Katrina shocks New Orleans visitors 10 months on

New Orleans, July 3 : Bill Friend thought he was ready to go home again. He had read the newspapers, watched TV and talked with friends about the devastation wreaked on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

Still, he was shocked.

''You go down street after street after street and see nothing -- wreckage,'' said Friend, 80, who grew up in New Orleans and now lives in the Washington area. ''The overall impression of it is how much of it there is.'' Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, flooding 80 per cent of the city and killing more than 1,500 from Louisiana in one of the worst natural disasters the country has seen. So far, only about half the population has returned and vast stretches of the city are nearly deserted and still full of debris.

''Ten months later, you come away with the impression that the cleanup is only beginning,'' said Friend's wife, Louise. ''Oh my goodness, where does anyone start?'' For visitors new to New Orleans, the storm appears to have just passed.

Residents see changes every day -- a store opens, stoplights work at an intersection with temporary stop signs, a government trailer shows up in the front yard of a damaged home in a sign that it will be reclaimed and rebuilt.

But visitors see other things -- such as the word ''Baghdad'' scrawled in black spray paint across a broken house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where it has been for months.

There is the roughly six-foot-high dirty bathtub ring around miles of houses in areas flooded for weeks.

And many houses remain barely standing, twisted by the force of the storm in areas where Katrina broke through levees and saturated the city with putrid water.

''The devastation, the totality and the enormity of it is just so heartbreaking. If this were hit in a carpet-bombing of a war you couldn't have more devastation,'' US Sen George Allen of Virginia said during a visit just over a week ago.

BEYOND THE FRENCH QUARTER

Many believe they have seen great progress when they arrive, since the tourist centers of the airport, the French Quarter and the Garden District of old mansions survived relatively well. The most historic sections of the city are on the highest ground. Walter Dupart, 53, remembers when his son's father-in-law arrived. ''He said, man, looks like New Orleans is coming back, and I kind of chuckled,'' Dupart said.

So they got in the car and began what has become the city's unofficial tour, viewing the Lower Ninth Ward, where a barge floated through a canal breach and houses still lie smashed.

The tour continued through St Bernard Parish, which includes more than 16 km of shopping malls, restaurants and houses, almost every one a deserted hulk that was flooded.

Up toward Lake Pontchartrain, where other levees breached, gutted houses await repair next to wrecks moved off their foundations. An ancient oak tree sprawled onto one yard and house does not appear to have been touched by cleanup crews.

Dupart, who lives in the once-flooded Gentilly neighborhood, remembers the reaction of his friend, a soldier on leave from Iraq.

'''The only way I can describe it is this is like the war zone I just left,''' the visitor had said.

Some are puzzled, angry or indignant at the lack of progress.

Insurance money has begun flowing but direct aid to homeowners is not expected before the fall, and views of government's leadership vary sharply among residents.

Thailand-based relief worker Tom Kerr recalled tsunami devastation in Aceh, Indonesia, when he saw the Ninth Ward. ''It looked a lot like Aceh when we visited six months after the storm,'' he said, asking why the United States had not done more.

''Most of the area could be improved very quickly, but it is deserted,'' said Somsook Boonyabancha, a colleague who is director of the Thai relief group. ''If I was the government, I couldn't sleep at night.''

Reuters