Two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still licking its wounds but efforts are being made to bring back the tourists that once made the Big Easy a major draw.

But one enterprising resident, Pamela Pipes, has released the first audio guide to the disaster and its aftermath.

"When Katrina hit, I was out of business, I was in exile. I slept in 16 beds before I came back. My home was not flooded, but (I had) no phone, no electricity for six months. There were no women in the city, mostly men," recalls Pipes, a seventh-generation new Orleans resident.

More than two years on, much of the sultry city famed for its jazz and Creole cooking still lies abandoned after seas whipped up by the hurricane breached its levees on 29 August 2005.

While parts of the city, such as the famous French Quarter, survived thanks to their slightly higher elevation, much has been left to rot.

Pipes has now produced "Hurricane Katrina: Self-guided tour — witness devastation and progress and learn her lessons for all of us" as part of a bid to entice the tourists back.

80 percent of the city was left uninhabitable

"I wanted to be a witness so the people know what happened," Pipes told AFP, noting: "It's not an easy tour. I've sold thousands of them, and people are doing it."

New Orleans expects six million visitors in 2007, almost twice the number who came in 2006 but still well below the 10-million-a-year before the disaster.

Some 80 percent of the city was left uninhabitable by Katrina and thousands of Louisiana families are still living in cramped government-supplied trailers.

Billions of dollars in federal aid remains wrapped up in bureaucratic red tape and blame is flying in all directions. The musicians and artists who made the jazz mecca unlike any other place in the country are struggling with exorbitant rents, rising utilities costs, high insurance, spiking property taxes and violent crime.

A recent government study found that mental illness has doubled among Gulf Coast residents and there is a surge in the number of people considering suicide. New Orleans, which still has only 275 000 residents, has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the United States.

Some 1600 people were killed, and almost half the city's residents who fled did not come back. Even more than two years on, tour "buses are not allowed in (the devastated) Lower 9th Ward, it doesn't look right," explained Pipes.

Half the residents who fled did not return

On her anecdote-packed tour, one stop is in front of an abandoned house, where curious visitors can see the opening in the roof through which its desperate owners fled for help.

On the facades of homes, writing in blood red paint by rescue workers remains as clear as the day it was written, including the date authorities passed by and the number of bodies they found.

Further on, Pipes voice, to the strains of dramatic music, indicates the high water lines on porch pillars well over the height of the average person. Putting together the tour was not easy, Pipes says.

"It's not like doing a tour of colonial Williamsburg where everything has been the same for hundreds of years. When I started to do the tour, every day something changed. I would write about the pumps and then the next day the pumps were destroyed because they didn't work. It was like a moving target," she recalled.

The commentary tells a tale focusing on an engineering fault in the design of the levees and the US federal government's sluggish response.

It details the city's geography, topography, canals, elevation and the location of levees. It takes visitors to the spots where the levees burst.

Some locations are familiar, like the Superdome, the huge stadium shown on television which took in thousands of refugees, or a blue boat used to rescue locals. For some streets, Pipes had to put up new street signs so people on her tour would not get lost.

"I went to a sign shop. I needed 30 street signs. I paid with my own money. I didn't want my visitors to get lost. You know, this is a citizen-driven recovery. The citizens are doing what has to be done. We are fighting together to get back," she said.

AFP