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Hurricane Damage 'Enormous' Scores Dead on Gulf Coast; New Orleans is Submerged

Posted on: Wednesday, 31 August 2005, 12:00 CDT

The Gulf Coast began Tuesday to confront the aftermath of one of the most devastating storms ever to hit the United States.

Officially, the regional death toll was put at 55 Tuesday morning, but officials warned that it was certain to rise; Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi said the toll in just one county in his state could be as high as 80. The waters of Lake Ponchartrain continued to rise and spill over into areas of New Orleans that flooded when two levees collapsed after Hurricane Katrina tore through the area on Monday. Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in a television interview on Tuesday that 80 percent of the city was under water, in some places to a depth of 20 feet, or six meters.

The storm left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even far from its center. Some of the worst damage reports came from east of New Orleans. An estimated 40,000 homes were reported flooded in St. Bernard Parish. In Gulfport, the storm left three of five hospitals without working emergency rooms, beachfront homes wrecked and major stretches of the coastal highway flooded and impassable.

As dawn broke Tuesday, rescuers set out in boats and helicopters to search for survivors. A reporter who accompanied Jefferson Parish rescue officials on a flight over the area saw floodwaters reaching to the eaves of some three-story houses. Hundreds of people trapped on roofs waved frantically for rescue. Coast Guard and police Blackhawk helicopters were plucking them off one by one. "The devastation down there is just enormous," Barbour said on the NBC "Today" show.

"I hate to say it, but it looks like it is a very bad disaster in terms of human life," he said, referring to Harrison County, which includes Gulfport and Biloxi.

Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi told The Biloxi Sun Herald: "This is our tsunami."

President George W. Bush, in a televised news conference in San Diego, urged people in the affected areas to listen to instructions from the state and federal authorities. "These are trying times for the people of these communities," Bush said. "We know that many are anxious to return to their homes. It's not possible at this moment. Right now our priority is on saving lives, and we are still in the midst of search and rescue operations."

The White House said the president would curtail his vacation in Texas and return to Washington on Wednesday to deal with the recovery effort.

At 10 a.m., the National Hurricane Center in Miami said the storm, by then categorized as a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds of 35 miles per hour, or 55 kilometers an hour, was centered near Clarksville, Tennessee, just northwest of Nashville. It continued to cause flooding as it made its way north.

In Diamondhead, Mississippi, in a grim scene that was probably being repeated in countless other places nearby, the fire department was going door to door Tuesday morning to search for survivors. If they found no victims, members of the Fire and Rescue team painted large Cs on the front doors of buildings, many of which were barely standing.

Many people had fled to the community, about 60 miles, or 100 kilometers, northeast of New Orleans, thinking they were reaching higher safer ground that would keep them out of harm's way. Instead, many were caught in the storm surge, which pushed through Bay St. Louis on the Gulf Coast and into the bayous, forcing water to the top of second-story homes in Diamondhead.

Relatives of Rhea Finnila, 84, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, had taken her up to the attic of her son's home in Diamondhead, hoping to keep her safe, but the floodwaters that reached almost to the eaves of the house nearly carried her away on the mattress on which her family had placed her.

"When the surge came, the mattress was floating most of the time," said Rich Finnila, 59, a relative. "It was a struggle to get her in there." After the storm, fire and rescue workers who found them used a blanket to carry the woman from the house and then loaded her in the back of a Jeep to take her to another relative's house.

Jeff Garth, 34, and his family, from Waveland, which is on the coast, sought refuge in Diamondhead with his sister-in-law, Tammy Lick, 35, who bought her home only a month ago.

The house did not survive the storm.

"The whole house is gone everything in it," Lick said. "They told us we needed wind and hail insurance, but that we didn't flood here. Little did we know." Yet no one was injured.

In New Orleans, a survey team was sent to inspect an overflowing canal that was spilling more water into already flooded areas, Lieutenant Kevin Cowan of the National Guard, serving in the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness, said in a telephone interview Tuesday. The assumption was that the canal was "simply overflowing," he said, but the team would also look for possible breeches in the levee system. New Orleans lies mostly below sea level and is protected by a network of pumps, canals and levees. But many of the pumps were not working Tuesday.

More than 1,600 Mississippi National Guardsmen were activated to help with the recovery, and the Alabama Guard planned to send two battalions to Mississippi, The Associated Press reported.

A Coast Guard officer in Louisiana, Captain Terry Galbraith, told CNN that several hundred survivors needed to be rescued in New Orleans, but that he did not have an estimate for nearby areas.

He added that the disaster and its aftermath would "change the face" of Coast Guard operations in New Orleans. "It's going to be catastrophic for everyone," he said.

A total of more than 2.1 million people have reported power failures in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, the United States Department of Energy said.

Scott Adcock, public information manager with the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, said in a telephone interview that more than 790,000 people were without power. The authorities were starting damage assessment Tuesday, using helicopters and people on the ground, but flooding and debris were hampering efforts in some areas, he said.

**

Joseph B. Treaster and Ralph Blumenthal reported from New Orleans for this article, and Kate Zernike from Montgomery, Alabama. Reporting was contributed by Abby Goodnough in Mobile, Alabama; Michael M. Luo in New York; James Dao in Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Jeremy Alford in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Diane Allen in Diamondhead, Mississippi, and Terence Neilan, Christine Hauser and Shadi Rahimi in New York.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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