Backwater town plays host to ghosts of New Orleans

They are expecting guests in the tiny Louisiana town of St Gabriel, at least 10,000 expected to arrive by the truckload.

Each will be assigned an escort to oversee their stay; the touch of a stranger who cares. But they will not see what the locals see - the whispering fields of green sugar cane, the sun casting its glow over the Mississippi River that runs past the end of the street. Instead, they will lay silently in rows, their bodies broken and bloated.

This is the place where the dead of New Orleans will be given numbers - and the lucky ones names. In a warehouse tucked behind St Gabriel's town hall, teams of morticians and forensic experts have begun the gruesome task of processing and identifying the dead.

Corpses are being slowly retrieved and the numbers so far counted in the dozens. Only when the flood has subsided will the scale of the horror be revealed. 'It's going to be awful and it's going to wake the nation up again,' New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned.

The remains of thousands who did not escape the hurricane and flood are submerged in the sea of oily black water that fills parts of the city up to the rooftops, or lying in unseen hiding places such as attics, decaying in the stifling heat.

Some will simply become carrion for the packs of wild dogs, or rot away in a cloud of flies. Those that are picked up will make it to St Gabriel, a small town 100km west of New Orleans. In the 1920s it was home to a leper colony.