Katrina: 'Last night on Earth'
2005-09-02 13:29
New Orleans - Announcing itself with shrieking, 233km/h winds, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast just outside New Orleans, submerging entire neighbourhoods up to their roofs, swamping Mississippi's beachfront casinos and killing at least 55 people.
Jim Pollard, spokesperson for the Harrison County emergency operations centre, said on Monday that 50 people were killed by Katrina in his county, with the bulk of the deaths at a flat complex in Biloxi.
Three other people were killed by falling trees in Mississippi and two died in a traffic accident in Alabama, authorities said.
For New Orleans - a dangerously vulnerable city because it sits mostly below sea level in a bowl-shaped depression - it was not the apocalyptic storm forecasters had feared.
In New Orleans and elsewhere along the coast, scores of people had to be rescued from rooftops as the floodwaters rose around them. An untold number of other people were feared dead in flooded neighbourhoods, many of which could not be reached by rescuers because of high water.
Ignored
"Some of them, it was their last night on Earth," Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, said of people who ignored orders to evacuate the city of 480 000 over the weekend. "That's a hard way to learn a lesson."
In New Orleans, Coast Guard helicopters plucked survivors from rooftops and firefighters went house-to-house in boats in desperate rescue operations in the city on Monday for hundreds of people trapped by floodwaters.
US military and Coast Guard helicopters flew overhead carrying out rescue missions and assessing the damage from one of the most powerful storms to hit the United States in years.
Louisiana state Governor Kathleen Blanco told CNN that hundreds of people had been plucked from floodwaters since the hurricane made landfall early on Monday and hundreds more were awaiting rescue.
"We believe there are hundreds more out there. And so tonight is critical," she said.
Stranded
But for every person saved there were scores more left stranded, many in extreme danger.
Darryl Thibodeaux, 49, couldn't get off the freeway to find his brother.
"He's blind and his roof collapsed but I can't get to him. I can't drive through this and I can't swim," he said as he stared down into waist-high water that was filled with floating debris and covered in oil slicks.
"I'm afraid to go in that water because I know they have snakes and alligators in that water," Thibodeaux said.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall early on Monday as a Category-four storm on the five-level Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale and caused widespread damage and flooding in New Orleans and other cities on the southern Gulf Coast of the United States.
Hurricane Katrina was downgraded to a tropical storm late on Monday. - AP/AFP