NATCHEZ – With the Miss-Lou just getting light rains as of 10 a.m. Monday, Adams County Civil Defense Office staff and volunteers were right to breathe a sign of relief.

But they, and others gathered at the office for a 10 a.m. telephone briefing from the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, held their breath as they heard other civil defense agencies in extreme south Mississippi call for help.

Almost all those counties, on up to those parallel with Hattiesburg, were already experiencing increasing building damage and downed limbs and power lines.

Among their needs: search teams from the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks and other agencies; Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster crews; the National and State guards; and power generators.

Harrison County, at the center of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was working off generator power, as were most Mississippi emergency operations centers at the heart of the storm.

One Gulf Coast hospital had no power at all. “We’ve got people on the roofs of houses … trying to get away from the (rising) water,” said a Harrison County EOC official. “The sewers are backing up and are going to flow into this water. We need crews to help.”

“We have a skeleton crew here now,” one worker from the Jackson County EOC said on the statewide conference call to MEMA. “We’ve got six feet of water and we can’t get out.

“We clocked 150 mile per hour winds. … And honey, some of our roof is flying off.”

“We’ve got 120 mile per hour winds, and we may be fixing to lose our roof,” said another EOC official, this time from Pearl River County. “We’ve got people stranded and a gas line broke and we can’t get to them.”