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On Mississippi coast, death toll climbing

More than 100 are confirmed dead as a desperate search for survivors continues.

BILOXI - Residents returning to the hardest-hit towns along the Mississippi coast Wednesday often found empty spaces where their homes used to stand, not even the smallest memento left behind.

Some embraced friends who rode out the storm. Others had no idea if their neighbors survived. The stench of decay lingered in the air.

Bewilderment mixed with denial.

"I still can't believe everything that's happened," said Gary Michiel, 60, who lives a historic district in Biloxi. "The whole thing has been so surreal."

Rescue workers continued their desperate search of the scores of damaged buildings. The death toll fluctuated throughout the day, rising to as many as 110.

More than 430,000 customers in the state remained without power. Residents ached for food, water and a respite from the withering heat. A family in Gulfport filled plastic jugs with water from the dingy bottom on a drainage canal.

Overwhelmed local police battled to control looting. Emergency officials struggled to grasp the full extent of the damage.

"It's beyond imagination," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said.

In many areas it's easier to judge the devastation by what isn't there, rather than what remained.

Noble plantation homes that lined the length of U.S. 90, towering oak tress, even some of the grand casinos, wiped clean as if they never existed.

"The history of Gulfport and Biloxi are gone," said Gary Tatum, 56, "There is no history anymore."

Katrina leveled nearly every building in the beach town of Waveland, population 7,000, according to Associated Press reports.

David and Connie MacKay estimated that the storm destroyed most of the homes in their hometown of Pass Christian. Their home was still standing, but under water.

"I hate this smell. After a while it's hard to tell the difference between the smell of the mud and the smell of death," Connie MacKay said, wading through the three inches of muck in her living room.

Katrina hammered some towns in neighboring Alabama as well.

Coastal Bayou La Batre was without power, water, gas and phone service Wednesday. About 80 percent of the town's homes are uninhabitable, said police Chief John Joyner.

Farther south, on Dauphin Island, a building inspector who surveyed damage said Katrina destroyed a third of the homes on the barrier island's west end.

More that 250,000 people statewide remained without power Wednesday.

Wednesday afternoon, Michiel and his neighbor, Butch Henley, watched in numb silence as a bulldozer pushed debris around their Biloxi neighborhood. The men knew at least two bodies were mixed in with the broken armchairs, car parts and plywood.

They had watched for more than an hour on Monday as eight people from an apartment complex clung to a metal rail as the water grew higher and higher. Then, suddenly, they were gone.

Michiel and Henley pulled six of the people from the roiling waters. Two didn't make it, including the apartment manager, whom they knew only as Mr. Garcia.

Michiel said he saw Garcia swim back into the building to retrieve an elderly man. Neither emerged.

"Mr. Garcia was a good man," Michiel said, his lip quivering. "Always kept his tenants in line."

In another section of Biloxi, tempers flared as the enormity of the damage began to sink in.

"They didn't give us enough warning," said Lillie Hopkins, 35, whose double wide mobile home on Beach Boulevard was blown away. "Someone should have told us how bad the storm surge was going to be."

Many wondered when all the promised help would arrive.

"People are hurting and people are being vandalized," the Sun-Herald newspaper wrote in an editorial on its Web site. "Yet where is the National Guard, why hasn't every able-bodied member of the armed forces in South Mississippi been pressed into service?"

Local police agencies were stretched passed thin.

In Gulfport, Katrina destroyed police headquarters. The storm waters swamped emergency vehicles.

More than 425 Florida law enforcement officers have streamed into south Mississippi in the last two days. Several times they discovered they were the only law enforcement around, said Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Guy Tunnell.

"It appears the (local police) may be victims too," Tunnell said at the Florida Operations Center in Tallahassee Tuesday.

Katrina hit hard in the state's economic engine.

he casinos, many of which were destroyed or severly damaged, employed about 14,000 people. More worked in the adjacent hotels. Gambling also put $500,000 in tax revenues in the state's coffers each day.

The 20 feet or more of storm surge ravaged the state's ports. The waters swamped the Northrop Grumman shipyards in Gulfport and Pascagoula, which employ 12,000 people.

The storm smashed shrimp and fishing boats all along the coast, at least temporarily crippling the state's multimillion-dollar fishing industry.

Mississippi already was struggling economically.

"We're going to rebuild the coast bigger and better than ever," he said. "But it's not going to get done next month. It's probably not going to get finished next year. It's going to be a long time. We're in it for the long haul."

The casino where Gwen Ray worked as a cook blew away. She said the casinos revitalized the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

"It's devastating," Ray said. "The casino has kept a lot of us going. Now we have nowhere to turn."

She was even unsure if she'd be paid for the last two weeks.

Today would have been pay day.

Times staff writers Joni James, Alex Leary, Thomas C. Tobin and Michael Kruse contributed to this report, which used information from the Associated Press, the Sun-Herald and the Mobile Register.