Bodies Are Strewn 'Like Roadkill'
The dilemma is not restricted to the civilian population. Watts said a distraught New Orleans police officer shot and killed himself at a staging area in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, on Friday night.
"We didn't even have a body bag to put him in," Watts said.
Sixty-five miles northwest of New Orleans in the small town of St. Gabriel, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has set up a mortuary in a private warehouse.
Police guarding the entrance would not let anyone pass. But the mayor, George Grace, said he believed bodies were already arriving in refrigerated tractor-trailers.
With a population of only 5,000, the town is too small to offer any assistance to hurricane survivors, Grace said. "I wasn't able to help the living," the mayor said, so instead he will "house the dead."