Set down on dry land after three days cowering atop furniture in her flooded kitchen, 83-year-old Camille Fletcher stumbled a few metres and collapsed. She and two of her children had made it through Hurricane Katrina alive, but her Glendalyn with the long, beautiful black hair was gone.

"My precious daughter," Fletcher sobbed on Wednesday. "I prayed to God to keep us safe in his loving care."

Then, looking into an incongruously blue sky, she whimpered: "You are supposed to be a loving God. You are supposed to love us. And what have you done to us? Why did you do this to us?"

But for the rescuers who plucked Fletcher and untold others from roofs, balconies and highways flooded by Hurricane Katrina, such questions were a luxury they simply could not afford.

Emergency officials say 72 hours is about the longest they can expect most people to last in the sweltering Louisiana heat. So they called in volunteers from across this "fisherman's paradise" to help improve the survivors' odds.

At dawn, a motley armada of air boats, aluminum skiffs and even a two-seater Jet Ski moved out from the central business district. Heading east in the westbound lanes of Interstate 10, the boats passed the Superdome, where hundreds of ragged people stood on the hot pavement and helicopters buzzed around.

Many of the displaced had clearly spent the night on the highway rather than suffer the stable-like conditions of the sports stadium.

The caravan passed people dragging suitcases and pushing shopping carts. One man waved an empty water jug like a railroad lantern, pleading for someone to stop and fill it.

After nearly an hour of zigzagging around downed lampposts and plowing through water up to past their wheel wells, the volunteer navy arrived at a staging point in New Orleans East, just south of Lake Pontchartrain.

Within minutes of launching, the men were returning with sunken-eyed, sallow-skinned survivors.

The boats circled a Day's Inn hotel, where people had hung sheets on the balconies reading, "SOS." and "We need food and water." At Forest Tower, a high-rise senior citizens apartment complex, one man waved his empty oxygen tank out a window.

A boat floated through the building's shattered entrance and pulled right up to the stairs. Elderly residents stepped gingerly onto tables and into the boats.

At the nearby United Medical Rehab Hospital, 14 patients, 11 staff members and their families awaited their saviours.

Nurse Bernadette Shine said the facility was nearly out of oxygen, and several diabetic patients had been without dialysis for nearly a week. After the fruit cocktail and peanut butter ran out, the staff broke into the candy and drink machines for sugary items to keep patients from going into shock.

After several hours, a small fleet of rented moving trucks showed up to take the people to the downtown convention centre so they could be taken out of the city. Police herded people up metal ramps like cattle into the unrefrigerated boxes.

Source: China Daily