GULFPORT, Miss., Sept. 3 -- In the middle of the night, gasoline is not secure here, even if it is inside the tank of a car. Gas is in such short supply that thieves are going up and down the streets here and siphoning it out of cars.
On Gerald Mays's street, some thugs even tried to carjack a man just to get his gas Saturday morning.
"At about 2 a.m. they were trying to jack a car in my neighborhood," said Mays, 39, who lives in Hyattsville, Md., but has been staying with his mother in Gulfport for the past month. "The National Guard saw them and said if they didn't put down their guns they would shoot to kill. I don't blame them."
The statewide death toll rose to 161 on Saturday. About 570,000 people are still without power, according to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, down from about a million right after Monday's hurricane. Around 12,500 people are living in shelters.
Ice, water, food and gas are priceless. With the sewage system not functioning, and water puddled in pockets across town, sanitation is a challenge.
"This is not a hurricane, this is not a disaster -- this is a catastrophe," said Robert Travnicek, health director for Harrison County.
While most of the attention has focused on coastal communities, preliminary damage estimates further inland showed that at least 400 homes were destroyed and 2,800 suffered major damage, said Tessie Smith, a MEMA public information officer. Nearly 100 businesses have been destroyed in the inland communities and about 600 were seriously damaged.
The Salvation Army is providing 30,000 meals per day. On Saturday, 43 truckloads of ice arrived in Harrison County, as well as 62 truckloads of water and 15 truckloads of military Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). By Sunday, 2,500 portable toilets should by in place, according to Col. Joe Spraggins, Harrison County's civil defense director.
Smith said the fuel situation statewide was improving but that Mississippi still needs help transporting supplies. Also, she said, as power returns to the state, gas stations that had fuel but were not able to pump would also come back into play.
"Fuel in many ways is the most immediate, urgent issue," Gov. Haley Barbour (R) said at a news briefing Friday.
The federal government calculates that Mississippi's 2.9 million residents use 4.2 million gallons of gasoline and 1 million gallons of jet fuel per day. It is ranked 12th in the nation in terms of energy consumption. It has 3,626 gasoline stations, which are about 2.1 percent of the nation's total.
The state's 1,412 oil wells produce 47,000 barrels of crude oil per day, or about 1 percent of the total crude oil production of the United States. It has four oil refineries that can distill 364,800 barrels per day, as well as major crude oil and liquefied petroleum pipelines.
