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Hurricane 'a very bad disaster'
30/08/2005 14:25 - (SA)
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| Henry Rhodes sits in a New Orleans Police Department boat after being rescued in the flooded city. (The Palm Beach Post, Gary Coronado, AP) |
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Gulfport - As dawn broke over the ravaged Gulf of Mexico coastline on Tuesday, rescuers in boats and helicopters furiously searched for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The governor said the death toll in just one Mississippi county could be as high as 80.
"The devastation down there is just enormous," Governor Haley Barbour said on Tuesday on NBC's Today show.
Barbour said there were unconfirmed reports of up to 80 fatalities in Harrison County, which contains Gulfport and Biloxi, and the number was likely to rise. The storm had winds of 233km/h when it hit the coast.
"We know that there is a lot of the coast that we have not been able to get to," Barbour said. "I hate to say it, but it looks like it is a very bad disaster in terms of human life."
Devastation
The official death toll jumped sharply late on Monday when Harrison County emergency operations centre spokesperson Jim Pollard said an estimated 50 people had died in the county, with some 30 of the dead at a beach-side apartment complex in Biloxi.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency officials refused to confirm the deaths. Three other people were killed by falling trees 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.
Across the Gulf Coast, people were rescued as they clung to rooftops, hundreds of trees were uprooted and sailboats were flung about like toys when Katrina crashed ashore Monday in what could become the most expensive storm in US history.
Katrina knocked out power to more than a million people from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. Katrina disrupted Gulf Coast petroleum output and rattled energy markets.
According to preliminary assessments by AIR Worldwide Corporation, a risk modeling firm, the property and casualty insurance industry faces as much as $26bn in claims from Katrina.
That would make Katrina more expensive than the previous record-setting storm, Hurricane Andrew, which caused $21bn in insured losses in 1992 to property in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.
At New Orleans' Superdome, where power was lost early on Monday, about 10 000 refugees spent a second night in the dark bleachers.
A 15m water main broke in New Orleans, making it unsafe to drink the city's water without first boiling it. And police made several arrests for looting.
"Let me tell you something, folks. I've been out there. It's complete devastation," Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said Monday. He estimated that 75% of buildings in Gulfport have major roof damage, "if they have a roof left at all."
In Mobile, Alabama, the storm knocked an oil rig free from its moorings, wedging it under a bridge.
- Associated Press reporters Mary Foster, Allen G Breed, Brett Martel, Adam Nossiter and Jay Reeves contributed to this report.
- AP
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