"Finally tonight, the parts of this city not visible to the rest of the nation. From the air, New Orleans -- and this whole region for that matter -- looks like a sea of blue. The locals call it "FEMA blue," the plastic tarp material that covers the roofs of houses.

And when you fly over at night, you see the reality as well. As much as this city wants to stress the services that have been restored: there are entire areas still living in darkness. No power. No lights. For three months.

The U.S. is at war. The holidays are coming. Americans are busy. And a whole lot of people in this area want people to know: life is still a daily struggle in this part of the world."

"New tests by the Natural Resources Defense Council and a Louisiana-based environmental chemist found dangerously high levels of industrial chemicals and heavy metals in the sediment covering much of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The tests also found alarming levels of long-banned pesticides that flood waters carried from an abandoned factory into a residential neighborhood. The tests found arsenic levels in samples from neighborhoods across the entire city, for example, that exceeded Environmental Protection Agency safety limits -- in some places by a factor of 30 -- and samples taken in residential neighborhoods near two toxic waste sites found high levels of DDT and other banned pesticides, and cancer-causing petroleum chemicals."

Through Monday, 426,693 people in 13 counties have applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for individual help, nearly 40 percent of them from Broward. And the agency already has referred nearly half of the applicants, 207,352, for housing assistance because they have no place to stay or need help repairing their damaged homes.

In the weeks ahead, that number is expected to balloon, as more dwellings are declared unsafe by city and county building inspectors who are surveying damage to houses, apartments, condos and mobile homes.

Karen, an event planner living in Miami-Dade, still feels the shock of the storm, nine days after it hit. With little relief from FEMA or the state, helping out with day to day survival needs has fallen to other residents, who themselves are struggling to get by.

"I tried to get around to help out, but I have to conserve gas," she told RAW STORY on Sunday, a week after Wilma, a previously category 5 hurricane that had weakened to a category 3 before it made landfall in Florida, caused severe damage to South Florida’s gold coast.

The people who appear to be the most affected in the aftermath of this disaster are the elderly, the poor, and minorities.

"Wait until people start finding bodies rotting inside their homes," she said.

Wilma was more severe than we expected her to be. The weather forecasters were pretty much dead on with the track, the category, and the effects. We didn?t so much doubt them as much as hope they were wrong. Many stayed. Some (such as us) suffered little. Others were reduced to tears by what they lost and what they would be faced with to restore to Key West normal.

Q. How are the levees holding up?
A. We spoke to a spokesperson for the South Florida Levee Authority (SFLA), who assured us that South Florida does not have any levees, but if we did, they would definitely be in bad shape.

This is our second day after the hurricane and we have all but lost contact with civilized society. Every 8th phone call might go through and we are still without even the most basic light source at night. There are no street lights in many places and lots of broken street lights that are strewn across the highways and medians. Grocery stores have been open for limited hours selling only nonperishables. The one we visited today had no lights and only took cash. Gas lines here are reminiscent of houston a few weeks ago with lines in many places being filled with 50 or more cars. Many gas stations are out of gas. FPL says it may take as much as weeks before we have power.

Highland Beach Mayor Harold Hagelmann highlights a problem of living without power in high-rise condos: No elevators.

"We have elderly people," he said. "Once they leave their apartments, there’s no getting up. They have to walk down if they’re on the 17th floor.

"There were tree branches everywhere and cars were getting stuck because of all the fallen limbs in the road. Light poles and electrical lines appeared as if they were picked up and mangled then thrown back to the ground. The sight was much like a war torn city, like something you’ve seen on tv."

Nineteen of the 31 victims died or became ill while they were inside vehicles, and seven of the deaths were thought to be heat-related, Begay said. Some had body temperatures ranging from 105 to 112 degrees, the report said.

"Cars are strewn around in random ways straddling curbs, on the neutral grounds, some upside down. Skiffs, canoes, pirogues and even small cruisers were beached. Everything once covered in flood waters is now covered in an ash-brown dried mud. Anything that was once green, is now dead and dessicated, coated in that same ash-brown dried mud."