Posted on 09/03/2005 12:14:55 PM PDT by Cedar
Mississippi Gulf Coast Reeling from Hurricane Katrina From Ground Zero
By Keith Burton – Gulf Coast News Publisher
This is not going to be your regular news story. There are a lot of reasons for this. The first is that I am as much a part of the staggering story of Hurricane Katrina as the hundreds of thousands of people all along the northern Gulf Coast whose lives have been changed forever by this storm. After all, I live here too.
You cannot believe how difficult conditions are here and how frightening our immediate future is. This story will also be different because of how GCN is getting this to you. You have to know that communications, telephones, Internet and cells phones are not working, or working only marginally at the time of this report.
After great effort we have managed to get online, but we still need help and we are not sure even our current efforts will work long.
I have to thank GCN acting editor Perry Hicks, who is based in Virginia for relaying information from me to get some information out from Biloxi. And I want to thank my brother, Ken Burton, who is in Colorado Springs for engineering the GCN Survivor Connector Database to help people find the status loved ones impacted from the storm.
Many of you have already seen the videos and news stories from the national media. I can tell you that aerial photography, as graphic as it is, in no way shows the true story from the ground. I struggle to find the words. The faces of friends, and family, the hollow fearful eyes as Coast residents, long experienced with hurricanes, know that this is a life changing event.
I have to thank God that my home and the homes of my brother and parents survived. But that doesn’t mean in any way that we don’t have major work ahead of us. Like thousands on the Coast, our days since the storm has been filled with trying to clear downed trees from our roofs and making makeshift repairs to protect our property. The amount of debris from trees is staggering.
Imagine every tree and bush from a lush semi-tropical environment stripped of the green of life and dumped limp and lifeless. It is as if winter in the coldest states suddenly came overnight, yet temperatures are still in the upper 90’s. It is the heat and humidity that is so debilitating, which brings up a major point of survival here - Water!
Wednesday, the first distribution of water began to be seen. With just three days since the storm, that sounds pretty quick, but keep in mind that the high temperatures mean you go through water fast.
The national news media has given you the big picture on how the Federal and State governments are responding and the news has been bad on that front with widespread criticism. But people just don’t appreciate the scale of what has happened, and how hard it is just to begin to help.
First, just getting around is extremely difficult. Trees are down everywhere, especially in neighborhoods where people actually live. The news media generally talk about cities as if their downtowns was where everyone lived. But it is in the subdivisions and neighborhoods that Hurricane Katrina ruined lives and dreams.
Concerns over how badly Katrina tore into families and how shook people are is that officials have not released death figures. It will be shocking. One person who I know that is working on the recovery of bodies said that the teams are not being informed of the totals.
If the word chaos describes confusion, than Katrina may find itself another word for the same. It is now four days since the storm and communications are still nearly impossible. This is for residents and officials alike. It would be wrong at this point, however, to blame public officials for the problems that they are having with getting the help to the ground. The communication system on the Coast suffered tremendous damage and no effort of the scale that is needed can move quickly without communications. A lot of work on lines and telephone poles is underway, but we are talking miles and miles of line and thousands of repairs. Bell South and Mississippi Power are working as hard as possible.
There is some water flowing into homes and apartments at this time. The pressure is extremely low, and not enough to fight a fire with, but it will fill up a toilet tank. It doesn’t take long to realize that the simplest necessities of life make really big differences.
The lack of gasoline has largely stopped the sightseeing and frivolous driving that initially clogged the few streets that were opened shortly after Katrina. For the brave folks that have gone on gasoline runs, they report they have to go more than 150 miles just to find a few gallons as restrictions are in effect.
The result is people cannot risk driving much. This is a major issue because even if food, water and medical distribution centers are set up, people can’t get there.
Just last night, Long Beach police and city vehicles were out of fuel. The city’s employees were scrambling for fuel in school buses and wherever they could find it. The hundreds of emergency service workers are finding that once they get here, there are only a few places they can get fuel and those places are running out. If the fuel issue is not resolved within two or three days, the situation on the Mississippi Coast will become extremely dangerous.
I will update you more soon.
Thanks.
Maybe by now some of the local news sources might have updates on that area. I'll check.
I'm glad the worst is over.
I felt for all of you having to go through that.
I went through a very similar situation, onyx.
I moved to Wilmington in mid-July, and six weeks later Diana blessed us with her presence.
We were without power for over a week.
It was a mess...took six weeks for them to pick up our yard debris.
I understand not being unpacked, and having that kind of mess.
I'm glad you and bourbon weathered it in fine fashion.
And, I am glad you are back!
It's hard to get gas in Meridian, too.
I understand it's hit or miss, with long lines.
"If you go out driving, you will see abandoned cars lining the roadways."
That sounds like Portland when it snows. ;o)
That's what my 91-year-old aunt said (who incidentally is from MS but worked for the Corps of Engineers in New Orleans for 18 years).
My wife's 60 year old cousin lived in Waveland
in an RV. We haven't heard from him yet.
I sure hope you hear from that cousin soon. Maybe he moved the RV to higher ground inland before the storm, but still can't phone.
Tom "Gator" Seefeldt, Davis' brother, lives in Biloxi, Mississippi. He is a 25 year veteran of the Navy, where he served as a SEAL, he is a veteran of Vietnam, has served in Somalia and Africa and has even spent time hunting alligators (hence the nickname) for the government. And although he's seen active combat and the terrible side of the human condition through his many years of work as a SEAL, when he got a call out to his sister two days ago, he said the devastation to his area was the worst he has ever seen."My brother is in Biloxi, right where it hit the hardest. My brother has been in service since straight out of high school; He's a Navy Seal and he's trained for survival. I know he's going to bring them all home, I know he is," she said.
Gator's land was spared in the hurricane - the only home in a five-block radius still standing, the only home with fresh, uncontaminated water and food. He even has a generator and a four wheeler that runs. He was able to call his sister thanks to having On Star in his car. Davis said Gator has been busy rescuing as many people as he can; when she spoke to him last, he had taken over 50 people into his home to give them food and shelter. He has pulled almost that many dead bodies out of the water and taken them to I-90, where he told Davis there were about 800 corpses lined up along the road for rescue workers to retrieve. It was 102 degrees when Davis got to speak to her brother and the mosquitoes and flies were eating the survivors alive.
Lt. Rusty Pittman of the Mississippi Bureau of Marine Resources, involved in the search effort, said he worries the death toll "could reach 4,000, maybe 5,000, if not more." The official number of confirmed dead in Mississippi remained at 170, but Biloxi spokesman Vincent Creel said Monday he thinks there will be several hundred dead just in Biloxi.My personal opinion, that I've stated previously, is that they deliberately downplayed MS because they didn't want hundreds of thousands of worried relatives clogging all the roads. There is no longer any point, because people who haven't heard from their relatives/friends are now going to get on the roads to find out what happened
Those estimates are unbelievable. I had no idea the MS deaths would reach that high too. Guess I thought most of them had at least evacuated up to Hattiesburg or Jackson area.
Very sad.
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. – The makeshift morgue in this leveled town of 8,000 people is a parking lot on a narrow two-lane road that runs along some rusty train tracks. Six refrigerated trailers are lined up in neat parallel behind a chain-link fence.So you could have a whole warehouse ful of bodies, but a body will only get counted towards the official death toll once a family member has officially identified the deceased. For many, if not most of these bodies, there can never be a positive identification after the amount of decomposition they have gone thru in the hot August weather.For a week now Norma Stiglet, the county coroner, a grandmotherly woman with white hair and spectacles, has been identifying the decaying corpses of lifelong friends and neighbors who tried unsuccessfully to ride out Hurricane Katrina.
[snip]
The official death toll in Mississippi is about 190. The last official count in Hancock County, of which Bay St. Louis is part, stood at just 36, but that could be ludicrously deceptive. One law enforcement officer estimated it is more likely to be between 600 and 800. The residents are “in for a shock,” he said. The reason the number is so low is that the state counts only bodies that have been recovered and positively identified.
What happens to the unidentified bodies?
The death toll in Miss is in the thousands. I have now spoken to at-least 4 people who have worked down there during recovery.If you did the math between the 4 of them you would be over 1,500 alone as far as tagging bodies is concerned.
If they begin to cremate...then we will never know the tally. Let us not forget the homeless,illegals, and anyone else who has become decomposed to the point of needing dental records which were probably washed away by this point in the floods.
Re: the unidentified dead: if soembody is missing for a sufficient amount of time, will he be counted as dead? A good percentage of the dead will have been collecting Social Security, pension, or welfare. Are scam artists going to pocket the money while maintaining the pretense that these people are still alive? Who knows
We also will never know how many bodies were washed out to sea when the storm surge went out. I would guess a good percentage of the dead will never be found, washed away or buried deep in the mud
Hmm, that's rather odd. The other night you were sure the toll wouldn't break 2000.
Still think that?
Whoa. You are efficient!
Perhaps they're adopting some BS requirement that the identification has to be done by the surviving next of kin (who may be in a distant state with no way to get there).
As I've stated in the other thread (the one that turned into such an unfortunate flame-fest with the obstinate believers-in-officialdom), this information-blackout is a story in itself. The media admit openly now that the official figures are deliberate fiction (see post 69), yet they still cooperate in the fiction.
Are they so contemptuous of the American people? What explanation can possibly apply at this late date. Earlier I was going "OK, they want to calm people down, and don't want 100 thousand worried relatives clogging the MS highways", but WHAT IS THE POINT now?
Do they really believe they can sweep this under the rug? Do they really think they can label all the eye witnesses to all the bodies as tin-foils? I admit we have more than a few posting on FR who would like to do just that, but it's now far past the point where it's anything other than futile.
The dead in MS exist. They exist in numbers FAR greater than the officials admit. There are lots of open eye witnesses to it all who are calling their friends and relatives with the news. It's OVER, guys. Any attempt to continue it is just spitting in the faces of all those who have seen
Are you still have severe gas shortages or long gas lines?
Our Exon was open today --- no lines --- gallon of REGULAR = $2.69 9/10. Call it $2.70.
Does ANYBODY have a plausible theory why officialdom and the MSM are still persisting in the fiction of less than 200 deaths in MS?
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