BATON ROUGE, La. - When he finally could leave his post guarding a nuclear power plant after Hurricane Katrina struck, Richard George Reysack III sped to the flooded home of his 80-year-old father east of New Orleans. Slogging through the muck, he found his father's corpse face-down in the hallway.

As devastating as that discovery was, at least Reysack had his father's remains. Then even that was taken away. The authorities who moved the corpse to a temporary morgue not only won't return it to Reysack for burial, he said, but they won't even confirm that they have it.

Reysack's family has published an obituary and held a memorial service - all without a body.

"My family has had to endure that memorial service knowing that, Lord knows when we'll get my father's body . . . and put this behind us," Reysack said.

A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands here, families of the dead have been traumatized yet again by the ordeal of trying to pry loved ones'bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed bodies.

Many of those bodies are unidentified. But authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses that they continue to hold, to the dismay of family member scattered across the country.

The state official in charge of the morgue, Dr. Louis Cataldie, said through a spokesman that he was concerned about the flow of information from the morgue. At a news conference here last week, he acknowledged that many families were suffering. "These are horrible times," Cataldie said.

Even funeral home directors, who normally would retrieve bodies from authorities, say they have been turned away at the heavily guarded morgue in St. Gabriel.

Among the remains authorities refuse to release are those of people who died before Katrina struck Aug. 29, but were transferred when floodwaters threatened the New Orleans morgue.

"It's inefficient and inept out there - it's beyond incompetence,"said William Bagnell, a funeral director who said he was refused access to four bodies at the morgue even though officials had faxed him forms inviting him to pick up the bodies.

For funeral directors and ordinary citizens alike, the grief of losing a relative has been compounded by the agonizing search for their remains.

Malcolm Gibson, a New Orleans funeral director, said he has tried for more than two weeks to recover the body of his 83-year-old uncle, who died in his home during the storm and whose remains were delivered to the morgue by state police. Authorities would not let him in to identify the body, he said.

Earline Eleby Coleman drove from Houston Sept. 5 to recover the body of her 78-year-old mother, who died at the New Orleans convention center in the arms of another family member. She was told to wait for confirmation that the body was even at the morgue. She is still waiting.

Wayne Dean Ryburn spent 10 days chasing his elderly mother's corpse from hospitals to morgues to parish coroner's offices. He finally recovered it from a morgue in the Louisiana countryside with the help of his sister, a registered nurse who had attended to the dying woman.

And Cal Johnson, a New Orleans funeral director, said he has faxed information to the morgue about an employee, a 75-year-old embalmer who died in his New Orleans home during the storm. But even though police took the body to the morgue, Johnson said, he was told that it could not be located.

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