New Orleans ? Authorities struggling to manage the largest relocation of Americans in modern history collided Wednesday with an unexpected obstacle: resistance from many of the evacuees.

In Houston, a plan to move evacuees from the Astrodome to two cruise ships in Galveston, Texas, was canceled for lack of interest, officials said, forcing the government to search for evacuees from other areas to move into the ocean liners’ cabins.

In New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin authorized force to remove an estimated 10,000 people still living amid floodwaters, which were receding but also becoming increasingly polluted with oil, sewage, bacteria and life-threatening toxins.

Four people may have died from rare bacterial infections caused by contaminated water that entered open wounds, federal health experts reported. Initial tests of New Orleans’ water detected levels of diarrhea-causing bacteria far exceeding safe levels.

As the dimensions of the human disaster became clear, forensic pathologists streamed to New Orleans. The official death toll there and throughout the region assaulted last week by Hurricane Katrina stood at 294, but estimates reached into the thousands.

New reports spoke of 30 people dead at a flooded nursing home in Chalmette, La., near New Orleans, and more than 100 people who died at a dockside warehouse while they waited for rescuers to ferry them to safety.

Staying put

Nevertheless, the rescue squads that patrolled deeper into New Orleans – as well as relief workers in Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia – found themselves confounded by the reluctance of many survivors to leave their homes or move to distant shelters.

Five planes from West Virginia sent to ferry evacuees from Texas returned home without passengers. Flights expected to carry 1,000 evacuees to Ohio were canceled. Cots stood empty at the D.C. Armory in the nation’s capital.

Throughout the Gulf Coast region, people decided that they preferred the familiar and the close to home – regardless of how awful it had become – to the unknown and the far away. In some cases, bureaucratic foul-ups and lack of coordination also played a role.

“Once you put yourself in the hands of the government, you could end up in Utah,” said Michael O’Donoghue, 64, a holdout in New Orleans’ Lower Garden District.

Ed Conley, a liaison officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the agency has no additional plans to transport people to shelters in other states.

“There were several states that offered opportunities for people to go via plane and bus,” he said. “There just weren’t any takers. We can’t force people to leave.”

The stepped-up evacuation effort came as workers trying to get into the city to restart essential services came under sniper fire. More than 100 officers and seven armored personnel carriers captured a suspect in a housing project who had been firing on workers trying to restore cell phone towers, authorities said.

“These cell teams are getting fired on almost a daily basis, so we needed to get in here and clean this thing up,” said Capt. Jeff Winn, commander of the police SWAT team. “We’re putting a lot of people on the street right now, and I think that we are bringing it under control. Eight days ago this was a mess. Every day is getting a little bit better.”

The police chief boasted that 7,000 more military, police and other law officers on the streets had made New Orleans “probably the safest city in America right now.”

Other fronts

The difficulties flared as officials turned their attention to other problems and, in some cases, to solutions:

¢ Federal officials prepared to distribute debit cards worth $2,000 each to displaced storm victims to offset the cost of food, clothing, gasoline and other commodities.

Michael Brown, FEMA’s embattled director, said the plan would “empower hurricane survivors to really start rebuilding their lives.”

¢ Repair crews inspected bridges and roads wrecked by Katrina, including 90 bridges in southern Louisiana alone. Contractors were hired to clear debris-blocked roads.

¢ Inch by inch, flood levels continued to drop in New Orleans as more pumps came back to life, but engineers still faced a Herculean task. Only 23 of the city’s 148 pumps were working. One major pumping station, however, was draining 2,000 cubic feet of water out of the city every second.