Katrina swamps South
'Some of them, it was their last night on Earth'
By Joseph B. Treaster and Kate Zernike / New York Times

NEW ORLEANS -- Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared but inundating parts of the city and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi where it tossed boats, ripped away scores of roof tops and left many of the major coastal roadways impassable.
Packing 145-mph winds as it made landfall, Katrina left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from the center of the storm.
Early today, Gov. Haley Barbour said the death toll in Harrison County, Miss., alone could hit as high as 80. Officials earlier reported 55 deaths, of which 50 were in Harrison County. Emergency workers feared they would find more dead among people believed to be stranded under water and collapsed buildings.
"Some of them, it was their last night on Earth," Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, said of people who ignored orders to evacuate the city of 480,000 over the weekend.

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