With all the coverage on N.O. and I can tell you from watching - the vast majority of coverage is still focused on N.O. - let's not forget what has happened to and is still happening to Gulfport and biloxi and the other coastal areas.
The number of dead is well over 100 and according to my husband it will swell to the thousands. The coast guard radios in to the biloxi police force on a regular basis telling them when to expect a new influx of bodies washing up on the beaches. Every few hours, cops on 4-wheelers head down to the beach to begin bagging up the bodies. They are opening more and more temporary morgues. The reason the body count that is on TV is so low is because they only release to the media the number of bodies that have been processed and identified. Many of these will never be IDed unless they use dental records or DNA. And the processing alone may take weeks, there are so many.
Yesterday my husband came up on a young girl on the beach. She was clutching a dead puppy in her arms and crying. The girl's parents told Wes they'd been looking for the dog for days. He worked the recovery process for a barge that was picked up from the port area by the storm surge and deposited more than a mile inland. Six bodies were onboard, it took them almost all day yesterday to clear enough debris to get to those six. They have hundreds of sites to clear just like it, with who knows how many bodies buried underneath.
I spoke to him this morning and he was working on a recovery detail on a street close to his hometown church, he said he knows many of the families who live on this street. I asked him if it looked as if most people left, and he said he hoped so but there were an awfully large number of cars, he's afraid that there are people who stayed behind.
He told me there will never be a way for people who aren't there to appreciate what is going on and what the recovery workers and the relief volunteers and the survivors themselves are going through. While you may see things on TV that are sickening, he said you can't imagine the scope of it until you're standing there, in 90+ degree heat, looking at total devastation as far as the eye can see and smelling the dead bodies and rotten food everywhere.