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Nater of Gulf Kept ( oming, Residents on Coast Relate
B-PT-	j
(Special to The TimevPicayune)
Baton Rouge, La., Sept. 21.— e water crept over the seawall d kept coming . . . we couldn’t ieve our eyes.
Two families today gave an eye-tness account of the storm ves that took lives and wiped
out homes at Clermont Harbor. Ivliss.
"We couldn’t believe our eyes.”
H.	Burleigh, mechanic, related.
' but there the water was . . . coming at us. I jumped in my truck and drove it to high ground. |When I got back to my house,
1 water was in the living room “The back yard was under | water. I took off my shoes and j went off the back porch to cut ; off the butane gas. I gashed my : foot on something, crawled back on the porch and realized the water was now getting dangerously high.
“’I got my family to the top of a nearby railroad tracks—the higheest ground 1 could find. Then the water took my house to pieces. There's not a plank of it left on my lot. The water even moved the foundations. I don't 'want any more of the coast.”
Mrs. j. E. Cary and her daughter Julia agreed. They lived next door to the Burleigh's in a brand new brick home.
; “Thursday night w a s very j windy but we didn't think much !of it.” Julia, and attractive girl of 120, related.
“About 7 o’clock Friday morn-'ing the wind started blowing a Hot harder. The rain was blinding.
I	could see the Gulf . . . the waves looked higher than a house.’’
“They were more than 20 feet high,” Mrs. Cary said.
“About 8 o’clock,” Julia went on, “we noticed the water was lapping over the top of the sea wall. It was like the Gulf was overflowing. It ran up into the front yard and in just a few minutes it was coming into the
house...............................
“My father and mother got ready to leave. We had a speedboat in the yard. When the water, came up, It started floating. When! we left the house, the furniture was floating. The water was up to my waist. A couple of neighbors needed help so we got them into the speedboat. There was no engine in the boat, it had to be pushed. Five got into the boat and a couple of us pushed. Finally we had to swim to push and we were sort of under water a good deal of the time. Finally we made it to the house on high ground tand the people put us up until the hurricane was over.”
“You should see our house.” Mrs. Cary said. “It’s just a brick shell. The water floated out everything in it, even the refrig- . erator.”
Vast Damage on Gulf Is Revealed in Aerial
Flooded, Wrecked Communities Seen
scurf nf t vniage negan a [ *° tremendous wreckage that stretched for more than 1 hundred continuous miles along the coast, feft there like a jumbled lumberyard by receding seas
v.-Al Perm°nt. Harbor a lone bathtub stood in the street a
ltewal?bhiUrHh’ its roof h«mped.
skvwith f ZU!’ shoulctered the SKy with its white steeple
heH^aveIand an entire row of Pieces	been	beaten	to
hou^e stood Intact"6	N°
Injayst Louis only brown
BY HAL BOYLE
(The Associated Press)
Biloxi, Miss., Sept. 20.—A hundred-mile aerial survey today disclosed that “Old Double Debbil Eye,” the Caribbean hurricane, has converted the Mississippi Gulf coast area into a still-flooded and catastrophic ruin.
Damage may well run into the tens of millions of dollars—a $6,-
000,000 estimate is given for the Biloxi shrimp canning industry alone. Residents fear also that as the Gulf waters yield up their dead the death toll will rise -much higher than at first believed.
Flying from New Orleans in a light plane piloted by William Hartson, we passed over a dozen communities flailed to earth by the hurricane’s hammer of wind.
Seen from the air, the Gulf coast stretched for scores of miles in a panorama of awesome destruction. In that vast area of desolation hundreds of people remain stranded by high waters 24 hours after the hurricane passed.
Rescuers Hampered
The slowly falling waters of Mississippi Sound still hide much of the. damage. Ground rescue workers moving into the area are hampered by the fact that the two chief channels of movement— Highway 90 and the Louisville and Nashville railroad-—have been cut in several places by tidal waves.
We flew northeast from New Orleans across miles of dreary marshland in which floated the splintered wreckage of scores of fishing camps.
At a highway intersection several dozen marooned motorists and bus passengers waved signals of distress. Some had stripped off their wet clothing and laid it out on a patch of dry concrete pavement to dry.
Dozens of cars were abandoned and others had skidded into ditches. Hundreds of small pleasure craft had been blown into the marshes, some lifted bodily across the highway and dumped into the fields. Cattle wandered aimlessly in pastures of salt water that held no forage. Others, trapped by the swift flooding, had drowned.
As our planes swung over wind-leveled pine forests and flew along parallel to the beach, the full story of the hurricane's incredible damage unfolded.
Resort Bearches Smashed
Clermont Harbor, Waveland, Bay St. Louis, and Pass Christian —the beach residential area of each of these pleasant summer resorts had been smashed to kindling wood. Houses had been dropped into the middle of the road. Others had simply disintegrated into splintered wooden shapes.
Sections of Highway 90 and the seawall had buckled and snapped like matchsticks. Only stumps sticking out of the turbid waves showed where the piers of seafood restaurants had stood. The
tViawicoltroc	rli’c?
ties showed of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad bridge across the bay. The rails had washed away. The highway bridge was interrupted by two 50-foot gaps. A barge had smashed through one hole.
Fuel Tanks Down
In refugee-crowded Gulfport of some 20,000 population people wandered about dazedly searching for belongings. The w-aterfront was a line of tangled disaster in which lay huge fuel storage tanks crumpled like tin cans and a line of overturned freight cars. East of the town a burned tourist camp still smoked.
The industrial east side of Biloxi, a summer playground, was destroyed as thoroughly as if it had been visited by 50 bombers, The beach front had vanished. Broken planes flapped on the great Keesler airbase.
We landed on the field anc went into town.
Five shrimp boats sat atop tht shattered rubble of one shipbuild ing plant, washed there by tht tidal wave.	;
“We had 1700 vessels in our shrimp fleet,” said Tony Jurich, , a fisherman, “and one fourth of 1 them are gone. Another 50 per : cent is damaged................. . . i
G. B. Cousins, Sr., father of the i Biloxi mayor, estimated shrimp canning plants had suffered $e„-
000,000 damage and wouldn’t I able to operate “before s: months.”
Looting Checked
The mayor, a former navy liei tenant, said a “very serious loot ing problem” developed befor hundreds of soldiers from Kees ler Field arrived and cordoned of the damaged area.
Police, using rowboats and swimming through seven-foot waters to rescut stranded residents, were unable at first to cope with the looters.
Our water supply is also critically short,” the mayor said, “and we need immediate help from state authorities to keep down the fire hazard.”
There was no electrical power in Biloxi, a city of 35,000. Residents moved soaked household belonging . out on the sidewalks to dry.
Voluntary co-operation by the city’s taxi companies enabled police to move 5000 persons to school shelters from the perilous beachfront, a move w'hich kept' down loss of life.
The Red Cross housed and fed 8000 people in the shelters and Mrs. Mollie Hodges, a disaster worker from Meridian, Miss., said “at least 1000 still need.to be supplied with food and household goods.”
As we flew back along the devastated zone we noted one thing: The damage was heavily concentrated along the beachfront where nothing intervened to halt the titanic thurst of wind-borne w’ater.i Homes and buildings protected by I trees a few blocks from the shore I