NEW ORLEANS – Progress rebuilding the Gulf Coast is still overshadowed by the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina, senators said yesterday, promising more federal help as they viewed broken levees and the shattered homes of victims trying to restart their lives.

Four months after the August 29 storm, lawmakers said they were surprised to see how little progress has been made in places like Gulfport, Miss., where churches were gutted and trees uprooted, and in New Orleans, where piles of boards and rubble sit where homes used to stand.

Senators touring the destruction were decidedly less upbeat than President Bush was five days earlier, when he visited New Orleans for the first time in three months. During that trip, Mr. Bush called progress since August “pretty dramatic,” but he was later criticized for visiting the city’s wealthier neighborhoods, which escaped the brunt of the damage.

“It’s good to say that we’ve made progress, but also important to say we’ve got a long way to go,” Senator Lieberman, a Democrat of Connecticut, said on a daylong trip to some of Katrina’s hardest-hit areas by members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“I’m disappointed, coming back four months later, that you don’t see more visible progress along the coast,” Mr. Lieberman said after an aerial tour of Gulfport. “We can’t kid ourselves, nor can we look the other way. This is a long-term commitment.”

Congress so far has approved $67 billion for the Gulf Coast, and Mr. Bush has called for an additional $1.5 billion to strengthen New Orleans levees. Yesterday, none of the lawmakers said how much more federal aid will be needed, or for how much longer the government will have to help rebuilding the area.

At a hearing in Gulfport, senators grilled Don Powell, who has been coordinating government rebuilding programs, over whether the federal commitment to the Gulf Coast is enough.

“Hopefully it will be enough,” Mr. Powell said of the money approved so far. However, he said bureaucratic red tape has hindered many authorities around the region, and acknowledged frustration from local officials trying to get answers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and elsewhere in Washington.

Frustrations continue to rise for Gulfport residents who are waiting for new flood insurance guidelines being drawn up by FEMA, a Republican elected shortly before Katrina hit, Mayor Brent Warr, said. Without the guidelines, businesses and residents are reluctant to start rebuilding, he said.

“Things are pretty depressing, but they’re still holding out hope for the federal government,” Mr. Warr said. “Now the federal government needs to come up with some real answers for us quickly.”

In his prepared testimony for the Senate hearing, Mr. Powell outlined two top priorities for Mississippi: debris removal and temporary housing for evacuees.

Mississippi has cleaned up 27 million cubic yards of debris – about two-thirds of the total, Mr. Powell said. He estimated that Katrina left Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties in Mississippi with more debris than the combined total created by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.