The storm pushed water up to the second floor of homes uprooted hundreds of trees and flung sailboats
The storm pushed water up to the second floor of homes, uprooted hundreds of trees and flung sailboats across a highway “Let me tell you something, folks: I’ve been out there. It’s complete devastation,” said Gulfport, Mississippi, Fire Chief Pat Sullivan. In Gulfport, young children clung to one another in a small blue boat as neighbors shuffled children and elderly residents out of a flooded neighborhood “Everything is flooded. A fire later tore through a yacht club near Lake Pontchartrain.
Elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, Mississippi was subjected to both Katrina’s harshest winds and highest recorded storm surges 22 feet. “Can you help us?” Blanco said 200 people have been rescued in boats from rooftops, attics and other locations around the New Orleans area, a scene playing out in Mississippi as well. In some cases, rescuers are sawing through roofs to get to people in attics, and other stranded residents “are swimming to our boats,” the governor said. In one dramatic rescue, a person was plucked from a roof by a helicopter.
It just kept rising and rising and rising,” said Bryan Vernon, who spent three hours on his roof, screaming over howling winds for someone to save him and his fiancee. Across a street that had turned into a river bobbing with garbage cans, trash and old tires, a woman leaned from the second-story window of a brick home and pleaded to be rescued “There are three kids in here,” the woman said. Bernard Parish, Katrina’s storm surge swamped an estimated 40,000 homes. In a particularly low-lying neighborhood on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, a levee along a canal gave way and forced dozens of residents to flee or scramble to the roofs when water rose to their gutters “I’ve never encountered anything like it in my life. But it weakened to a Category 4 and made a slight right-hand turn just become it came ashore around daybreak near the Louisiana bayou town of Buras, passing just east of New Orleans on a path that spared the Big Easy and its fabled French Quarter from its full fury In nearby coastal St.