Eyewitness: For a man who had just lost half his home and most of his possessions, Mike Neill was in commendably good humour. Along with a few dozen others, the portly young redhead was queuing outside the CVS pharmacy in Gulfport, a Mississippi coastal town that felt the full force of Hurricane Katrina.
"Take me back to Ireland with you. I want a beer, that's all I want," he pleaded.
Mr Neill lost half the roof and a wall of his house but he has continued to live there since the hurricane struck on Sunday, even though most of his furniture has been ruined by water damage.
Until Katrina struck, Gulfport was a booming port with a lucrative gambling business based in a string of casinos along the beach.
The beach was closed yesterday, as police continue to find bodies beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Almost every building on Gulfport's gaudy main strip has been hit, power lines are down and a number of houses are no more than rubble.
A large gift shop has had its whole front wall blown away but a cardboard sign warns looters: "OWNER HERE W/ GUN."
Antoinette Cooke and Jeremy Lowther not only lost their home and their car, they almost lost their lives. The small apartment they shared with their nine-year-old daughter, Angela, filled with water so quickly that they were floating towards the ceiling before they could escape. A German neighbour upstairs saved them by hacking through the ceiling.
The family are now staying with Mr Lowther's father but, like most people in Gulfport, they were not insured against Katrina.
"The apartment's gone. The car's gone. We only moved in a month and a half ago," Ms Cooke said.
For families like Ms Cooke's, every waking hour is occupied with the business of survival, queuing outside the few grocery shops, pharmacies and petrol stations that remain open, most of which warn that they only accept cash. On the streets, the National Guard patrol in armoured vehicles, directing traffic and discouraging looting.
From the Gulf coast to Jackson, 241km (150 miles) away, long queues form outside petrol stations, each of which is protected by police in case trouble breaks out among the hot, weary drivers.
The destruction of much of Gulfport and neighbouring Biloxi has left many people unemployed as well as homeless, as there is little prospect of the casinos and hotels that employed so many reopening soon.
Mr Lowther is confident that his employer, a local construction firm, will be back in business before long, although the company's most recent project was its most short-lived.
"We just finished building that on Friday," he says, pointing to a pile of rubble across the road. "Now it's gone."