cent, his lowest in more than four and a half years in the White House.

Mr Paulison, a former head of the Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue Department, has considerably more emergency management experience than his predecessor and promised to intensify efforts to find more permanent housing for the tens of thousands of evacuees still living in shelters.