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 News from Around the Americas | August 2005 
Katrina Kills Dozens and Leaves Millions Devastated
 Peter Whoriskey & Fred Barbash - Washington Post
| | Water continues to rise in New Orleans and virtually every building in Gulfport, Miss. is damaged. |
New Orleans - Authorities along the battered Gulf Coast, handicapped by impassable roads, power outages and damaged equipment, began the massive undertaking Tuesday morning of searching for stranded survivors of Katrina and assessing the damage in town after town in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, including many coastal villages yet to communicate with the outside world.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Tuesday morning that there are unconfirmed reports of up to 80 fatalities in Mississippi from Hurricane Katrina, the Associated Press reported, including 50 to 55 people reported dead late Monday in Biloxi.
But officials remained uncertain and deeply concerned about what they would find when they finally are able to move and to get search and rescue operations into the air.
More than a million people are without power, officials said. Tens of thousands are unable to enter their homes.
TV footage at first light showed many areas still flooded, apartment buildings and houses collapsed or thrown off their foundations, and roads littered with trees, debris and overturned vehicles.
In New Orleans, the troubles were not over, as water from Lake Ponchartrain to the north coursed through lower-lying streets, released by a breached levee that normally protects the city. Water was rising in some areas of downtown.
At New Orleans' Superdome, where power was lost early Monday, some 9,000 refugees spent a second night in the dark bleachers. With the air conditioning off, the carpets were soggy, the bricks were slick with humidity and anxiety was rising, Bloomberg news reported.
"Everybody wants to go see their house. We want to know what's happened to us. It's hot, it's miserable and, on top of that, you're worried about your house," Rosetta Junne, 37, told wire services.
In a particularly low-lying neighborhood on the south shore of Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain, a levee along a canal gave way and forced dozens of residents to flee or scramble to the roofs when water rose to their gutters.
"I've never encountered anything like it in my life. It just kept rising and rising and rising," said Bryan Vernon, who spent three hours on his roof, screaming over howling winds for someone to save him and his fiancee.
Ambulance services were preparing to ferry large numbers of patients from Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which was without power, to Baton Rouge. "We're going to need amphibious vehicles," Richard Zuschlag of the Acadian Ambulance Service in New Orleans said in a CNN interview.
Katrina herself, "downgraded" to a tropical storm and weakening, nevertheless continued to threaten points north and east of the coast in Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio as it traveled away from the scene of the worst damage, bearing heavy rain, 40 to 50 mph winds and possibly tornadoes.
More than 24 hours after Katrina's landfall, however, officials still didn't know what hit them.
At least 50 people may have died in the state's coastal Harrison County, Jim Pollard, spokesman for the Mississippi's emergency management agency told wire services. Five people died in other parts of the state, including one who may have been in Harrison, another agency spokesman, Heath Carpenter, said in an interview from Jackson.
"The damage is catastrophic and widespread," Pollard said. "There's virtually not a building here in Gulfport that's not substantially damaged."
In Biloxi, the Biloxi Sun-Herald reported on its website that "it is easier to list the things that are undamaged than those that have been pounded."
It said U.S. Interstate 90 was impassable. Along the road, an Olive Garden Restaurant and a Red Lobster were "obliterated." A nearby shopping mall was wiped out, along with several casinos and a hundred year old church.
The Mobile (Ala.) Register reported that authorities rescued at least 30 to 40 people by boats and even more were taken by car or bus from the southern end of Mobile, where Dog River overflowed.
"Most of these people did not evacuate and got caught up in high water," Walter Dickerson, director of the Mobile County Emergency Management Agency, told the paper.
Fred Barbash reported from Washington. |
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