President George W. Bush, under fire for the sluggish initial response to the disaster, announced 2,000 dollars in emergency relief for every affected household and spoke of "many difficult days ahead" as bodies are recovered.

In New Orleans, officials were still hoping to persuade holdout residents to leave voluntarily before resorting to force, which was authorized by Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday.

Most streets were completely deserted save for police and army units conducting house-to-house searches.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 people are believed to remain in the city and some, like former marine Philip Turner, 62, made it clear they he would have to be physically removed from their homes.

"I don't run nowhere," Turner said. "I didn't run in Vietnam, and I'm not going nowhere now."

In flood-hit east New Orleans, where the water still reached to the roofs of some houses, US Marines used amphibious vehicles to search for trapped survivors.

Vice President Dick Cheney toured the region -- the latest in a line of cabinet officials dispatched by Bush -- and spoke of "significant" progress made in the hurricane relief and recovery effort over the past week.

"If there is a place on the face of the earth to have the resources to deal with this problem, it is the United States," he said.

Cheney visited the region with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff -- one of those most criticised over the sluggish reaction of federal agencies when the extent of the destruction wrought by Katrina became apparent.

Hundreds of corpses are being recovered from the city's flooded streets and in trapped homes as army engineers step up a massive operation to pump the putrid water from New Orleans, which is expected to take up to three months.

A gruesome preview of the horrors hidden beneath the receding waters came with the discovery of at least 32 bodies in a nursing home southeast of New Orleans.

The White House Thursday declined to speculate on a final death toll, but warned of grim news to come.

"It is going to be a very ugly situation when those flood waters recede and we start to go in and recover bodies and we look at the additional public health issues that need to be addressed," spokesman Scott McClellan said.

A Louisiana health official said late Wednesday that some 25,000 body bags had been brought into the area.

Federal troops and National Guard have joined the survivor search, but their officers made it clear that, if it came to dragging recalcitrant survivors from their homes, the task would be left to the police.

As of Wednesday, there were 18,000 active-duty soldiers and 45,000 National Guard troops in the area of the Gulf Coast devastated by Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the region on August 29.

Explaining the decision to authorise forced evictions, Nagin cited the growing threat of disease posed by the toxic flood waters in the city. Health officials said five evacuees had already died of exposure to contaminated water.

With relief operations costing one billion dollars a day, the US House of Representatives approved Bush's request for 51.8 billion dollars in further emergency funding.

Congress had approved an initial aid package totalling some 10.5 billion dollars last week.

Americans were also offering unprecedented private donations, eclipsing the initial pace of relief for the September 11 attacks and last year's Asian tsunami, charitable groups said.

As of early Thursday, American donations had totaled 587 million dollars, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a newspaper that tracks charitable contributions.

And the storm's political fallout gathered pace as Democrats said they would boycott a congressional probe into the much-criticised government response to Katrina.

Democrats complained that the committee would be stacked with members of Bush's Republican party.

"I will not be making appointments to a committee that is not bipartisan," said Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives.

Democrats are pushing for an official bipartisan commission similar to that which looked into the September 11, 2001 attacks and highlighted embarrassing intelligence failures.

Fresh criticism of the Katrina relief effort came from Colin Powell, who served as US Secretary of State in the first Bush administration.

"I think there have been a lot of failures at a lot of levels --- local, state and federal," Powell said in an interview with the ABC News program "20/20," to air late Friday.

"There was more than enough warning over time about the dangers to New Orleans," Powell said. "Not enough was done. I dont think advantage was taken of the time that was available to us, and I just dont know why."

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that more than two thirds of Americans believe Bush did not do enough in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.

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