NEW ORLEANS: They might have been mourners in a hearse, so sombre were the passengers in the small bus on Mirabeau Avenue.

Theresa Sandifer shook her head sadly as the bus crawled along. House after ruined house was spray-painted with an “X” and numbers denoting how many people had been found there, dead or alive, after Hurricane Katrina. Sue Stein stifled a gasp at floodwater marks that grazed the roofs of a block of one-story homes. William Thompson glued his gaze to a trim beige house impaled by an oak tree.

No one spoke until the bus rounded a corner onto St. Bernard Avenue, in the Gentilly area. The roof of a wood-frame house from the 1960s sat askew, as if it had been picked up and tossed down at all the wrong angles. The chimney was missing; the doors and windows were blown out. A plywood sign carried a message from a family who had left for good.

“Goodbye, N’awlins, We’ll Miss You,” read Brad Dupuy, the guide on this city’s newest bus excursion.

The ‘devastation tour’, as the three-hour outing is popularly known, brings visitors to some of this city’s most heavily damaged areas, though it skips the almost obliterated Lower 9th Ward. Even in a city that loves to test the limits on tastefulness — a city, after all, that made an industry out of cemetery tours — the idea caused consternation when it was proposed in late December.

A city councilwoman accused the Gray Line franchise of trying to profit from the miseries wrought by Katrina. Some worried that gawkers snapping photos of shattered homes would turn New Orleans into a theme park of destruction. Others chafed at the tour’s brash, formal title: “Hurricane Katrina: America’s Worst Catastrophe!”

But many New Orleanians welcomed the prospect of the public’s seeing first-hand what happened when the city was battered by a Category 4 hurricane, then flooded when man-made levees gave way last August.

Survivors of the storm argued that newspaper pictures and television footage could not capture the magnitude of a disaster spread through 141 of the city’s 181 square miles. The city’s newspaper, the Times-Picayune, editorialized about the value of expeditions designed to be educational, not morbid or sensational.

“It will keep this storm-ravaged region on the national radar,” the paper wrote.

The tour attracts about 300 people per week and has turned out to be a draw for local residents as well. One recent Saturday morning, more than half the 25 passengers on the bus leaving the French Quarter came from the Gulf Coast and the New Orleans region.

Stein, 55, said she was busy for weeks cleaning up storm damage in her home in nearby Kenner. But now she wanted a look at the city where she grew up, so she could keep tabs on sections of New Orleans that have received little attention. Two friends from Kenner joined her on the tour.

“When I first heard about it, I thought it was exploitive,” she said. “Then I got to thinking, so much TV coverage had been focused on just one area, the 9th Ward. People need to know that this touched all of us, everywhere. They need to know how bad it is, all over this city, not just in any one part.”

As the tour got underway, Dupuy, 31, offered a dedication to the “1,000 men, women and children who lost their lives on account of Katrina.” He asked everyone to turn off their cellphones, and said: “We are not here simply to point and gawk at people who lost their property.” And, he said: “We will not be seeing dead bodies on this tour.”

On Canal Street, Dupuy gave a quick lesson in how to spot a floodwater line — ‘yellowish brown horizontal bands’ on the buildings. He noted the many boarded-up buildings and businesses closed five months after the storm.

“Is this where they had all the looting?” asked Thompson, 59. In a sad voice, Dupuy said yes.

Three days before Katrina hit, he said, ‘not too many people were concerned’ about the hurricane. Many in his native city had been through so many storms that they were casual about it, the way Californians yawn about earthquakes, Dupuy said. He and his roommate rode out Katrina in their apartment on Esplanade, not far from downtown, where the flooding was less severe than in many other parts of the city.

His narrative balanced the glories of New Orleans’ past against the misery of its present. Consulting a spiral notebook filled with handwritten notes, Dupuy told passengers that the city has three times as many canals as Venice, Italy, and its leading industry before Katrina was not tourism, but shipping.

The pristine white roof on the Superdome is a patch job, Dupuy said as the bus circled the arena where more than 25,000 people took shelter in chaos for nearly a week. St. Joseph’s, the largest Catholic church in the South, lost many stained-glass windows. The chic River Walk shopping centre, he said, fell prey to looters.

“Oh my,” said Sandifer, a dental assistant in Baton Rouge. One of the dentists she works with, who also had an office on Canal Street, had been telling her about the looting, and about how bad things looked. Seeing it with her own eyes was worse than she had expected.

The dentist lost many patients to Katrina, Sandifer said: “He ended up using his dental records to identify 35 bodies.”

Past the Orleans Parish prison, where about 6,500 inmates were evacuated during the flooding, the bus crossed through the Mid-City and cemetery districts. Dupuy issued a warning as the bus entered the once-prosperous Lakeview area: “Brace yourselves, folks, as we are about to enter one of the hardest-hit areas.”

Large, luxurious homes had become brick-and-stucco skeletons. The formerly vibrant neighbourhood was a ghost town: no cars, no children, no pets — no sign of life, anywhere.

“That is what is so hard to bear,” said Mary E. Carter, 71. “You look out, and you don’t see anyone in these neighbourhoods. And it’s like that for miles.”

The neighbourhood of million-dollar houses overlooking Lake Pontchartrain had been home to Greg Hoffman, vice president of Gray Line New Orleans. Hoffman lost everything. He was also in danger of losing his business. The staff had shrunk from 65 in late August to six in late December. Travellers were avoiding New Orleans.

When his employees first broached the disaster tour, Hoffman hesitated. Gray Line sales director Jim Fewell said the idea came to him after he rode his motorcycle around the city a month after the storm. The experience so upset him that he did not sleep for a week. Then he realized that what he had seen could help others understand what had happened in New Orleans.

Fewell convinced Hoffman that a tour could be done with dignity. Buses would not stop, and passengers would not be allowed to explore the ruins. He argued that exploitation was about cheap tourist merchandise — T-shirts that laud the looters by boasting, “I Survived Katrina, and All I Got Was This T-shirt … and a Plasma TV” — not about bringing people to see the ruined city.

He said visitors would want to see the damage, just as travellers want to see the sites of the bombed-out Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or the World Trade Centre in New York.

“Yes, certainly, part of it was we wanted to get back to work,” Fewell said. “But we also needed to tell the story. This is a defining moment in the history of New Orleans.”—Dawn/Los Angeles Times News Service