In life they had names and loved ones. In death they became mere numbers, with only a group of strangers to mourn their passing.

Three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina wreaked disaster in New Orleans and along America’s Gulf coast, the last of its victims - including three babies - were finally laid to rest at a ceremonial funeral yesterday.

In the end, it fell to city officials and volunteer funeral directors to give them their peace; half the bodies, including the babies, remain unidentified and others were spurned by their own families.

As a lone trumpeter played Amazing Grace, the last of the bodies - wrapped in black plastic and contained in elegant silver-coloured coffins, and one transported ceremonially in a horse-drawn carriage - were slipped into mausoleums overlooking a new Hurricane Katrina memorial in the city’s Charity Hospital cemetery.

“Each one of those is a human being who had a life and a love....I often wondered about their lives, who they were, what happened to them,” said Dr Frank Maynard, the New Orleans coroner, who led the three-year operation to identify Katrina’s 1,400-plus victims.

In the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, there was no proper record of where each body was recovered, or the exact circumstances of their deaths. “There are so many stories we’ll never know, including those babies,” said Dr Maynard.

“I’m sure there were a lot of mothers holding babies, trying to climb up in the attic, couldn’t get out, couldn’t break a hole in the roof. We found a lot of people like that, people that died in the attics. That’s the hard reality of what happened to us here.” He added: “This is a closure for everybody. It’s one big Amen.”

But even as they interred the last of Katrina’s fatalities, the people of New Orleans were back in emergency mode and offering up new prayers ahead of the possible arrival of Hurricane Gustav, which was beginning its furious march across the Gulf of Mexico yesterday.

It had already killed at least 78 people across the Caribbean. Landfall is expected early next week anywhere along America’s Gulf coast, from Texas in the west to Florida in the east. A separate storm, Hanna, was also building several hundred miles off Florida’s Atlantic coast.

“Who would have thought that three years after Katrina, nature is knocking on our doors again,” Lieutenant Retired General Russel Honoré (correct), who led the 2005 rescue and recovery effort, told a crowd of 200 people at yesterday’s funeral. “What Mother Nature brings we cannot control, but we can prepare,” he added.

Anxious not to be caught out as they were in 2005, when tens of thousands of New Orleans residents were left stranded, state and federal officials were putting emergency plans in place yesterday. Anxious to avoid a repeat of the Katrina episode, when tens of thousands were left stranded without transport and caught in the rising floodwaters, 1,200 buses were on standby to help evacuate yesterday.

Many were already leaving under their own steam, though as the storm’s projected path wobbled, uncertainty remained as to where and when Gustav would strike.

As the last of the crypts was sealed yesterday, Mayor Ray Nagin tolled a bell to symbolise the moment the first of New Orleans’ flood protection levees burst three years ago.

Dr Maynard, who led the effort to try to identify all of Katrina’s victims, played a jazz version of What a Friend We Have in Jesus on his trumpet.

“I just had to get that out of this trumpet,” he said. “It’s been in there three years, just waiting to be played for these people.”

Times Recommends

• China dissident's cry for democracy 30 years on
• A charity or a front for the Mumbai killers?
• Putin shows he's still the man in charge