Well over 100,000 refugees who lost their homes, possessions and relatives have streamed into hundreds of shelters opened across the southern United States by the American Red Cross, Red Cross officials said.

Their emotions swung between relief, anger and despair following tortuous ordeals, some of which involved harrowing tales of being plucked to safety as the bloated corpses of victims floated by in flooded streets.

"I'd go back home right now but there is nothing to go back to," said John Auzenne, 47, who fled his submerged home in New Orleans, pushing his baby in a plastic pool until they reached the relative safety of a freeway overpass.

Like 25,000 other survivors of the catastrophe, Auzenne then made his way to the city's foetid and overcrowded Superdome before being bussed Thursday to Texas where they were assigned cots in Houston's Astrodome, a 1960s sports palace converted into a giant shelter.

Texas has offered to take in 75,000 refugees from the apocalypse unleashed by the hurricane that made landfall Monday and saw New Orleans ageing dykes give way.

Some 100,000 people who escaped the disaster zone in New Orleans and on the US Gulf Coast are camping in Red Cross shelters in 13 southern states as they wait to learn their fate, Devorah Goldburg of the American Red Cross told AFP.

Tens of thousands more -- disaster officials cannot estimate exactly how many -- have moved into other shelters, relatives' homes, churches and hotels.

For many, the heart-stopping realisation is dawning that they may never be able to go home following the catastrophe that produced scenes of Third World anguish in the world's richest and most powerful country.

"There's nothing to go back to, we'll go back to visit, see if there's something to salvage," said Earl Clark, a 45-year-old waiter from New Orleans' famed French quarter, one the home of jazz and Cajun mystique.

"It hit me yesterday. We're going to have to relocate. Where? We'll see who gets a job first," he said in the Florida city of Pensacola -- where he arrived, along with thousands of other evacuees -- with an overnight bag and the expectation that he would be home within days.

As Louisiana politicians said the death toll would likely pass 10,000, with thousands still stranded in the city now overrun by looters and lawlessness, the chances of returning to New Orleans were slim.