Posted on 08/31/2005 2:11:38 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Heaviest loss of life appears to be from Biloxi building collapse
GULFPORT, MISS. - Stunned residents emerged from shelters and homes Tuesday to start assessing the massive damage left by Hurricane Katrina as rescuers pulled bodies from crushed homes and apartments near the coast.
The death toll in this hard-hit county rose to more than 100, but officials believe that number will rise. "There's so much rubble, we won't know for a while. But I fully expect the number to be in the hundreds," said Jason Green, assistant to the Harrison County coroner.
In an auxiliary morgue downtown, hearses unloaded bodies uncovered by search-and-rescue teams.
"Several families have brought in their dead," Green said.
County Supervisor Connie Rockco said it appears the heaviest loss of life was in east Biloxi, where an apartment building collapsed and killed 30 people.
"But there are fatalities from one end of the county to the other," Rockco said.
Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said most of those who died in Gulfport perished in the zone of the storm surge, which pushed up to a set of railroad tracks about six blocks from the beach.
"We begged, we pleaded, we demanded. We told them they had a good chance of dying if they didn't leave. But there's only so much government can do to protect people," Sullivan said. "Too many people tried to ride it out. We can't regulate good sense."
Thought they were safe
Sullivan said many homes that survived the catastrophic Hurricane Camille in 1969 were washed away by Katrina.
"People in them thought they were safe, that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place," he said.
In Biloxi, at the Quiet Water Beach apartments, at least 30 people died when the two-story building crumbled in the storm Monday. One resident, Joy Schovest, told the Associated Press she swam for her life.
"We grabbed a lady and pulled her out the window and then we swam with the current," said Schovest, 55, breaking into tears. "It was terrifying. You should have seen the cars floating around us. We had to push them away when we were trying to swim."
All that remained of the apartment complex was a concrete slab surrounded by a heap of red bricks that were once the building's walls. A crushed red toy wagon, jewelry, clothing and twisted boards were mixed in with the debris.
Gulfport Police Lt. Michael Shaw said he and others in his search crew carried bodies across stretches of rubble that ran blocks from the beach.
"I've lived here all my life, and in some places we were, I couldn't recognize where I was," Shaw said.
The central part of the city, near the coast, looked as though it had been rocked by an explosion. At the waterfront, the blocklong floating Copa Casino had been heaved about 200 yards onto the shore. Its sides were blown to tatters, especially on the lower levels of the roughly six-floor structure.
The floating Grand Casino also was pushed aground and came to rest several blocks west of its former location.
On the beachfront U.S. 90, near the center of town, Hugh Keting surveyed where his law office used to be. The two-story stucco house had been scraped off its foundation, although a huge live oak next to it remained with hardly a damaged branch.
Dwight Harper's workplace was all but gone, too. He works for Dole, which runs a shipping operation on the docks. Some of the facility's two-story-tall unloaders and other heavy equipment were tossed about the edge of downtown.
Inside First Presbyterian Church, which faces the water about a block from the shore, waves had pounded away the plaster up to a line about 6 feet high across the entire back wall. The floor was covered with 3 inches of sand.
Gulfport Mayor Brent Warr said the beachfront shopping center that he and his father owned was destroyed, as were their homes.
Warr and his city staff met in the largely undamaged City Hall on Tuesday morning to choose locations for distribution points for the aid they expect to come in. He said he expected it to begin arriving early today.
"We understand the military trying to reach us was bogged down on U.S. 49," Warr said, referring to the main north-south highway into Gulfport. "I was told there were more than 100 big pines across the road in a two-mile stretch in the DeSoto (National) Forest."
City officials said they could not immediately re-establish water or sewer services. All land phone lines and most cell phone communications were out of service, they said, and crews were trying to repair a major gas leak downtown.
Tons of chicken parts, which had been stored for shipping in the port area, ended up scattered across dozens of blocks west of the city.
"That's going to become a biohazard in no time," said Sullivan, the fire chief. "We'll need fast help with that, too."
Police Chief Steve Barnes said there was an immediate need for portable toilets. "There's not one left standing along the whole (Mississippi) coast," he said.
Katrina's destruction was so widespread, Barnes said, that "all the emergency resources we need are being stretched."
Marine life facility gone
After several drug and grocery stores opened late in the day, lines quickly formed and parking lots filled. Some residents, including 67-year-old Norman Vancourt, said they were planning to leave the coast until basic services are restored. "I'll go as far north as it takes to get a hot cup of coffee," he said.
His house in Long Beach, a town of about 17,000 just west of Gulfport, was demolished. "In a storm like this, you don't even board it up," he said.
Six bottlenose dolphins from Marine Life Oceanarium that rode out the storm in two motel pools will leave town soon, too.
"We were totally destroyed," said Moby Solangi, the aquarium's president. "We're planning to put them in another facility until we can rebuild."
Three of Solangi's sea lions that ended up in neighborhoods were recovered alive, he said.
"The birds and fish, they're free now," Solangi said, describing how the storm crushed several 30-foot-tall tanks.
thomas.korosec@chron.com
I understand that Walmart's told them to come in and take what they needed. Of course, some needed 20 TV's, don'tcha know?
It costs a lot more than that in terms of disruption of the economies and lives. Futher when the storms pass, the bureaucrats are extremely slow to allow people back to their property.
The fact remains that they cry wolf for every hurricane when serious disasters like this are (fortunately) extremely rare events. The fact is that people get so used to hearing the same thing time and time again when there are no serious consequences that they don't pay attention to the warning when it actually means something.
The moral of the fable of the boy who cried wolf isn't hard to understand - except apparently for government bureaucrats
Boortz has a poll on shooting looters www.boortz.com
We train for Halliburton and they are always looking for new employees. However, they have a very strict drug policy and many are caught up in the random sweeps that they have. Sixteen were dismissed last week when they either failed or refused drug tests. I imagine some will find work out here in the west.
Prayers going out to all who live down there. May God give them the inner strength to know this is not the end, we will make it.
I'm stopping at my husbands work, they are one of the sponsors collecting donations for the Red Cross. I will see if the Red Cross needs anything else I can help with.
Often tragedy opens doors. Many of these people may be jolted into new and better lives. I believe people need to go where they can get jobs and not stay in one place, no matter what, because that is all they know.
Yes. We do.
Foreign aide is pouring in, with France leading the EU with its massive donations of manpower and equipment.
Great LINKS!
Thank you for that information.
You know what, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If government doesn't do the warnings and all hell breaks loose, they catch flak. Then when they do warn and little to nothing happens, you have people screaming how you disrupted their lives. NOBODY can predict what nature will ulitimately do. If you choose to live an area that experiences these powerful storms, you damn well better be prepared to run for your life when the government tells you to get the hell out of there!
You missed the point completely. If I predict that every storm will be a disaster, then sooner or later I'll be right, but by the time a rare true disaster like the current one hits, people will have long since come to the conclusion that I'm full of $hit and stop paying attention to me.
Human nature - if someone is proven to be wrong and an alarmist time after time, then the one time that they're right, people are going to ignore them because they've been wrong so many times in the past.
*
Well, it's tricky when we haven't perfected weather prediction yet. :P
No they will organize relief for New Orleans... it has glitz.
That said, NO has been playing russian roulette for decades and this time the bullet was chambered. I am sickened by the death and destruction that overwhelmed my neighbors to the south in the blink of an eye.
What about the snakes in the flood water???
What we have here is a failure to communicate. You still miss the point. I'll try again. It is human nature is to stop paying attention to warnings and dire predictions when they're proven false 99 times out of a hundred. On the hundredth time when they're right no one listens any more. Anyone with a brain could have seen from the satellite pictures that this was a huge storm, but when the government tells you to evacuate for every storm, and for years the evacuations have proved unnecessary, people just stop listening. My point is that you save the dire warnings for the severe storms so that people will listen.
The conservative position is always to err on the side of public safety.
Even if true the law of unintended consequences says that people are going to get used to the warning and ignore them if there are too many of them. Plus NO was a disaster waiting to happen. Every time I flew into that place and the plane went over the lake and I saw the roofs of the houses lower than the level of the lake I thought that is just crazy.
I'm just full of it (information, that is--smile). Mxxx
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