Rescuers collect dead

Emergency workers collected the dead of New Orleans yesterday and the official death toll rose slowly, boosting hopes Hurricane Katrina would claim far fewer lives than the thousands once feared.

As police and soldiers started to remove the bodies - many in homes marked with paint to identify their presence when floodwaters were high - President George W. Bush invoked the spirit that united the nation after the September 11 attacks.

"Today, America is confronting another disaster that has caused destruction and loss of life. This time the devastation resulted not from the malice of evil men, but from the fury of water and wind," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

"America will overcome this ordeal, and we will be stronger for it," he said on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington that killed some 2,700 people.

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals raised the official hurricane death toll for the state to 154. In Mississippi, 211 people were confirmed dead. There was no updated official figure from Alabama, which also sustained considerable damage in the August 29 storm.

Some officials had warned of a death toll as high as 10,000 in the first chaotic days after the hurricane, which displaced around a million people.

Police and rescue teams, seeing corpses floating in New Orleans' flooded streets, feared many more would be discovered trapped in houses when the waters receded.

"There's some encouragement in the initial sweeps... The numbers (of dead) so far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000," Col. Terry Ebbert, director of Homeland Security for New Orleans, said on Friday.

There were more signs of recovery around New Orleans. Plaquemines parish, which covers territory in the Mississippi Delta south of the city, said it would lift the mandatory evacuation order for part of the parish today.

Entergy Corporation reported it has restored power to two-thirds of its 1.1 million customers in Mississippi and Louisiana but warned it might take months to bring power back to all of New Orleans, parts of which remained under several feet of fetid, polluted water.

Looting and violence, which erupted in the days after the storm, were also under control.

"The security situation has stabilised in about the last 72 hours and has got better every day, said Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux of the Louisiana National Guard."

A Louisiana policeman said crime at this point was "nil". City business leaders were trying to organise a comeback. Executives aimed to reopen the French Quarter tourist mecca within 90 days and hold a scaled-down Mardi Gras carnival in late February.

Some federal officials have put the cost of the storm at between $100 billion and $200 billion.

Congress has now approved $62.3 billion for hurricane relief sought by Bush, who warned further requests will come.