The ways to help the victims:

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Everything New Orleans

American Red Cross

The Humane Society of America

AmeriCares

Feed the Children

President Bush, who flew over flood-stricken areas on Wednesday, compared the devastation to the 11 September 2001 attacks. 

"It is so devastating that it is hard to describe it. 9/11 was a man made attack. This was a natural disaster," he said. (Source: BBC)

Hurricane Katrina will be as big a test for the United States as was the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. 

Even his supporters like columnist Peggy Noonan are concerned that the federal government was a bit slow off the mark. She wrote in the Wall Street Journal: "More was needed in terms of sending a US military presence into New Orleans." 

She asked about Mr Bush: "Does he understand that what has happened in our Gulf is as important as what is happening in the other Gulf?" 

A former official in the Clinton administration, Sydney Blumenthal, has written in Der Spiegel: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the US, including a terrorist attack on New York City. 

"But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war." (Source: BBC)

One man, George Turner, who was still waiting to be evacuated, summed up much of the anger felt by the refugees. 

"Why is it that the most powerful country on the face of the Earth takes so long to help so many sick and so many elderly people," he asked. 

Tens of thousands of people are still waiting to be evacuated 

"Why? That's all I want to ask President Bush." 

And John Rhinehart, the administrator of a New Orleans hospital without power and water, said: "I'm beginning to wonder if the government is more concerned about the looting than people who are dying in these hospitals." (Source: BBC)