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Some relief arrives

Bush visits a devastated Mississippi

Associated Press Writer
Published Saturday, September 03, 2005

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PRESIDENT BUSH comforts Debra Foster as he talks to Charles Foster in Biloxi, Miss., on Friday. The president toured the storm-ravaged area of Point Cadet and met survivors at a Salvation Army food line.

By TIM ISBELL, The Sun Herald JACKSON, Miss. -- On a day when President Bush got an up-close view of the devastation in Mississippi, authorities pulled more bodies from the rubble and the fuel shortage worsened to the point that people were seen pushing their cars into the few stations with gas.

Bush toured Alabama, Mississippi and New Orleans on Friday, meeting with officials and citizens whose lives are in tatters. In Biloxi, the president was greeted by two women who were crying on a street in ruins. The women embraced the president and told him they had been left with nothing.

"My son needs clothes," said Bronwynne Bassier, 23. "I don't have anything."

Bush comforted the women, kissed each on the head and vowed that they would receive assistance.

"I've come down here, one, to take a look at the damage firsthand," Bush said. "And I'm telling you, it's worse than imaginable. And secondly, to tell the good people of this part of the world that the federal government is going to help."

The official number of deaths in Mississippi rose to 147 Friday-- a figure expected to increase drastically in the coming weeks.

"If you see the devastation, you wonder why it didn't kill a million people," Gov. Haley Barbour said, throwing his hands in the air.

Elsewhere in Mississippi, the gas shortage continued to cause headaches as people waited in mile-long lines and coasted on fumes. In some areas, people lined up at stations that didn't even have gas, just hoping a tanker would arrive.

Late Friday, tankers with thousands of gallons of gasoline arrived in Jackson.

Valerie Brewer of Gulfport waited with her family for more than an hour at a Shell station before finally pulling up to a pump with gas $2.43 per gallon.

She said the slow-moving lines were a welcome change after leaving behind the heavily damaged coastal city.

"We don't mind, because there's a lot of people waiting for water and food," she said. "It's very, very stressful down there. Tempers are flaring. People have been going four days without food."

Brewer and her family managed to escape Hurricane Katrina unscathed, and their house was mostly intact.

Also Friday, emergency workers continued searching for survivors and sorting through the dead, storing corpses in mortuaries or refrigerated trailers until they can be identified.

Much of the state is still without fresh water or electricity. On Friday, Mississippi still had about 628,700 utility customers without power, down from 841,000 earlier in the week.