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'Our tsunami,' Mississippi hurricane survivors say
BILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters) - "It was like our tsunami," Vincent Creel, a spokesman for the Mississippi Gulf Coast city of Biloxi, said on Tuesday. When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on the U.S. Gulf Coast on Monday, it sent a 30-foot (9-meter) storm surge into Biloxi. Many people were probably trapped in their homes by the ferocious wall of water."It's going to be in the hundreds," said Creel, when asked how many people may have died. Police said around 30 people died in one Biloxi apartment complex alone when the storm surge brought it crashing down. "Camille was 200, and we're looking at a lot more than that," Creel said, referring to Hurricane Camille, which devastated the area in 1969 and killed 256 people. But Katrina's storm surge beat all the high-water marks left by Camille, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit the United States, residents and local officials said. "The cadaver dogs are due in this afternoon," said Creel. Biloxi, a waterfront city of about 50,000 people, was a seafood-industry hub and sleepy summer resort for southerners early last century. It began to boom in the 1990s when Mississippi legalized dockside gambling, which opened a new economic frontier in the poorest U.S. state. Now, the town faces a long recovery. All that was left on Tuesday of hundreds of homes were the foundations. Waterfront casinos had been crushed, their top floors stripped off. The beach was littered with steel girders. City parks were 4-feet deep in debris. Dazed and tear-streaked survivors wander aimlessly, asking the few police or firefighters around where they could find some food and water. They tell stories of people hanging from trees for three hours half a mile inland, waiting for the swirling water to recede. "We almost drowned in our house," said Linda Boldt, 57. "We just moved here from Florida to get away from the hurricanes. We have no place to stay. Our car, our truck, our van full of furniture. We lost everything." She waved at others combing through the rubble-strewn streets. "I don't know what's going to happen to these people," she said. Creel said the power grid of Biloxi and its water and sewage systems were destroyed. "We've had widespread looting," he added. He said even the police and fire department had raided a grocery store for supplies as emergency teams worked triple shifts to hunt for survivors. "We're essentially looting ourselves but we're keeping track of it." Several police officers and firefighters said they had left their families when the storm came in and they were called out to search and rescue operations. "There's a lot of guys out there who don't even know where their family members are right now," said one police officer. Cay Wiser, another survivor, pointed to the town around her. "It's demolished, but we're alive," she said. She forecast a lengthy effort to rebuild. "It'll probably take us years, maybe several years."
Posted by: Steve 2005-08-30 |
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| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=128160 |