BATON ROUGE, Sept 1: Stretched relief services flailed away at a vast refugee crisis developing, unbelievably, within US borders, following a human exodus from Hurricane Katrina.

Scenes emerged of desperation, deprivation and human agony, which Americans are used to seeing only on their television screens from the world’s hotspots.

“It’s the Third World,” said one medical professional.

A huge operation was underway to pull out people still marooned in the swamped city of New Orleans, but the evacuation was badly hampered by poor communications and rising anarchy as a National Guardsman was shot and wounded and a helicopter came under fire.

As the strain on already underfunded and inadequate infrastructure along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, became critical, wild rumors flew of a building crime wave, allegedly blamed on desperate evacuees.

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator David Fukatomi meanwhile said airdrops had been launched to bring food and water to areas of Mississippi still cut off under fallen trees.

People who fled the hurricane in a mass evacuation on Sunday were stuffed, sometimes many to a room in hotels, roadside motels and homes of relatives in southern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

But thousands of people appeared to still be trapped by floodwaters, according to officials, with reports circulating of rotting bodies being left for days in steaming hot summer weather.

Not a room was to be found within a 250-mile (400-kilometre) radius of New Orleans, and many of those already in hastily booked accommodation found money fast running out.

“The majority of hotels have been cooperative,” said Angele Davis, secretary of the Louisiana department of culture, tourism and recreation.

“We strongly urge them to continue to accept them,” she said at an emergency operations center set up in Baton Rouge.

But there were reports that some local hoteliers were asking evacuees to leave by Friday, and as afar afield as Houston, Texas, a five hour drive to the west, there were isolated incidents of hotels raising prices.

“We are working to try to get hotels to keep their doors open so these people can stay there as long as possible,” said Louisiana Lieutentant Governor Mitch Landrieu.

Up to 20,000 displaced people were being taken in a 500-strong fleet of buses from the hurricane scarred Superdome, where they had taken refuge from Katrina, to another cavernous sports arena, the Astrodome in Houston.

And he acknowledged the situation outside the Superdome, where authorities said trash fires were burning was “critical.”—AFP