NYT: Mississippi - Searching for the Living, but Mostly Finding the Dead

PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss., Aug. 31 - Dave Bernzweig saw them as soon as he peered inside the small brick house: two more lost souls, wedged among the soaked ruins of their belongings. He recorded the location of the bodies, between the front door and the flowered couch, then moved across the street, where another victim of Hurricane Katrina lay.

A member of a federal search and rescue team marked a home in Pass Christian, Miss., that had been checked for survivors of the storm.
Mr. Bernzweig and his colleagues from Ohio Task Force One, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency hunting for storm survivors with dozens of other search and rescue teams on the Gulf Coast, have punishing work ahead of them. In this area of coastal Mississippi lashed hard when the eye of the hurricane passed just to the west, they are looking for the living in dangerous, putrid mountains of debris that too often hold only the dead. The heat is excruciating, and the stench of detritus, even in areas where no one has died, turns stomachs.

"We go now, on Day 3, by the smells," said Doug Cope, the search team manager, "just like the dogs."

The team from Ohio spent most of Wednesday in "blitz mode," searching Pass Christian, a community on the eastern side of St. Louis Bay, for people who might be trapped in pancaked homes. They worked in pairs with dogs that sniffed each rubble pile for traces of human scent, but had found no one by midafternoon. On Tuesday, other teams scouring the neighborhood found at least eight people. They also found many dead pets and two live snakes, including a poisonous copperhead.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/national/nationalspecial/01rescue.html

I spent a lot of time in those houses. Man.