America At Large: My brother Jon, if he was anywhere near a television set yesterday morning, would no doubt have been amused as he watched footage chronicling the parade of looters fresh from pilfering the wares of a store a few blocks from his home in the French Quarter. I counted at least two thieves bustling out the door clad in black-and-gold football jerseys identifying them as partisans of the New Orleans Saints.

That they were supporters and not real Saints we can be fairly certain, because at the first whiff of Hurricane Katrina the NFL team hopped on a plane and blew out of town en masse, leaving the denizens of New Orleans to fend for themselves.

In the Saints' absence, city and state officials commandeered their venue as an emergency shelter for residents displaced from neighbourhoods flooded when the Mississippi River levees breached.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, but once the 145mph winds arrived on Monday, they nearly ripped the roof off the Louisiana Superdome.

By yesterday the authorities had decided to evacuate the Superdome, where an estimated 20,000 New Orleanians had taken refuge.

My mother is fairly certain that Jon wasn't among them, and on that count she's probably right. "He wouldn't have gone there, because they didn't allow pets," she pointed out. "I just hope he took his border collie and left the city."

I'm not quite as worried about my kid brother as his mother is, although I do wish he'd phone, if only to relieve her anxiety.

Both his neighbourhood in the Quarter and his place of employment, a Bourbon Street saloon, rest on higher ground and were spared the initial impact of the storm.

And although the area is now under curfew, at least some of the bars along Bourbon Street remained open 24 hours a day, right through the hurricane, and appear to have done a thriving business the night Katrina was ravaging the rest of the city.

Eighty per cent of New Orleans is under water this morning. Close to a million people have been displaced, and reports of bodies floating through the streets keep filtering back.

There has also been some collateral damage. One evacuee in the Superdome, who may well have stopped off on Bourbon Street on his way there, fell to his death when he attempted to leap from one level of the stadium to another.

Once the looting broke out up and down Canal Street, at least one policeman was shot by a pillager, and one pillager was shot and killed by another.

In the face of all this carnage, National Football League executives are grappling with an emergency scenario of their own: how to resolve the Saints' 2005 home schedule.

If this concern seems a bit unseemly in light of the ongoing catastrophe, remember that the NFL played a full schedule of games the weekend after John F. Kennedy's assassination, and even the 9/11 attacks caused minimal disruption. (Games scheduled the following weekend were postponed, but by September 23rd of 2001 the league was back to business as usual.)

If the Superdome has been so structurally compromised that it isn't safe to house refugees, it's a fairly safe bet that it isn't going to be operational for crowds of 70,000 any time this fall.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reported that an official of the Superdome's management company had already informed him that it would be "very, very difficult for the Saints to play their home games here this season".

The Saints play their final pre-season game in Oakland tonight, and have been in California all week, having fled Louisiana in advance of the hurricane.

Current plans call for them to repair to San Antonio, Texas, tomorrow, so that they can train without disruption for their season opener in Charlotte a week from Sunday.

The first home game at the Superdome, against the New York Giants, is scheduled for September 18th, and the team is already weighing offers from prospective venues in San Antonio, Houston, and Jackson, Mississippi, as well as the Louisiana State University stadium upriver in Baton Rouge.

"Nothing has been decided," said Saints director of media and public relations Greg Bensel. "It will be a decision by the team, the league and potential facility, and that has not happened.

"We've been in contact with the Saints the past two days discussing the situation and options - both for practicing after the Oakland game and for the possibility of relocating games," said NFL spokesman Greg Aiello.

"The goal on both key issues - where they practice and where they'll play if the Superdome is not available on Sept 18th - is to try and find a place as close as possible to New Orleans.

"That's what the Saints want."