Wow, sounds like it's 100 times worse down there today than yesterday.
Read this to get the "grim" picture.
Hundreds feared dead in Hurricane Katrina
BILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters) - Helicopters plucked frantic survivors from rooftops of inundated homes on Tuesday and officials said hundreds of people may have died in Hurricane Katrina's attack on the U.S. Gulf Coast, which sent a wall of water into Mississippi and flooded New Orleans.
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The economic cost of the hurricane's rampage could be the highest in U.S. history, according to damage estimates.
"The devastation is greater than our worst fears," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco told a news conference. "It's totally overwhelming."
She spoke after an overnight breach in New Orleans' protective levee system allowed water from Lake Pontchartrain to flood most of the city.
In the Mississippi coastal city of Biloxi, hundreds may have been killed after being trapped in their homes when a 30-foot (9 meter) storm surge came ashore, a city spokesman said.
"It's going to be in the hundreds," spokesman Vincent Creel told Reuters. "Camille was 200, and we're looking at a lot more than that," he said, referring to Hurricane Camille, which hit the area in 1969 and destroyed swaths of Mississippi and Louisiana, killing a total of 256 people.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reported
bodies floating in the city's floodwaters.
Rescuers struggled through high water and mountains of debris to reach areas devastated by Katrina when it struck the Gulf Coast region on Monday.
The storm inflicted catastrophic damage all along the coast as it slammed into Louisiana with 140 mph (224 kph) winds, then swept across Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.
It shattered buildings, broke boats, smashed cars, toppled trees and flooded cities. Risk analysts estimated the storm would cost insurers $26 billion, making Katrina potentially the costliest U.S. natural disaster.
Most of the deaths appear to have been caused by the storm surge, which swept as far as a mile inland in parts of Mississippi. Hundreds of people climbed onto rooftops to escape the rising water and waited to be rescued. Others may have been trapped in attics.
UNDER WATER
In New Orleans, "
We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with
some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet," Nagin told television station WWL. "Both airports are under water."
New Orleans is a bowl-like city mostly below sea level and protected by levees or embankments. The levees gave way overnight in places, including a 200-foot (60 meter) breach that allowed the lake waters to pour into the city center.
Pumps failed and floodwaters threatened downtown and the historic French Quarter.
"We always were afraid the bowl that is New Orleans would fill quickly," Walter Maestri, emergency management coordinator for Jefferson Parish, said in a radio interview. "Now with the water rising today, it appears to be filling slowly."
Tulane University Medical Center Vice President Karen Troyer-Caraway told CNN
the downtown hospital was surrounded by 6 feet of water and considering evacuating its 1,000 patients.
"
The water is rising so fast I cannot begin to describe how quickly it's rising," she said. "We have whitecaps on Canal Street, the water is moving so fast."
Police took boats into flood-stricken areas to rescue some of the stranded. Others were plucked off rooftops by helicopter.
"We've been pulling them off sometimes four at a time, sometimes as many as 12," said Coast Guard Petty Officer Larry Chambers. "People are being taken to the nearest dry spot then the helicopter's going back and picking up more people."
"HORROR STORY"
People used axes, and in at least one case a shotgun, to blast holes in roofs so they could escape. Many who had not yet been rescued could be heard screaming for help, police said.
"This is a horror story. I'd rather be reading it somewhere else than living it," said Aaron Broussard, president of New Orleans' Jefferson Parish.
In Mississippi, water swamped the emergency operations center at Hancock County courthouse and the back of the building collapsed.
"Thirty-five people swam out of their emergency operations center with life jackets on," neighboring Harrison County emergency medical services director Christopher Cirillo told Mississippi's Sun Herald newspaper.
Before striking the Gulf Coast, Katrina last week hit southern Florida, where it killed seven people.
Katrina knocked out electricity to about 2.3 million customers, or nearly 5 million people, in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, utility companies said. Restoring power could take weeks, they warned.
The storm had swept through oil and gas fields in the Gulf of Mexico, where 20 percent of the nation's energy is produced.
At least two drilling rigs were knocked adrift and one in Mobile Bay, Alabama, broke free of its mooring and slammed into a bridge.
U.S. oil prices on Tuesday jumped $3.65 a barrel to peak at $70.85 as oil firms assessed damage.
Governors in the stricken states called out more than 7,500 National Guard troops to help police, remove debris and give other aid. Convoys of Humvees and military trucks headed south on Interstate 65 through Alabama with loads of fuel and power generators and Special Forces boat crews were dispatched to conduct search and rescue operations in flooded communities. The remnants of the storm spun off tornadoes in Georgia and drenched Tennessee and Kentucky. In western Kentucky, heavy rain turn the normally placid North and South Forks of the Little River into torrents and rescuers manned boats to retrieve people stranded in a flooded neighborhood. A 10-year-old girl was sucked into a drainage pipe and killed.
