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Biloxi mayor: 'This is total destruction'

BILOXI, Miss. — Chaos reigned the day after monstrous Hurricane Katrina reduced the Mississippi's Gulf Coast to rubble.

This waterfront city's residents awoke this morning without a single working toilet, no water, no electricity, no telephones, sporadic cellular phone service and no idea when conditions would even begin to stabilize.

ROGELIO SOLIS/AP Photo (enlarge photo) Joe Clavin of Biloxi, Miss., recalls Tuesday how he and others escaped the waves driven from Hurricane Katrina.

Authorities acknowledged they had no idea how many people were killed by the storm, but they feared that deaths may have exceeded the 236 people who died in the last major storm to ravage the area, Hurricane Camille.

"We're still going with the official count from last night, 40 in Biloxi," Vincent Creel, the public affairs manager for Biloxi said Tuesday. "But that's going to be very low."

At a news briefing just east in Gulfport, Gov. Haley Barbour said parts of Harrison County, which contains Biloxi and Gulfport, "looks like Hiroshima is what it looks like." He warned that the death toll could soar.

"There is incredible evidence that the casualties are more than 50, maybe 80, and it seems likely that that's not the end of it," Barbour said. "It may be higher, maybe substantially."

"This is total destruction. Total devastation," Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway said after an aerial tour of the city and neighboring communities, none of which were left unscathed. "I'm afraid from what I've scene it's going to be very bad."

By nightfall search and rescue teams from Florida and elsewhere were still trying to determine whether any survivors remained trapped in their homes or elsewhere.

Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said searchers were concentrating on looking and digging into huge piles of debris. "These people could be down in a void, under a house. We're bringing people out alive," Sullivan said.

"I never thought I'd see something that looks worse than Camille," he said, referring to the 1969 hurricane, "but this is worse than Camille."

Creel said that many people had ignored evacuation orders because they, or their homes, had survived Hurricane Camille. But while Hurricane Katrina was not as strong — it was rated a Category 4 while Camille was a 5, the fiercest — it drove an unstoppable wall of water that Creel compared to a tsunami. Over and over again Tuesday, mud-covered people looked around, shook their heads and announced: "It's worse than Camille."

Overwhelmed officials struggled to establish some semblance of order as looters pillaged businesses and dazed residents wandered the streets with nothing left but the clothes they wore.

Authorities threatened martial law early Tuesday but then backed off.

"We're going to arrest people if we need to," Creel said.

Toni Ganucheau's home was one of hundreds razed by storm surge on the eastern end of the coast in an historic neighborhood called "The Point" where many residents ignored evacuation orders.

"It looks like a bomb was dropped on it. I can't find a piece of my house," Ganucheau sobbed as she stood outside the Peoples Bank, where she and other employees consoled one another. "We have no clothes. We have nothing."

Gary and Valentina Stilwell rode out the storm there and realized they were in trouble when they watched their neighbors houses float by their second story windows.

"The house started to move. All the houses were gone and I saw this wave coming. We floated across the street," said Gary Stilwell, who moved to Biloxi from West Palm Beach.

The couple said they wound up in their boat and rescued three women and two men they found clinging to trees in the rain.

"We're homeless. And we have nothing. We have no idea what we're going to do," Valentina Stilwell said.

An American Red Cross official told reporters Tuesday in Biloxi that Katrina probably will prove more devastating than the four 2004 hurricanes — Frances, Jeanne, Charley and Ivan — combined.

"This is the largest response in the history of the United States," said spokesman Peter Teahen.

Throughout the day, convoys of emergency vehicles and power trucks rolled across Interstate 10 from Texas and Florida.

But officials had no idea when they will begin to distribute water and food.

"We can't tell you when food is going to be served. We don't know. We hope it will be in a couple of days," Teahen said.

Thousands of employees are without jobs after the storm swells dislodged casino barges from their landings.

Kris Kwitzky, who managed The Sports Zone bar on a barge beside the Palace Casino, stood at the edge of the bay overlooking where his establishment once stood. The barge had drifted across the bay and lodged against U.S. 90.

"Now it's parked there on land. It's quite a situation," he said. The Palace Casino employed about 700 people, Kwitzky estimated.

Around 6 p.m., Holloway drove his SUV along the coastal zone on the western end of Biloxi near his home to get his first glimpse of the region that now resembles a war zone.

Antebellum homes were demolished and rumors of at least a dozen people who drowned in a condominium drew television cameras to the area. There also were reports that 30 people in the Quiet Water Beach apartments had died, trapped in their crumbling two-story building as it was swept away Monday. Those reports have not been confirmed.

"A good friend of mine lived right there," the mayor said as he shook his head.

"Lord have mercy. Unbelievable," he repeated as he took in the devastation. "Oh man. Oh, man. Oh, man."

Dara Kam writes for the Palm Beach Post. The New York Times contributed to this story.