The storm-battered state urgently wants its citizens out of refugee shelters and in longer-term accommodation as some may not be able to return home for months, if ever.

But the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) - already facing furious criticism over its handling of the disaster - is not moving fast enough, said Colonel Jeff Smith, of Louisiana's Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

"We have real concerns right now with the assistance we are getting from FEMA on temporary housing," fumed Smith, deputy head of emergency planning in the state.

"We have raised this issue now for days. We do not feel this process is working fast enough," he told reporters in Louisiana's capital Baton Rouge, in an unusually direct official attack on the embattled agency.

"We feel like there needs to be trailers rolling and things happening that are not happening as quickly as they should at this point," Smith said, adding that state officials had complained of the problem to US Vice President Dick Cheney when he visited Baton Rouge last week. "We want our citizens back here."

The criticism came as the administration of US President George W. Bush came under intense fire from politicians and victims over a lack of official preparedness and the grindingly slow pace of the relief effort.

It also followed FEMA chief Michael Brown's removal two days ago as the government point man on the Katrina crisis as he became the focus of a public and political firestorm that has put a severe strain on the administration.

Around one million people were forced to flee after Katrina struck the US Gulf Coast with a vengeance two weeks ago, laying waste to New Orleans and leaving thousands feared dead. Many of the evacuees were left homeless by the storm.

Smith said it was critical to get at least 150,000 Louisianans out of emergency shelters across 10 US states and into temporary apartments or trailers as many may be homeless for the long haul.

"Many areas are not going to be accessible for months, if not indefinitely," he said of the deluged and hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, which has been turned into a corpse-strewn swamp, deserted by all but a few thousands of its residents.

But FEMA so far has failed to come up with a clear plan for supplying trailers or alternative accommodation, he said, just hours before Bush was due to fly into the disaster zone to survey the devastation in New Orleans. "This is massive," Smith said. No one has dealt with this before, but we need to get some housing on the ground.

"Right now we are not talking about shelters per se, what we are looking for is temporary housing. I don't want to slam it too hard, but we've got to get it moving."

FEMA is besieged with claims that it misjudged the severity of the storm and then only managed to get the first relief and evacuation convoys to tens of thousands of stranded New Orleans residents five days after Katrina hit.

Federal, state and local officials have become locked in a "blame game" of pointing fingers at each other over the failures of the effort to relieve epic suffering in the world's richest and most powerful nation.

The New York Times said Sunday the apparent logjam was the result of a virtual standoff between hesitant federal officials and besieged authorities in Louisiana.

Citing interviews with dozens of officials, it said FEMA expected the state and city to direct their own efforts and ask for help as needed, while regional authorities were so overwhelmed that they were unable to manage the crisis.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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