NEW ORLEANS -- When Reginald Washington returned to the Lower Ninth Ward months after the storm, he could barely find his daughter's home. All he could see was a 200-foot long barge with a steel hull. 
 
 "This is the very first time," he said. "Haven't been back here since." 
 
 Even though he lives just a few streets away, he still avoids this block. 
 
 "All they had was a barge there and they were cutting it up," he said. "It made me think about my child, what she went through. The way she drowned made me feel that I wasn't there for her." 
 
 The infamous barge and a relentless flood flowed through a massive breach in the Industrial Canal Levee, inundating the Lower Ninth Ward not far from where Pam Washington and her fiance, Darryl Milton, rented a brick single-story house on Jourdan Avenue. 
 
 "I can't really say why she didn't want to leave," Washington said. "But I told her I was staying. I really thought I'd come get her and bring her by my house. At least we had an upstairs." 
 
 Like thousands of others, Washington and his daughter chose to ride out Hurricane Katrina. 
 
 The 61-year-old said he'd spend three days with no food or water trapped at home until a boat came. He'd end up at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome with only $275 in his pocket and a cell phone. He'd go to Texas to stay with family. 
 
 Only to return, nine months later, when the heartbreaking call lit up his cell phone. 
 
 "I'm calling to inform you that they found your child through DNA," he said. "At first I thought it was a hoax, then she said she was mailing me something. Papers and information." 
 
 Pam's dad says her body was found five blocks away from her home on Lizardi Street. Family members confirm it took about eight months for DNA tests to come back confirming her identity. 
 
 But not all of the victims who've recovered have been identified 10 years after the storm. 
 
 "I just thought we should honor our dead in a better way than putting them in Potter's Field," said former Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard. 
 
 On the fifth anniversary of the storm, Minyard sat down with Eyewitness News to talk about the Katrina memorial, where 80 bodies were laid to rest. It's an eerily quiet place on Canal Street designed, as the engraving says, to "evoke" the shape of a hurricane. These victims were either unclaimed by relatives or never identified. 
 
 Minyard said more extensive DNA testing is needed, but money allocated by FEMA to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals dried up. 
 
 So back in 2005, Minyard confirmed 40 people still remained. 
 
 "It's been five years, maybe it'll go 10 years, 15, 20. I mean it's ludicrous in this day and age to have people unidentified," he said. 
 
 Now a decade after the storm, an Eyewitness News public records request to current coroner Dr. Jeffrey Rouse reveals a total of 30 victims who still remain unidentified. 
 
 Autopsy reports show locations across the city where some of these men and women were found, many with little to no personal belongings or distinguishing marks. 
 
 One man identified as an unknown black male had his body recovered at Interstate 10 and Elysian Fields Avenue. He was wearing black Nike tennis shoes, black warm-up pants, a dark polo shirt, along with a black necklace adorned with a wooden African pendant and black swatch quartz. 
 
 At S. Prieur Street in Central City, an autopsy report says the body of an unknown female was discovered dressed in a multi-colored skirt, blue knit t-shirt and wearing a yellow metal earring with the letters "RMJ" on it, a single curler still in her hair. 
 
 Back in the Lower 9th Ward at 5113 St. Claude Ave., an unknown black man with a beard and moustache dressed in black low-top shoes, black jeans, and in a blue, vertical-striped t-shirt was found with keys in his front pocket and one nickel to his name. 
 
 "Heat lamps as you see in the studio, and horrific, no running water except hoses we could run in there. Extremely decomposed bodies with very harsh conditions," said Dr. Louis Cataldie. 
 
 Identifying more than 1,000 bodies was a complicated task. Cataldie ran the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, which worked out of this temporary morgue in St. Gabriel. The team of medical professionals had no choice, since the Orleans Parish morgue was under water. 
 
 Inside the old warehouse, autopsies were performed, DNA was collected and x-rays taken to try to identify the dead. 
 
 But Cataldie confirms medical records lost to floodwater, badly decomposed bodies and collecting DNA samples from relatives who evacuated made that task cumbersome. 
 
 "We would take DNA from family members and relatives and try and match the family tree," he said. "That's real hard to do when you've got people displaced to Texas and you're trying to get their DNA. That's one of the reasons it took so long to identify these folks. Fingerprints were pretty much useless." 
 
 Cataldie also confirms the funding for more DNA testing ran out. 
 
 So, what about these unidentified bodies honored at this Mid-City Memorial, and their families who never came back, or don't know they're here? 
 
 Cataldie said there is a way. 
 
 "I think at this point in time, if someone was really concerned, they could probably do it privately, but it would probably be cost prohibitive to do it that way," he said. 
 
 Washington said, "There's a bunch of them down here that they didn't find. I couldn't tell you what happened to them." 
 
 Washington said they deserve to be identified. 
 
 A few months short of Katrina's one-year anniversary, Pam Washington was buried in her family's plot at Providence Memorial Park & Mausoleum on Airline Highway. Her fiancé Darryl was never found. 
 
 It's a painful memory for any parent, especially Washington, who said Pam's daughter Whitney is a spitting image of her mom. She evacuated with family before the storm hit. 
 
 In his mind, the teen is part of the next generation that can now set their sights on the future. 
 
 "We weathered the storm, we went through it and we made it," Reginald Washington said. "Now we're trying to go past that and move on." 
 
 Rouse said he did not want to be interviewed for this story. 
 
 State health officials say in an effort to reunite families with the remains of their deceased relatives, the department spent more than $3 million, but only $2.2 million of the funds were reimbursed by the federal government. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://on.wwltv.com/1JlRYIb ||||| For five days after Hurricane Katrina struck, the body of Vera Smith lay where it fell, alone on the roadside, partly covered by a tarpaulin. 
 
 Eventually – with the authorities apparently having neither the resources or inclination to remove the corpse – a local man buried her under a makeshift grave. He said prayers, fashioned a cross and placed a plastic sheet over the soil on to which someone painted the words: “Here Lies Vera. God Help Us”. 
 
 Ten years after the storm that killed 1,833 people and whose destruction topped $100bn, the death of 66-year Vera Smith and the utter break-down of authority symbolised by her abandonment, continue to haunt the city. There are some in New Orleans – many of whose residents have an intense relationship with the dead – who literally believe they have felt her spirit. 
 
 Vera Smith, in an undated photograph provided by her family 
 
 Visiting the junction of Magazine Street and Jackson Avenue in the Garden District today, it is hard to imagine the scenes that played out ten years ago in the chaotic aftermath of the storm, when Ms Smith had gone to a local shop to try and find supplies for her and her partner, Max Keene. 
 
 Across the US and around the world, people watched stunned and outraged as the media carried images of the seemingly countless corpses left stranded by the storm. They lay rotting on the roadside, floating in floodwater, hanging from wires. 
 
 The US government appeared both hapless and heartless, failing to come to the aid of some of its most most vulnerable people, a large percentage of whom were black. Television viewers could not believe that what they were watching was happening in their country, rather than somewhere in the distant developing world. 
 
 President Barack Obama, who will this week visit the city to mark the anniversary, said there had been a “shameful breakdown in government.” 
 
 More than 1,800 were killed by Katrina and the flooding it triggered 
 
 Ms Smith did not die in the actual storm but was killed in the lawless aftermath, apparently the victim of a hit and run accident, the perpetrator of which was never found. Her frail partner – who passed away the following year - did the little he could to provide some dignity to her body. After five days of intense heat, someone decided more serious was required. 
 
 That person was John Lee, an engineer and businessman who has a home in the Garden District. Over a bottle of root beer in Stein’s Deli, located on Magazine Street, Mr Lee said he had gone to the local police station and asked them to remove her body. 
 
 Mr Lee said they not only declined to do so, but also refused him permission to move it. Eventually, they said he could bury it but could not move it. As a result, he dug the grave on the actual pavement. 
 
 Mr Lee has written a book of his experiences, Our Sleepless Nights: Surviving Katrina and Burying Miss Vera. In it he details the break-down of authority and the looming fear that permeated – some of it exacerbated by inaccurate reports about looting – in the ten days after Katrina. 
 
 But his book is also testimony to the acts of quiet heroism that took place, the coming together of people, often strangers, to try and help one another. 
 
 John Lee led efforts to build the makeshift grave for Vera Smith 
 
 “I think of her often,” Mr Lee said of Ms Smith, whom he used to see around the neighbourhood. “I do have faith. I do wish she is at rest.” 
 
 He said he remembered the prayers that he and two black women – people he had met that day – spoke as they buried her. “We were praying for her soul.” 
 
 Ms Smith, whose full name was Elvira Briones Smith, was born in Mexico and grew in Texas before she moved to New Orleans. She was married four time has two adult daughters. 
 
 For 20 years or more she lived with CN Keene, better known as Max. She liked clothes and shoes, shopping and drinking, and was a regular at the local Catholic church, St Mary’s Assumption. They had met when she was working as a waitress in a bar and he was working off-shore for an oil company. 
 
 “She was married, her old man left her. I had a different girlfriend then, she left me. It was the right time. We just got together. Every now and then it happens that way,” Mr Keene told The Independent ten years ago. 
 
 “We used to lie in bed. I’d drink bourbon, she’d read books.” 
 
 Large parts of New Orleans were inundated by flooding 
 
 Ms Smith’s family learned of her death from the front page of a Texas newspaper. Three months after Katrina, Ms Smith’s body was eventually collected, taken to a mortuary and her ashes returned to her family in Santa Rosa. In November 2005, they were interred in a family plot. 
 
 Ms Smith’s daughter, Cindy Briones, said her mother had returned to visit the family every year for Thanksgiving Day. She said she was also delighted to be among her relatives and spend weeks in advance of her visit buying special gifts for each of them. 
 
 Speaking from Santa Rosa, she said she was grateful to Mr Lee and the others who had built the makeshift grave, but said it had been important for the family to have her returned to Texas. 
 
 She said she and her sister remained traumatised by what happened to their mother and the their emotions had been stretched every year on the anniversary of her death. 
 
 “I still have flash-backs. I have seen her body on the internet, pictures of before it was buried,” she said. 
 
 This image - believed to be of Vera Smith - was left at the grave 
 
 In some limited respects, Ms Smith’s family was fortunate in that they were able to locate and recover her body. Even today, some of those killed by the storm remain unidentified and unclaimed. 
 
 Asked what officials had used to identify the remains, the office of Jeffrey Rouse, the coroner for New Orleans, said their work made use of dental records, DNA testing, plane manifests, unique scars and tattoos, follow-ups on missing persons cases, jewellery, unusual hair, finger-prints, medical implants and government identification. 
 
 In the City Park neighbourhood, a memorial to Katrina, designed in the shape that the Category Five storm assumed as it made landfall, was erected in the memory of those who died. 
 
 Even today, the remains of 30 people who died during Katrina have not been identified 
 
 
 
 Despite the effort of the coroner’s office, the remains of 30 people were not identified while a total of 43 were never claimed. 
 
 “The memorial received the remains of the unidentified or unclaimed,” read the words on a black granite stone. 
 
 Jayson Orlando, who works at the nearby Sacred Grinds coffee shop, said New Orleans was less care-free since Katrina hit. “Even cities feel trauma,” he said. “It’s not just people.” 
 
 Since 2005, several memorials have also been erected in the memory of Ms Smith. The one that currently stands attached to a wall was built by an artist, Simon Hardeveld, who is originally French, and metal worker Scott Evert. 
 
 Mr Hardeveld, whose memorial features a working fountain and bright colours, said he had been asked to make it two years ago by the owner of an adjoining burger restaurant, built on the site where Ms Smith’s grave had stood. 
 
 He had contacted him amid reports that the restaurant was haunted. The reports were taken so seriously that a local television channel dispatched a film crew. “This is New Orleans. People believe these things,” he said with a shrug. 
 
 Blaine Presenbach built a restaurant on the plot where the makeshift grave had stood 
 
 Blaine Presenbach, 36, the owner of the Charcoal restaurant, said some of his workers had joked after the “ghost of Vera” when a piece of equipment broke down. But he said nobody had really believed it. 
 
 Rather, he had commissioned the memorial out of respect for Ms Smith and what had befallen her at that location. “We don’t want to forget it,” he said. 
 
 Mr Evert, the man who did the metal work for the memorial, heard the stories too and was unsure what to think. And then he set about the task of shaping the memorial. 
 
 “It was weird. I don’t really believe this sort of thing,” he said. “But the job became really tedious and difficult.” 
 
 He said that each point in the job, something went wrong. Each star – something that would normally attach simply – fell off. “It seemed to me she did not like what I was doing,” he said. 
 
 Simon Hardeveld and Scott Evert at the memorial they built 
 
 Mr Evert said he too felt the trauma of having lived through the storm, having used a boat to help rescue stranded people and remembering the terrible scenes. Even now it upset him to recall what happened to his city, to people such as Ms Smith. 
 
 He likened the memorial built by himself to small shrines he had seen when he visited Thailand, a place where a spirit might sit. 
 
 “The point we wanted to make was that we wanted to remember Vera,” he added. 
 
 “It was just to say ‘this was someone who lived here and something terrible happened to her and people think she was worth remembering’.”
– Cleaning up after a massive hurricane is a difficult affair, but a decade after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and claimed what Live Science reports is an estimated 1,833 lives, 30 bodies have yet to be identified. WWL-TV arrived at that number after making a public records request to the current coroner, who did not agree to be interviewed. The data comes from autopsy reports—reports that contain only a few identifying details, like the location of the body and what it was clad in or carried. One unknown black male wore black Nike tennis shoes and a black necklace with a wooden African pendant. An unknown female was wearing a yellow metal earring with the letters "RMJ" on it and a single curler in her hair. State health officials say the department spent more than $3 million trying to reunite families with the remains of the dead; the federal government ended up covering only $2.2 million of that, and there's no more money for further testing, says Dr. Louis Cataldie, who helmed the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team that helped ID the bodies. The condition of the bodies rendered fingerprints largely "useless," and so "we would take DNA from family members and relatives and try and match the family tree," he says of his work. "That's real hard to do when you've got people displaced to Texas and you're trying to get their DNA." Former Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard's take: "It's ludicrous in this day and age to have people unidentified." (Ten years on, these are 10 standout reads about Katrina.)