Bush tries to repair hurricane damage to his presidency

NEW ORLEANS - Facing the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, George Bush took his first close-up tour of a devastated New Orleans in what appeared to be as much a political damage limitation exercise as an opportunity to size up the physical damage from Hurricane Katrina.

The tour came as the death toll climbed past 500, including 45 bodies found in a New Orleans Memorial Medical Centre hospital which was evacuated a week ago after it was surrounded by floodwaters, AP reported.

Fifty-four per cent of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of the response to Katrina, according to two polls released today - one by ABC News/Washington Post and the other by CNN/USA Today/Gallup.

Almost all of the President's public remarks during his tour were defensive - denying there was any racial bias in the way the federal authorities responded to the victims in a predominantly poor, black city, and denying the war in Iraq had in any way drained away resources from rescue efforts.

"The storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort," he insisted, despite vocal criticism from black New Orleans residents, civil rights leaders and some Democrats that the government would have moved more quickly if the stricken area had been whiter and richer.

"Preposterous" was his response to the widespread charge that the war in Iraq had depleted the National Guard and diverted resources from disaster management.

The President even sought to defend his now-notorious comment that nobody could have foreseen the levees breaking - an observation contradicted by years of government studies and a simulation exercise by his administration last year.

He told reporters he was referring only to the "sense of relaxation in a critical moment" in the aftermath of Katrina, when it appeared initially New Orleans had been spared the worst.

The director of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency Michael Brown resigned today after being recalled to Washington amid criticism of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

In an apparent nod to demands that Brown be replaced by someone with experience in emergency response, the President replaced Brown with David Paulison, the former Miami fire chief with 30 years of fire rescue service experience who now runs FEMA's preparedness division.

Bush had praised Brown for doing a "heck of a job" in the first days of the disaster that killed hundreds in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and displaced 1 million people. He later was pressed by Democrats and others to fire Brown.

During the President's tour he did little talking, focusing on discussions with officials, in particular the Mayor of the city, Ray Nagin, who has been one of his most outspoken critics, and on seeing the flood damage for himself.

Dressed in crisp shirt-sleeves, he looked, from the moment he emerged from Air Force One, like a man ready and determined to get down to work.

"We're moving on; we're going to solve these problems," he said.

This was the President's third visit to the hurricane-battered region but his first to New Orleans, now virtually a ghost city apart from the heavy presence of armed police and military personnel.

Many of the residents most angry at the failures of his government's response, who might have turned an earlier trip to the city into a furious heckling exercise, are long gone. His visit coincided, rather, with a modest rise in New Orleans' fortunes.

The airport reopened for cargo traffic on Sunday and is expected to resume limited commercial flights today.

The US Army Corps of Engineers reports that water levels are going down faster than expected and that the entire city may be drained as soon as the beginning of next month.

Business owners in the dry parts of the city - encompassing the central business district and the tourist areas of the French Quarter - were also invited back for the first time yesterday to inspect their properties and retrieve documents and stock.

The President spent the night on the aircraft carrier Iwo Jima, docked at New Orleans and serving as a command and control centre for the federal disaster response. He spent Sunday afternoon huddled with key local leaders including Mr Nagin, Governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana and Lieutenant General Russel Honore, the senior local military commander.

All parties appeared interested in mending fences after a fraught week in which state and local officials have heaped blame on the federal government for compounding the hurricane disaster, and federal officials, including the White House spokesman, have simply lobbed the blame back in the other direction.

President Bush also toured a staging area for the military and first-responder teams and took care, on the fourth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Centre, to meet and greet representatives of the New York fire department now stationed in southeastern Louisiana.

The tour, in a four-vehicle convoy, took him through the poorer residential neighbourhoods where streets have turned into foul-smelling stagnant pools with downed trees and power lines and a growing number of markings to indicate which houses have been searched and how many bodies found inside.

Despite dire predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans alone, it now appears the death toll was considerably lower. The official body count runs to just a few hundred all along the Gulf coast, but the collection of bodies has only just begun, making it one of the deadliest hurricanes in the United States in a century. One million people in the region have been displaced by the disaster.

The storm could also be the costliest natural disaster in US history. Estimates range from US$100 billion to US$200 billion. Congress has approved US$62.3 billion so far for hurricane relief.

Congress passed legislation that more than doubled the borrowing authority of the government's flood insurance programme to US$3.5 ($5.03) billion, to pay storm-related claims. The insurance pays up to US$250,000 for residential buildings and another US$100,000 for contents, though many people in the affected areas did not have the coverage.

- INDEPENDENT and REUTERS