NEW ORLEANS -- As she hobbled ashore from a rubber dinghy in the baking heat and up a freeway ramp, cradling her four-month-old grandson Moses, 40-year-old Samantha Egana voiced nothing but heartfelt thanks.
Back in her ruined, waterlogged home were all her pets -- cats, a dog, a parakeet and hamsters -- which will likely starve to death. She was hungry and thirsty. She didn't know where her husband was. She had no idea what the future held.
But after being trapped for almost a week in eastern New Orleans, the section of the city hit hardest by last Tuesday's devastating flood, Ms. Egana and the rest of her family had finally been granted deliverance.
"God is good," she said, barely audible amid the roaring thwack of helicopter blades as chopper after chopper alighted on the debris-strewn Interstate 10 to pick up the evacuees. "We're finally out of there. It was horrible, horrible. We had nothing."
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Ms. Egana had reason to be grateful. As far as the eye could see stretched a desolate lake of greasy, garbage-filled water reaching halfway up the old clapboard houses where many of her neighbours remain, dead and alive, and concealing a body count that could run into the thousands, possibly tens of thousands.
In nearby Baton Rouge, a police officer said he was told that 30,000 body bags have been ordered.
No less thankful to survive are all the other people who made it through their ordeal in their homes or at the nightmarish evacuation centres in the city, where gangs roamed in the darkness, preying on the most vulnerable.
But along with the release is a fierce anger over what happened, and what was allowed to happen when the levees of New Orleans crumbled and sent the waters of Lake Pontchartrain pouring across.
And that rage and despair boils down to two questions: In the richest country in the world, how is it possible that a long-predicted disaster could bring a world-famous city like New Orleans to its knees? Second, why was the response so torturously slow?
The quick and easy answer is that a range of negatives blended into a toxic brew whose dimensions were unprecedented.
"I put this at the door of [state governor Kathleen] Blanco," said a policewoman who, like dozens of colleagues, quit the force in disgust last week, furious at having to perform a job with so little training and so few resources that over the weekend there were radio appeals for citizens to donate socks to the police.
"They knew that levee was in big trouble and they could have reinforced it, they had enough time."
The New Orleans police force, many of whose members lost their own homes, is also getting much blame for its perceived indifference as gangs of looters ran riot, buildings burned and the city sank into lawlessness.
Cumbersome state bureaucracy and shoddy communication, particularly radio communications between different agencies, are also being singled out.
Poverty, too, undoubtedly played a part. New Orleans's mostly black population comprises one of the poorest communities in the country, and when told to leave the city as Katrina approached, many failed to do so because they had no cars and no way of getting out.
But the central villain of the piece, in the judgment of almost everybody here, is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which heads up the disaster response.
FEMA was created in 1979 by former president Jimmy Carter, but in 2003 it was folded into the new Department of Homeland Security.
Since then, FEMA's many critics say, the overriding federal emphasis on countering terrorism has seen the organization's bureaucracy mushroom, while weakening its ties to state emergency programs and slashing its spending on disaster preparation.
FEMA is led by Michael Brown, a Republican lawyer whose chief organizational experience before joining was as counsel for the International Arabian Horse Federation.
In New Orleans, Mr. Brown took a lot of people's breath away when he admitted to CNN last week that as evacuees at the city's convention centre were struggling and sometimes dying, cut off from the outside world in a spectacle being widely televised, FEMA was unaware of their plight until last Thursday, several days after it began.
Although President George W. Bush proclaimed a state of local emergency two full days before Katrina hit, no one at FEMA, it seems, had any notion of what was about to transpire.
Certainly there was no planning for a mass evacuation.
This despite the fact that in June a widely regarded Louisiana State University engineer issued a report, forwarded to FEMA, expressing worry that parts of the coastline and New Orleans were sinking far quicker than had been realized, posing the risk of a catastrophic flood.
FEMA, it appears, ignored those findings. And even as the floodwaters began coursing into New Orleans last Tuesday state Senator Mary Landrieu says she was still battling to make the agency realize that New Orleans was in major trouble. Nobody wanted to know, Ms. Landrieu says.
"You know what the problem was?" said refugee Gladys Long as she struggled up to the makeshift heliport on Interstate 10, all her worldly belongings carried in two plastic bags.
"The problem was that we're a bunch of poor black people that nobody in Washington gives a damn about. Ain't no Republican votes for Bush down here and he knows that."
Unfair, said New York water engineer Steven Smith, part of the legion of public and private-sector experts who have poured into New Orleans as the rescue and repair effort moves forward.
"Everybody's throwing shit at Bush, but I don't think anyone really saw this coming," he said.
"But hey, I'm a Republican."