Fifteen days on from Hurricane Katrina and its deadly storm surge, snapshots of daily life returned in some quarters but the city was still a surreal place, patrolled by troops, and with its lifeblood nightlife zone muted.

One family, originally from Honduras, took advantage of a permit from city authorities allowing business owners to survey their properties, to check on their Latino record store.

They found a tangle of wreckage in a shop smashed by looters, then consumed by the rising floods, which left a six-foot (1.8 metres) layer of slime inside.

"We have lost everything," said store owner Nilton Martinez.

"They came in and smashed it all up. Then the waters came in and ruined what was left. It stinks," he said shaking his head.

"What can we do? It's gone."

Martinez family members salvaged what little they could. A glass sign with the words "Open" defied looters and floods, but much of the job involved pulling mud-soaked CDs off the shelves.

Next door, water seeped out of a looted Latino bar. Beer bottles empty, and often smashed, littered the floor outside.

To the native eye, floodwaters appeared to be receding fast. One intersection of the I-10 highway, heading north to Lake Pontchartrain, which was six feet deep (1.8 metres) in water on Sunday was nearly dry.

On either side of the road, the waters had revealed two of the city's stately cemeteries, where the dead are buried in tombs above the ground, as the area is too flood-prone and the soil too moist to inter them.

While the rich of New Orleans merit elaborate tombs, the poor have to make do with four- or five-storey graves, thin tombs just bigger than a coffin.

One such cemetery, with its racks of dead, in the deprived Ninth Ward also emerged from the floods in recent days.

In some streets throughout the city, camouflaged army bulldozers worked to clear fallen tree limbs, and "Bobcat" skid steer loader machines pushed piles of garbage to one side to clear a path for cars.

Evidence of the city's agony, two weeks ago, when thousands of stranded people waited to be rescued in fierce heat was everywhere, even though the site of some of the worst scenes, the Convention Center, has been cleared up.

Piles of blankets, empty water bottles, mattresses and garbage littered the slip road to the I-10 elevated highway, where people had huddled awaiting rescue from the rising floods, in fierce heat.

Someone had written on the road the words "Need Water Now. Help" to attract passing helicopters. Discarded face masks and rubber gloves told the story of rescue workers who had attempted to ease the suffering.

Every day, acres more ruined houses and mud-fouled streets are ceded by retreating floods which once covered 80 percent of New Orleans.

A top environmental official said Tuesday that many people would be prevented from returning to their homes for months after testing showed high levels of bacteria, air pollution and chemical spillage, left by the waters.

"Right now it's going to be a while before the areas that were flooded will see people moving back," Mike McDaniel, head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, told reporters in nearby Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Residents would however be allowed to return briefly to pick up any surviving possessions, he said a day after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said residents would be able to begin returning by Monday.

"They will go block by block to allow people to come back and pick up their personal effects, but ultimately the homes are going to have to be disposed of," McDaniel said.

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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