US Spending £6m a Day on Hotels for Hurricane Katrina Evacuees

The US government is spending more than £6m a day to house people affected by Hurricane Katrina in hotels. The hotel bill has grown as officials struggle to meet a deadline imposed by George Bush to move all evacuees out of emergency shelters by the middle of October.

The news comes two weeks after it emerged that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) had agreed to pay $236m (£134m) to a cruise liner firm to provide housing on three ships.

Nearly 600,000 people so far have been placed in 10,000 hotel rooms in the US, and the bill is expected to rise to $425m over the next two weeks.

Critics say hotels are not suitable for long-term accommodation, and that, with an average cost of $59 a night, they are too a costly. Shirley Franklin, the Democrat mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, where 17,223 evacuees are staying in hotels said: "Deplorable. Disappointing. Outrageous. That's how I feel about it. The federal response has been unacceptable."

A Fema spokeswoman said: "Housing half a million people is a challenge by any standard." Fema has scaled back plans to create settlements of thousands of mobile homes, for fear of placing evacuees in slum-like conditions. But its alternative, of smaller trailer parks with 200 mobile homes, has not materialised.

Another Fema policy, of handing money to evacuees to help them find a place to stay, has also been criticised. Fema officials do not know how many families have used the money for accommodation.

Barney Frank, a Democrat representative in Massachusetts, told the New York Times it was unreasonable to expect a family with few means to find a new home in an unfamiliar city.