Wall of Water Left the Rescuers in Need

The firefighters trudged door to door, if there were doors left at all, searching for survivors in this isolated village on the Mississippi coast.

Too often, they could tell from the stench as they approached that they would find only victims.

Sgt. Paul Middlebrooks, part of a rescue team sent here from Prattville, Ala., held his red T-shirt over his nose as he entered a small one-story house off Waveland Avenue on Thursday.

The house was dark and dank, with sticky mud on the porch and slick floors in the living room. Next to an armchair, Middlebrooks saw a woman crumpled on the floor. Holding a stick to fight off snakes, Middlebrooks looked at the still figure in a black-and-white dress for a moment, then retreated to radio the location of the body to Mississippi authorities.

“It bothers you,” Lt. Spencer Williamson said. “That woman in there sat as long as possible and couldn’t do anything ... She just drowned.”

Hurricane Katrina caused many such tragedies up and down the Mississippi coast. Authorities said Thursday that more than 125 people in the state were dead.

This historic fishing town of 10,000 was among the hardest-hit, with 25 deaths confirmed so far, according to Mayor Tommy Longo.

He put much of the blame on a storm surge, up to 35 feet high, that swept across Waveland with unimaginable force.

The wall of water tumbled in so unexpectedly that even the town’s own rescue personnel had to scramble for cover. Twenty-five police officers, trapped, had to hack their way through the roof of the police station and cling to a nearby tree.

The fire station flooded too; many firefighters ended up swimming to a taller building next door and hunkering down on the top floor. “It took us two days to get them out,” Longo said. In fact, it took two days for rescuers to approach Waveland.

With hundreds of trees and power lines down, and nearly every road blocked or flooded, the town was cut off even from the other devastated cities along the Mississippi coastline.

Thursday afternoon -- three days after Katrina hit -- some neighborhoods remained inaccessible, Longo said.

At least half the town was wiped out in the hurricane -- from the coast to the railroad tracks, three-quarters of a mile inland. “Our whole downtown business district, the beachfront, the veterans monument, it’s all gone,” Longo said.

“There’s not a stick left.”

Some of the houses on the north side of town looked relatively intact. But that was deceptive. The water had rushed into them so quickly that even homes with no structural damage became watery tombs.

Rescue squads -- including units from California, Maryland, Massachusetts and Virginia -- are searching through the rubble and the buildings still standing.

“Those who chose not to get out of the way of the water ... we’re trying to find them in trees and under collapsed buildings,” said Capt. Larry Collins of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

It was a grim duty on a grim day. The sky was gray, with intermittent rain. Even where there were no bodies, the air smelled of rot -- and of the saltwater that had brought such devastation.

The mayor looked, above all else, crestfallen as he sat slumped at an emergency operations center in nearby Bay St. Louis, awaiting word of the living and the dead, and wondering what would happen to the town he loved.

He spoke of bouncing back, but it sounded perfunctory.

Farther east along the Mississippi coast, the mood was angrier, as survivors waited through another broiling day with little sense of how they would make it through the weekend, much less rebuild their lives.

The looting that has ravaged New Orleans began to crop up in battered cities such as Biloxi, where a crowd smashed the window of a video rental store and walked out with piles of DVDs. Local radio reports said parked cars had been broken into in the night -- and their gas tanks siphoned.

In the town of Gautier, about 20 miles away, a smashed-up house, its two stories collapsed into one, bore a warning spray-painted in orange: “We still have the bullets left over from [Hurricane] Ivan. Beware, looters.”

At word that a supply truck might be on the way, residents desperate for food, water and ice queued up at 4 a.m. and waited hours. In the one spot that sketchy cellphone service was available -- a bridge west of Pascagoula -- men and women jumped on top of car hoods, holding their phones high in the muggy air, trying for a signal.

Lines for gas stretched for hours, with some drivers pushing their cars to the pump.

It was so humid that even breathing was an effort. And along the coast, the air was thick with the scent of rotting sewage, human waste, burned wood and bayou mud.

The Harrison County coroner went on the radio to warn that identifying bodies would be difficult because they were decomposing quickly in the heat.

Officials across the state were fielding scores of calls from entrepreneurs hoping to win contracts for debris removal or hazardous-waste cleanup.

In the emergency operations center in Jackson, the state capital, an inch-thick stack of fliers, most of them promising miracles, was piled up next to the fax machine.

One read: “Rescue 911: Aerosol instant roof patch. Spray it on, walk away ... You’re Done! No more leaks!”

Another offered for sale a powerful generator, ready for immediate delivery from Memphis.

“We’re here to help, but we’re also here to make money,” said Todd Brown, vice president of operations for Alabama Emergency Response and Recovery, a 12-person firm based in Montgomery.

The company’s president, Charles Stephenson, added: “This will be a very good year for hurricane business.”

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Dahlburg reported from Waveland and Huffstutter from Jackson and Pascagoula. Times staff writer Stephanie Simon contributed to this report from Denver.