Residents Pick Up Pieces Left by Hurricane Georges

His own home was without power. A pine tree leaned up against the house next door. But still, a day after Hurricane Georges unleashed its ferocious winds and torrential rains on the Gulf Coast, 68-year-old Ingle Brewer pronounced the experience not nearly as bad as it could have been.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” said Brewer--who unlike 1.5 million other residents from the Florida Panhandle to New Orleans who fled for safety until the storm subsided, decided to ride it out at home.

Downgraded to a tropical depression, Georges on Tuesday lumbered northeast as rains continued drenching Alabama and northern Florida. A flash flood watch was issued for south and central Georgia and parts of South Carolina through this morning. The hurricane winds that ripped through the coast with gusts as high as 174 mph had dropped to 35 mph. “It’s pretty much a rain event now,” said Jerry Jarrell, director of the National Hurricane Center.

Rain-swollen Big Creek Lake near the Mississippi-Alabama line overflowed late Tuesday, sending water down the Escatawpa River into Moss Point, Miss. Resident Paul Bosarge described his neighborhood as “submerged.”

About 400,000 homes from Florida to Louisiana were still without power following the season’s most devastating hurricane, which killed more than 370 people in the Caribbean and was blamed for four deaths in the United States--two in Louisiana and two in Florida. President Clinton, who declared the entire storm-damaged swath a disaster area, planned to visit later in the week.

Not far from the Brewer place, Michael Dodd picked through the gray insulation that once packed the ceiling of his mother’s bungalow. “I don’t think anybody would be living if we’d been here when this happened,” said Dodd, 25, eyeing the fractured beams above the couch. His mother had left the house to be with her own mother when Georges’ devastating winds arrived.

But when countless Gulf Coast residents returned home Tuesday morning, the recovery began.

“My first reaction was well . . . I’ve got to clean up. Someone’s got to do it,” Dodd said upon seeing the smashed graduation picture now bathed in insulation lint, the crystal swan that once took center stage on a coffee table now lying on a pile of debris.

Radio hosts from town to town helped in the effort, relaying messages for residents whose power had been knocked out and conveying queries about job status and local food supplies. Announcers reminded Gulfport listeners to beware of “hurricane gypsies”--contractors who prey on desperate homeowners needing repairs.

“There are long lines at McDonald’s at Orange Grove,” reported one Gulfport caller, describing post-curfew signs of life.

In New Orleans, where the Superdome was transformed into an emergency shelter for more than 13,000 people, some evacuees had turned testy, complaining about city-supplied juice and hot dogs and itching to go home.

In all, more than 30,000 New Orleans residents stayed in public shelters; by Tuesday, tens of thousands of other city residents who had fled as far as Houston and Atlanta were snaking their way home on the reopened interstate.

Along Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, a stubble of black pilings marked the site where dozens of fishing camps had been wiped away by high surf.

Poised on a boulder near the water, 49-year-old Ron Richoux struggled to described a place now physically erased.

“Right there was our summer home,” Richoux said, pointing to a smattering of pilings. “It was a wooden-framed house set on a platform with a screen porch all around. We had the camp here for years and years. . . . People would stay here all summer.”

Richoux and his family had evacuated north of New Orleans before Georges roared in.

“It’s sad, it really is,” he said. “My kids have been coming here since they were babies. . . . I learned to water ski here. My whole family came out here--I mean 40 or 50 people. We’d catch crabs. We’d fish. It’s over.”

Times wire services contributed to this story.