By Francis Temman

St Gabriel, Louisiana - "I just want to find my parents and put them to rest," says Randolph Fazande, standing outside a huge improvised morgue in a small town near the shattered US city of New Orleans.

For days he has been going back and forth in a daze, trying to find the remains of his parents. But a police officer, a bulky black man standing guard in front of the morgue at St Gabriel, about 30km south-east of Baton Rouge, is implacable.

Randolph, a man with a wrinkled face, graying mustache, sunglasses and a baseball cap, has every reason to believe that both his parents died in the disaster, but he is not being allowed in.

'The only thing I know is that my parents are dead'

People like him should call a special number reserved for family members, according to an announcement pinned to a bulletin board.

But once he dials the number, an employee of the Find Family Phone Bank tells him that at the moment there is nothing she can do for him, and refers the case to a different service.

She writes down his name and number and promises to call him back.

"This is a mess. It's one big joke," explains Randolph, hanging up the phone. "Every number you call, nobody knows anything. It's chaos."

His parents Alvin and Bernadette Fazande, both 78, were poor. They lived in a modest home in the eastern part of New Orleans.

Randolph says he was speaking on the phone to his father shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit the region, when water began pouring into his parents' garden.

He urged them to move to the second floor, but a few minutes later, the water reached his father's waist, and the conversation was cut off.

Since his parents had neither food nor water in stock, he believes it is most likely that they died in their attic, most likely from heat exposure.

He alerted emergency services as quickly as he could. A rescue team sent to the house in a boat two and a half days later confirmed seeing two motionless bodies floating inside it.

They should have been retrieved later. But he has not received any news since then.

A long truck convoy turns the corner and moves toward the morgue. Three massive 18-wheelers, preceded by a police truck with flashing lights, roll in, bringing the day's macabre load in their refrigerators. These are bodies most recently picked up on the streets of New Orleans and its suburbs.

St Gabriel, a hamlet sandwiched between the Mississippi River and sugar cane fields, is now home to a makeshift morgue set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to receive the bodies of victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The massive hangar surrounded by barbed wire can hold up to 607 corpses. Coroners can process more than 140 sets of remains per day.

It is now almost three weeks since the day the killer storm struck, and the influx of refrigerator trucks has not abated.

Nobody is allowed to videotape or take still photos of the procedures. Authorities insist the ban was instituted out of respect for the victims in order to preserve their "dignity". However, the needs of those mourning the deaths of their loved ones don't seem to have been addressed.

It is difficult to mourn in these circumstances. "The only thing I know is that my parents are dead," angrily remarks Randolph.

The anguish caused by the lack of information is being compounded by the sight of truckloads of bodies being brought here in plastic bags.

It hurts Randolph to think that he may not be able to offer his parent a traditional, dignified burial because nobody knows when the New Orleans cemeteries will re-open.

But he know there will be no horse-drawn carriage, or open caskets or jazz musicians.

The days when New Orleans followed that tradition are gone, at least for the time being. - Sapa-AFP