An Australian man who survived Hurricane Katrina locked in a Louisiana jail plans to return to New Orleans next year. Mr. Ashley McDonald arrived back in Melbourne on Monday morning, a fortnight after his release from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Centre in Baton Rouge.

The 30-year-old machine operator from Narre Warren, in Melbourne's south-east, had been arrested for public drunkenness in New Orleans' French Quarter the day before Hurricane Katrina hit the city on August 29. His frantic parents flew to the United States to search for him when he was feared missing for almost a fortnight before he was found alive and safe on September 8. McDonald, who had gone to the US to visit his sister in Tennessee, continued his holiday after he was released and flew back on his originally scheduled flight.

He was on his third trip to the United States, but his first visit to New Orleans, when arrested.

He had been in the city for less than 12 hours before he being picked up at 3am on August 28 for refusing to leave a bar in the famed Bourbon Street. He was held in the city's Parish Prison when the storm hit the city, but was transferred to Baton Rouge after the New Orleans jail was abandoned because of flooding. McDonald said he was still surprised that he had been locked up for 12 days over such a minor charge alongside hardened criminals, gang members, and people on death row with a hurricane approaching.

Inside the jail, he saw bashings and muggings as inmates armed themselves with smuggled knives and screwdrivers, or fashioned weapons out of bits of metal. While McDonald was undergoing an ordeal inside the jail, a storm was beating on its walls outside.

He said he got "a bit of a dressing down" for going missing from his parents Doug and Sharon McDonald, who had flown over to the US to search for him. McDonald will go back to work next week, but is already planning his next trip to New Orleans.