Briton tells of Katrina nightmare

Helen Neill:

Stuart Bird's summer-of-a-lifetime trip turned into a nightmare when Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans.

When the eighteen-year-old and his friends got the order to evacuate the city, like many tourists, they found they had no way of getting out.

Their hotel manager initially persuaded the boys to ignore advice to go to the city's now notorious Superdome.

The pictures Stuart, 18, from Rugby, took show the devastation of the hurricane, and rising flood waters, taken from his room.

Then, running out of food and water by the middle of the week, Stuart and his friends gladly accepted the US army's offer to take them to the Superdome by boat.

They hadn't heard any of the terrifying stories from other "internationals" trapped there.

Stuart describes the scene as they arrived there as "jaw dropping, it was hell, like nothing you could ever imagine".

He told me that there were "tens of thousands of people" queuing outside for buses. He joined them for what would turn out to be the most frightening 13 hours of his life.

Unable to sit down, move, eat or drink, he says "people were just shouting at us, we were basically getting racially abused all the time".

A man standing next to him threatened to get a "gun out and shoot all the white people".

We did all that was possible to rescue citizens, say British diplomats