Katrina survivor found after almost three weeks

NEW ORLEANS - Rescue workers combing hard-hit New Orleans neighbourhoods today found a survivor who had camped out in his home since Hurricane Katrina.

The discovery of survivor Reyne Johnson nearly three weeks after Katrina ripped southern Louisiana and Mississippi relieved the search crews, who had been finding more and more corpses as floodwaters that forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee the historic city recede.

The Louisiana death toll rose to 646 on Sunday, bringing the total dead from Katrina to 883, including 218 in Mississippi and 19 combined in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee.

Johnson, 39, and his dog were discovered in his small house in an impoverished section of eastern New Orleans caked with mud by the flood.

"I'm doing a little better now," said Johnson, who appeared disoriented after he answered rescuers' knock.

He was the first survivor found since a 76-year-old was rescued on Friday. Search and rescue teams had suspected someone was in Johnson's home and had been leaving food and water, but he had not responded to earlier attempts to make contact.

"Everybody just scared me," Johnson explained. "Since the flood, I was sitting there."

Staff Sgt. Robert Andrade, a National Guardsman from Oregon: "We were pretty stoked to see somebody in there we could help out."

The rescue was a bright spot in a day when uncertainty clouded New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin's plan to reopen parts of the city to residents. Nagin said New Orleans, formerly home to half a million people but mostly abandoned, needs to start returning to life.

Nagin has said people in areas less affected by Katrina could begin returning home on Monday, but Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, head of the federal recovery efforts in New Orleans, insisted the city was not ready.

He said the lack of drinkable water, sewage and electricity in much of New Orleans posed health problems and another storm would put people in danger because Katrina had breached levees that protect the low-lying city from Lake Pontchartrain.

Allen said he and Nagin planned to meet on Monday.

- REUTERS