United States Gulf Coast residents staggered on Tuesday from the body-blow inflicted by Hurricane Katrina, with more than a million people without power, lowlands swamped and at least 55 dead — a number likely to increase as rescuers reach the hardest-hit areas.
Even with Katrina to the north as a tropical storm, a large section of New Orleans’s vital 17th Street Canal levee gave way on Monday afternoon, sending a churning sea of water coursing across the western part of the city.
Residents who had ridden out the brunt of Katrina faced a second, more insidious threat as flood waters continued their ascent well into the night.
”The hurricane was scary,” Scott Radish told The Times-Picayune. ”All the tree branches fell, but the building stood. I thought I was doing good. Then I noticed my Jeep was under water.”
Across the Gulf Coast, boats rescued people clinging to rooftops, hundreds of trees were uprooted and sailboats were flung about like toys after Katrina crashed ashore on Monday in what could become the most expensive storm in US history.
The federal government began rushing baby formula, communications equipment, generators, water and ice into hard-hit areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, along with doctors, nurses and first-aid supplies.
The US Defence Department sent experts to help with search-and-rescue operations.
The death toll jumped late on Monday when Harrison county emergency operations centre spokesperson Jim Pollard said an estimated 50 people had died in the county, with about 30 dead at a beach-side apartment complex in Biloxi.
”This is our tsunami,” Biloxi mayor AJ Holloway told the Biloxi Sun Herald.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency officials refused to confirm the deaths. Three other people were killed by falling trees elsewhere in Mississippi and two died in a traffic accident in Alabama, authorities said.
The total does not include 11 deaths in South Florida when a much-weaker Katrina first made landfall last week.
Katrina knocked out power to more than a million people from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle — the westernmost areas of the southern state — and authorities said it could be two months before electricity is restored to everyone. Ten major hospitals in New Orleans were running on emergency back-up power.
”It will be unsafe to return to the coastal area for several days,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour told evacuees on Monday. ”Be patient. Don’t be in a hurry to go back.”
According to preliminary assessments by AIR Worldwide Corporation, a risk-modelling firm, the property and casualty insurance industry faces as much as $26-billion in claims from Katrina.
That would make Katrina more expensive than the previous record-setting storm, Hurricane Andrew, which caused about $21-billion in insured losses in 1992 to property in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.
Mississippi’s economy was also dealt a blow that could run into the millions, as the storm shuttered the flashy casinos that dot its coast. The gambling houses are built on barges anchored just off the beach, and Barbour said emergency officials had received reports of water reaching the third floors of some casinos.
After striking the Gulf Coast as a category-four hurricane, Katrina was later downgraded to a tropical storm as it passed through eastern Mississippi, moving north at nearly 35kph. Winds early on Tuesday were still dangerous at nearly 100kph.
Forecasters said that as the storm moves north over the next few days, it may spawn tornadoes over the South-East and swamp the Tennessee and Ohio valleys with a potentially ruinous 20cm or more of rain.
At New Orleans’s Superdome stadium, where power was lost early on Monday, about 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.
”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,” said Rosetta Junne (37).
In a particularly low-lying neighbourhood 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 fiancée.
Across a street that had turned into a river bobbing with garbage cans, trash and old tyres, a woman leaned from the second-storey window of a brick home and pleaded to be rescued.
”There are three kids in here,” the woman said. ”Can you help us?”
In a subdivision of Gulfport, young children clung to one another in a small blue boat on Monday evening as neighbours shuffled them out of the neighbourhood.
Shun Howell (25), who was trying to leave with her five-year-old son, said cars in the neighborhood were flooded or flipped over.
”We’re going to need some serious help to start over,” she said. ”Everything is ruined.”
”I’ve been out there. It’s complete devastation,” Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said on Monday. He estimated that 75% of buildings in Gulfport have major roof damage, ”if they have a roof left at all”.
Dozens of Hancock county officials were forced to put on life jackets and swim out of their emergency operations centre when water swamped the site.
A 15m water main broke in New Orleans, making it unsafe to drink the city’s water without first boiling it. Also, police made several arrests for looting.
In Mobile, Alabama, the storm knocked an oil rig free from its moorings, wedging it under a bridge. Muddy 2m-high waves crashed into the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, flooding stately, antebellum mansions and littering them with oak branches.
”There are lots of homes through here worth a million dollars. At least they were yesterday,” said a shirtless Fred Wright. ”I’ve been here 25 years, and this is the worst I’ve ever seen the water.” — Sapa-AP
Associated Press reporters Mary Foster, Allen G Breed, Brett Martel, Adam Nossiter and Jay Reeves contributed to this report