NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The official death toll from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana shot up by 90 to 736, a spokesman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals said Monday.
Asked to explain the sudden increase, spokesman Bob Johannessen said, ''Folks are collecting bodies.'' With water receding over most of New Orleans, more and more areas of the city are becoming easily accessible to the search teams going door-to-door for bodies.
The announcement came as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he was suspending the neighborhood-by-neighborhood repopulation of the city and ordering a new round of evacuations because of the threat of a new tropical storm that appeared to be headed toward the Gulf of Mexico.
The vast majority of fatalities from the storm were in New Orleans, where crews continued searching neighborhoods by land and water in search of the dead. The flooded areas of the city were dwindling, but the Army Corps of Engineers said 20 percent of New Orleans was still under water on Monday.
On Sunday, one search team found four corpses in the impoverished and heavily damaged Ninth Ward, along with a 39-year-old man who had survived in his home with his dog since the flood.
The collection of bodies is handled by Houston-based Kenyon International Emergency Services, which signed a contract with the state last week after working without a contract for several weeks. Louisiana officials had expressed frustration with what they said was the Federal Emergency Management Agency's lack of urgency in the task.
Military patrols, firefighters and other rescue workers find and log the location of the bodies before calling in Kenyon's recovery teams to retrieve the bodies.
In public, officials say the grim job of body recovery is finally proceeding apace. Bureaucratic snafus and manpower difficulties have been overcome, they say. Privately, federal officials have expressed frustration, speaking of delays of up to 72 hours before Kenyon gets to bodies.
Indeed, Saturday, a body in Bywater, discovered a week earlier, lay undisturbed as emergency vehicles whizzed past it on N. Robertson Street.
Kenyon, for its part, says it is getting to the bodies as fast as it can. Delays are overnight at most, ''to the best of my knowledge'' says Kenyon spokesman Bill Berry. But he acknowledges that ''human factors'' _ communications mix-ups between the military-directed teams finding the bodies, and Kenyon, could contribute to delays.
In a brief interview, the Coast Guard officer directing what is called ''Remains Recovery'' called it ''very complex'' and ''very sensitive.'' Speaking at the multi-agency command center behind the Convention Center here, Capt. Jeff Pettitt said: ''I don't even have a Kenyon representative here.''
Asked if many more bodies remain to be found, he said: ''I hope not,'' before declining to answer any more questions.
Last week, Nagin noted that the job was proving to be tougher than expected. ''They were going in some of these very warm houses with attics and it was really starting to affect some of their workers,'' the mayor said.
