Daughter's safety the perfect Father's Day gift

Natasha Rive (left) and Marianne Lynch.

Lawrence Lynch got his Father's Day wish - a call from his daughter Marianne, who had escaped the chaos of New Orleans and was safe in Dallas.

The call came at 3.30am yesterday: "It was the best Father's Day gift I could get," Mr Lynch said.

Marianne Lynch - one of four young New Zealand women holed up in a New Orleans hotel for five days while chaos raged around them - said it felt like a "really, really bad nightmare".

"I look back now and I can't believe we lived through it," she told TV3 from Dallas, where the group is staying with friends.

"It's one of the scariest things I've done in my life."

With three South African friends, and Kay-Lynn Mann, Stacey Howes and Natasha Rive, all from Auckland, she sheltered in the Ramada Inn in the city.

They shut themselves inside a wardrobe while the storm raged.

Marianne Lynch said that from the relative safety of the hotel, they saw others swept helplessly away by the floodwaters.

"[An old lady] was crying and yelling, 'Help me God, help me Jesus', and she was clinging on to the wall trying to make her way.

"The police and military on airboats going past, everyone who went past just watched her, she was by herself, an old lady."

After five days in the hotel, with no electricity or running water and eating looted food, they were asked to leave, so they abandoned their belongings and waded into the water.

"My worst thing was walking through that water," Marianne Lynch said. "It was black, not even knee-deep, but we couldn't even see what we were standing on."

State paratroopers told them to go to the stadium, but they found a medical bus instead and begged for a ride.

Kay-Lynn Mann said it was "a miracle ... we walked up the road and we walked straight on to a bus".

The girls had completed a three-month stint with Camp America and were holidaying in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck.

Mr Lynch said the girls planned to fly out to Miami in the next couple of days.

In an email to her mother, Natasha Rive, 26, described the horror of living through Hurricane Katrina.

"That city is hell on earth. The hurricane hit Sunday night/Monday morning and we lost power. Me and five others slept in a closet and by Monday evening we were walking the streets and taking photos of the devastation."

The next day everything turned bad when the floodwaters arrived, a mix of "water, toilet waste, rubbish - everything disgusting under the sun and it stank it was so rancid".

For the next five days, she said, they were stuck listening to radio reports of murder and rape as lawlessness took over New Orleans.

Mr Lynch said his daughter described listening to gunfire, helicopters and people screaming in the Superdome, and saw people walking around with machine guns.

"She said people were jumping off the bridge, committing suicide."

She was calm when he spoke to her after she had arrived in Dallas.

Another New Zealand woman, who escaped New Orleans with the help of an Australian news crew, slated United States authorities for their response to the crisis.

Cynthia Miller told Channel 7 that she and her husband, Gary Jones, had sheltered at a shopping mall, where they had looted food to survive. "It's put me right off America."

Rob Hole of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said all New Zealanders in the area had been accounted for.

The US Embassy in Wellington was advising New Zealanders wanting to help to put off packing their bags for New Orleans.

Mr Hole said American officials were trying to keep well-intentioned people away.

- additional reporting NZPA