Katrina's toll: thousands dead

CAMP WILLIAMS — In this "little city of people who don't know each other," as Utah's director of homeland security Verdi White puts it, there are handwritten signs telling Katrina survivors when the next trip to the grocery store is, where to fill out forms to find relatives, how to find the showers and apply for unemployment and register with FEMA.

The signs don't, however, tell Brenda Hodges where her 15-year-old son, Jeremy, is. Or her friends, siblings Jervis Bergeron and Kathleen Chatelain, what happened to their dog, who they were forced to abandon before someone would let them get into a boat to head for safety.

At the grim frontlines of the disaster Sunday, officials were still trying to measure the loss of life along the Gulf Coast. "I think it's evident it's in the thousands," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said on CNN. One morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, was expecting as many as 2,000 bodies, according to Associated Press reports.

Some 1,800 miles away, in the refuge of Camp Williams, Hodges, Bergeron and Chatelain — all of Louisiana — were sitting outside the main evacuee center at the camp, teary-eyed and clearly exhausted.

Hodges and her son were separated before the storm, she said. His friends were leaving, and when he called her, she encouraged him to go with them to safety; she'd find a way as soon as possible. But calls to a relative in Georgia are discouraging. No one's heard from Jeremy, though Hodges feels he's safe.

On the JetBlue plane coming to Utah, many of them saw CNN for the first time, said Pamela Atkinson, community advocate who's working with the governor's office. "They hadn't seen all that we'd been seeing. They'd been living their piece of it, but not all of it, the widespread devastation."

Most of the evacuees enjoying their first day at Camp Williams Sunday — and most were enjoying it, they assured reporters repeatedly, because they could shower and eat and sleep if they wanted — were concerned about relatives and friends and pets they'd lost track of in the horrendous aftermath of Katrina.

That is likely to be one of the most important tasks facing those helping the 400-plus evacuees who have already arrived, with many more expected, according to Mariann Geyer, CEO of the Greater Salt Lake Chapter of the American Red Cross.

Besides running shelters across the country, the American Red Cross is trying to reunite families — a task that would seem easy with computers. But this disaster took out computers and phones and other links in the South, Geyer says. "All those things we count on don't exist."