Pieces of Lives Lie in Mississippi Rubble

A sticky, sour sludge coats the scraps of grass that used to be lawns, the shards of drywall that used to be bedrooms and the washing machines that somehow, inexplicably, made it through Katrina intact.

It’s one more reminder of the hurricane’s malice, as if anyone needed a reminder.

All that’s left of Famous Joe’s Oyster Bar is the sign. All that’s left of Dillon Fairchild’s bike is a wheel, poking out of a 10-foot-high mound of shattered timber.

For New Orleans residents, the agony is not knowing: They might not be able to return to see what’s left of their homes for months. Biloxi’s battered families know. And that, too, is unbearable.

They came back here Wednesday under a broiling sun, and they found only bits of the lives they had known: a plastic Christmas wreath. A collection of model cars. A satellite TV dish.

The old working-class neighborhood of east Biloxi looked like an enormous, ruined swap meet: Lamps, microwaves and shower rods were strewn about amid the rubble.

“I can’t break down yet,” said Sheila McGee, 25.

Her 7-year-old daughter, Asia, kept her strong, she said. But she wasn’t sure how long she could keep up a brave front.

Monday’s hurricane had shoved their rental house over to the next block. Her husband, Henry, was pretty sure he recognized it from its distinctive roof. But the roof was about all there was to recognize.

“She has a lot of questions,” McGee said of her daughter. “We don’t have answers.”

Few answers were forthcoming Wednesday as authorities and citizens tried to assess Katrina’s toll across Mississippi. It seemed clear that the wind had done more damage much farther inland than officials had realized, toppling enormous old oak trees and stripping off roofs 100 miles and more from the coast. But there were no firm estimates of the damage; it was impossible to add up so much destruction.

“It’s one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen,” U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) said.

Gov. Haley Barbour, just back from a tour of the state’s southeast quadrant, put it this way: “A lot of Mississippians got clobbered.”

Here on the Gulf shore, this city of 55,000 was all but demolished. Authorities struggled to find a way to help the dispirited -- and still slightly awestruck -- residents who ambled in a daze around streets that looked more like landfills.

There was no phone service, no electricity and so little water that firefighters pleaded with residents to be extra careful with candles, lest they start a blaze.

Convoys of 18-wheelers carrying supplies began reaching southern Mississippi by afternoon, but distribution was spotty and generally focused on shelters. So when a Salvation Army truck rolled into east Biloxi at midday, scores of residents swarmed it.

Sweaty and drained, many waited in line for at least 30 minutes to get a plastic container of beef stew, a small bag of corn chips and a bottle of water, handed out by volunteers from Sand Springs, Okla.

“We wanted to go to the hardest-hit area, and this is it,” Salvation Army Capt. August Pillsbury said. “Look around you. There’s nowhere to live. There isn’t any worse than this.”

In truth, the same words could have been spoken in any community along Mississippi’s once-golden coast.

In the small town of Bay St. Louis, whole neighborhoods washed away -- block after block swept down to the bare foundations.

In Gulfport, two hospitals were heavily damaged. A middle school was on the verge of collapse. Dozens of beachfront homes were missing.

It took rescue teams two days to even approach the town of Waveland, population 7,000. It was cut off from the mainland when a bridge over the bay washed out. Most of the town was in splinters, and the air smelled of death. Survivors scavenged the rubble for food.

Up and down the coast, survivors tried to catalog the mess: Lyman Elementary, lost. Hancock County’s emergency center, swamped. First Baptist Church in Long Beach, leveled.

“It’s unimaginable,” said Vincent Creel, public affairs manager for Biloxi.

Lt. John Lowe, of the Biloxi Police Reserve, said he expected the death toll to exceed 100 in this one city alone.

Rescue workers excavating each block of debris said they were still searching for survivors. Increasingly, though, they found themselves counting bodies. And then moving on, with apologies, to the next pile of wreckage.

Well into Wednesday afternoon, four bodies lay crushed under the collapsed cement-block walls of the Seashore Mission, a soup kitchen in east Biloxi. It was unclear when they would be extricated.

“The police were here. They took their names. They just don’t have the time to come get the bodies,” said Kevin Miller, who was standing nearby.

Authorities promised a massive infusion of federal aid. Volunteers from as far as California and Pennsylvania streamed toward the Mississippi coast to help. And residents of still-intact inland cities opened their arms to their newly homeless fellow citizens.

“Although we’re poor, we’re benevolent folks,” said Frank Melton, the mayor of Jackson, the capital.

But even with all the goodwill and lavish promises, many here said they could not imagine how they would recover.

Especially in the poorer Biloxi neighborhoods, most of the residents were renters without insurance. Even some business owners said they had no coverage, no way to rebuild.

At My-Viet Market, the floor was slick with mud, the merchandise was toppled in a heap, and the boxes of shrimp crackers were soggy. The air was ripe with the smell of coming rot. And the Vietnamese immigrants who ran the store were dejected.

“There’s nothing left right now,” said Huy Huynh, 21, an employee.

“No insurance. We lose everything,” owner Oahn Kim Nguyen added.

In another part of town, Sarah Fairchild, her husband, Bobby, and their 7-year-old son, Dillon, picked through a mound that used to be at least seven separate houses. Including, they thought, their own.

They found a gasoline-powered generator splattered with mud, but no sign of the antique furniture, the china, the jewelry they had collected over a lifetime of careful saving.

“All gone in a day,” Bobby Fairchild said.

“What do you do?” Sarah Fairchild asked. “You pick up the pieces. You start over.”

Times staff writer Stephanie Simon in Denver contributed to this report.