New Orleans streets awash with danger 

Police chased armed gangs roaming the darkened streets of hurricane-devastated New Orleans today where a climate of fear has increased after two days of looting.
  
Shots were fired across the southern city, ravaged by Hurricane Katrina on Monday.

Authorities are sending thousands of National Guard to New Orleans in a bid to restore order while media reports said hundreds of exhausted police had been taken off survivor search duties to take on gangs.
  
Residents reported hundreds of looters on the streets, carjackings, armed robberies and even shots fired at helicopters evacuating patients from local hospitals.
  
Media reports said one gang had commandeered a telephone company
van to carry out robberies while Fox News television said two men with AK47 semi-automatic rifles had opened fire on a police station.
  
New Orleans already had one of the worst murder and crime rates in the United States before Monday's storm, but robberies and pillaging have shot up since the hurricane.
  
As darkness fell today, residents said they had seen police cars and national guard trucks speeding through the flooded debris-strewn streets following reports of attacks and carjackings.
  
Police said two officers had been wounded since yesterday.
  
"The gangs are stealing anything they can get their hands on," said one resident who requested anonymity.
  
"They take what they can and drive away as fast as they can."
  
Residents told of seeing motorists being dragged from their cars and beaten until they hand over their wallets.
  
Hotel and store owners armed themselves to defend their businesses.
  
One shoe store just off the Canal Street shopping district was looted all morning and a fire broke out in the store around midday.
  
Smoke rose over the French Quarter as firefighters struggled to put it out.

They could not get enough water pressure and floodwater did not work.
  
Judy, a 62-year-old intensive care nurse at Tulane Medical Centre, said that last night, National Guard had to stop evacuating patients away from New Orleans because people on the streets were shooting at the rescue helicopters.
  
"When they were shooting they were taking out babies. What kind of people would shoot at a medevac," the nurse said.
  
The looters took food, appliances, jewels, clothes and even guns from a Wal-Mart store that was completely ransacked.
  
"We looted a store because we had no food and we had to do something," tourist Jared Wood, a New York schoolteacher, said
outside the French Quarter hotel where he was waiting for a ride to
nearby Baton Rouge.
  
Wood said he and companion Erin O'Shea had leapt through the smashed window of a supermarket to stock up on soup, power bars and
soy milk while other looters gathered armfuls of soda and beer.
  
O'Shea said she was threatened when she started to take pictures of the looting.
  
Rosemary Rimmer-Clay, a 51-year-old social worker from Brighton, England, who was here with her two grown sons, said Katrina made her trip "90 per cent boredom and 10 per cent sheer terror".
  
"The police said there was rioting and we saw people running with bags full of inappropriate items. It looked quite dodgy," she said.

"It felt like a film set and we were in the middle of it."
  
The Louisiana state governor said the lawlessness had driven her to desperation.
  
"We beg the people to get out," Blanco told a news conference called to urge remaining people in New Orleans to leave the city.
  
"What angers me the most is that in these situations, you usually see the best from people. But here we saw also the worse. We're going to enforce law and order."