Deluge in the Deep South

As nervous residents of Hattiesburg, Miss., watched on Wednesday afternoon, the skies blackened and pounding sheets of rain began to fall. Kimberly Marks, 7, stepped off a school bus, walked down the street and was swept away by a juggernaut of water. Her body, coated with debris, was recovered on Thursday. She was one of at least ten who died in a series of thunderstorms that began in the Gulf of Mexico and caused the worst floods in 20 years in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. An estimated 30,000 people, 25,000 from Louisiana alone, were evacuated as up to 20 in. of rain fell, sometimes at a rate of more than an inch an hour.

National Guardsmen removed people by boat and helicopter, sometimes through attics. In Mississippi, corpses were washed out of cemeteries; in Louisiana, residents had to contend with snakes and swarms of fire ants flushed from their nests. Angry waters severed oil pipelines across the Homochitto River near Meadville, Miss., unleashing an estimated 30,000 bbl. of crude oil into the river. Officials in Louisiana, shoulder to shoulder with 140 inmates of state prisons pressed into service, filled sandbags.

New Orleans was paralyzed on Thursday by rampaging waist-high water that cut off electricity in 10,000 homes and telephone service everywhere. The city, sitting more than 5 ft. below sea level in some areas, is ordinarily kept dry by its extensive drainage pumping system, but this time the pumps were unable to keep pace. Stranded residents switched to boats and canoes. For Rose Hushfield in the suburb of Arabi, it was the third time in five years that her house had been flooded. "You get to where there are no more tears." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.