One year ago today, Hurricane Katrina smashed into New Orleans.

The tourists may be back in Bourbon Street now, but a few blocks away the remains of the city look like a war zone with bodies still being pulled out of the wreckage.

Katrina's winds may have died a year ago, but they left deep scars wrecked streets, destroyed forests and the mobile homes spread across the southern US that house many of the city's former residents.

Katrina hit on August 29 last year, yet, a year later, life on the coastline of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is still a nightmare.

Rebuilding scarcely seems to have begun. Gaunt ruins stretch for miles through a disaster area the size of Britain.

Billions of dollars promised by the government to fix New Orleans' crumbling infrastructure have gone largely untapped for the past year.

City officials complain that a snarl of red tape, restrictions and unexpectedly high costs have kept hundreds of public buildings in disrepair, streets pocked with potholes and parks too dirty for children to play in.

So far, the city has collected only US$117 million to start the repair work. An estimated US$25 billion is needed.

President Bush is in New Orleans today, attending a church service to mark the anniversary of the city's destruction and meeting with mayor Ray Nagin and other city officials.

His visit comes after a speech when he admitted the government had been unprepared to respond to the storm.

"We will stay until the job is done," Bush pledged in a radio address on Saturday.

But Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, accused the administration of failing in its hurricane response.

"Countless neighborhoods appear as if the hurricane was just yesterday and they serve as harsh reminders of how our nation was so unprepared," she said.

Outside of New Orleans in the cities, towns and villages the dot the Deep South's coast things are, if possible, even worse.

In Waveland, once a popular retirement community, many houses have yet to be repaired.

Yet retiree Jack Hyman, 72, is determined to stay. He and his wife live in a trailer supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in what used to be their front yard.

"It was like Katrina was a big bowling ball, and it just bowled down all these houses," he says, a trace of awe in his voice.

On Bourbon Street, in the heart of New Orleans' French Quarter, the partying tourists down cocktails and try not to think about the carnage.

Yet only a 15-minute stroll from home of jazz's clubs and bars the wreckage begins. Ruins vary from small wooden homes to gigantic shopping malls lining the freeway to Mississippi. At one point a huge theme park sits abandoned, complete with a dead roller-coaster jutting up like the bones of a gigantic dinosaur.

And Katrina didn't just destroy buildings the justice system has also collapsed.

So far this year there have been 83 murders and only a single trial. Drug problems have increased, rents have skyrocketed.

An American diaspora

Hundreds of thousands of citizens have not returned. Katrina blew them away, and away they stayed.

In an anonymous suburb of Houston, 650 kilometres away, Dana Patterson sits in an empty bungalow. She is part of an American diaspora the Katrina evacuees.

Patterson leads a ghost life. She and her family once lived near the Mississippi, where the river makes a slow, sluggish bend.

But their homes were ruined and they ended up among more than 250,000 refugees in Houston.

Life has been hard. They have no car and Houston has little public transport so they are marooned in suburbia. Employers won't take her on until she gets a car.

Yet there is hope for New Orleans. It lies not with President Bush's year of pledges, but with the many ordinary Americans who still flock to help.

Hyman's house and those of two of his neighbours are being rebuilt by church volunteers.

Among the volunteers is Stephanie Bronner, 22, who cycled 1,500 miles from Boston to Waveland to help. "I felt a calling to come and do something," she says.

Source: China Daily