I counted 10 helicopters swooping between the tightly packed towers in the New Orleans hotel ahead of me. They were flying through black smoke billowing from fires below. There was no sign of normal life around.

Even before I saw the flood water and the soon to be refugees, I was having a flash back to an apocalyptic day in the fall of 1992. I was driving into downtown Sarajevo during the Bosnian war where wind-whipped smoke was driving horizontally across the sky from the burning buildings. The only people I could see where cowering in the gutter to escape the rockets.

But this was different. This was America. And it shouldn't be happening. Right? The luxury of those thoughts lasted seconds. Soon we were driving past the tall hotels, picking our way through fallen masonry and crushed cars. All the while wary of the bands of armed looters we'd heard about.

But where to start? Where to begin? We'd bought a boat and a palatial RV, a home on wheels with a double bed, a shower, TV, refrigerator, stove and, most important of all, air conditioning - luxuries unimaginable when covering a war zone. But that was the reality of what we were facing. A modern city with no electricity, no communications, brought to its knees by nature and, as we were to find out, by bureaucratic fumbling.

We parked up on the tram tracks on Canal Street next to uprooted palm trees and just across the road from up-market Brooks Brothers outfitters and the prestigious Saks Fifth Avenue store.

Barely had we got our satellite phones set for our first live report and people were asking us for water. They were never malevolent most seemed to ask out of desperation. Weary families trudged past us: fathers leading the way, children clutching their most treasured possessions. The youngest, it seemed, always bringing up the rear.

How many times have I seen this? In 1993 I stood in Goma in what was then Zaire and watched hundreds of thousands of families' stream out of war torn Rwanda. The families I saw here looked the same. The same as the Kosovars I watched on the border in Albania making the painful transition from home owner to helpless refugee in 1999.

The sight never gets any easier, the expressions of the newly homeless no easier to stomach. New Orleans was no different. But why are they forced to walk up the street? Why hasn't rescue transportation been provided? Despite the visual reminders, this is not a war zone. This is America.

The Mayor, when I found him in the fetid Hyatt hotel lobby, offered clues. His operation centre had been a processing point for evacuees and the detritus of temporary human encampment littered the halls ways.

The emergency stair wells had served as toilets when power and water failed. The excrement was adding to the potentially lethal cocktail of rotting bodies and unsafe water which he feared could plague the region with mosquito borne diseases.

But at that moment he was fuming. Federal Government had not moved fast enough to send resources to the city to get people out as the flood water rose and saved lives. Others were to argue that the 80% of the population he managed to evacuate before the storm was a feeble effort. In other words he'd bought the disaster on his own people himself.

Staggeringly, the war of words was getting underway before the rescue effort was even fully in gear. People were dying and politicians were trading blows.

As a nation the response could hardly have been more heart warming and welcome. A fire fighter putting out an arsonist's blaze in the posh stores near our truck told me his evacuated family had been taken to a stranger's house just because he was a New Orleans fire fighter. There was a post September 11th spirit of stranger helping stranger.

Volunteers were flooding in; some with their own boats to help in the rescue. After eight hours searching houses semi-submerged in water, actor Sean Penn told me he'd helped rescue 12 people, but he said he was disappointed to have seen only three government agency boats helping the rescue effort. He seemed to reflect the feelings of many.

Army and Marine helicopters were doing their bit plucking survivors from the roofs of their homes, but the fact was the massive logistical effort that the United States is so good at was slow to get moving. National Guard and FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were some of the first into the fray, but most in the giant logistical rescue effort were still busy establishing beach heads in the down town hotels from which to direct their operations when many here thought they should already have rescued everyone in need.

It's something no New Orleans resident is likely to forget. Many of the poor black families I talked to - who were the majority of victims - were angry with the view that what they saw as "white America" had abandoned them.

I'm left with the feeling that the real conflict over who is to blame is yet to play out on a far bigger canvas.