Burying the dead: The makeshift morgue in this levelled town of 8,000 people is a parking lot on a narrow two-lane road that runs along some rusty train tracks. Six refrigerated trailers are lined up in neat parallel behind a chain-link fence.
For a week now, Norma Stiglet, the county coroner - a grandmotherly woman with white hair and spectacles - has been identifying the decaying corpses of lifelong friends and neighbours who tried unsuccessfully to ride out Hurricane Katrina.
"It's almost indescribable, because I was born and raised with these people," Ms Stiglet said on Sunday, sitting by the trailers in a rickety folding chair. "You want to help them. But what can a coroner do?"
The official death toll in Mississippi is 150. The last official count in Hancock County, of which Bay St Louis is part, stood at just 36, but that could be ludicrously deceptive.
One law enforcement officer estimated it is more likely to be between 600 and 800. The residents are "in for a shock", he said. The reason the number is so low is that the state only counts bodies that have been recovered and positively identified.
For days, Ms Stiglet was alone and besieged as she did her work. Finally, some organisation is beginning to take shape: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema)'s Disaster Mortuary Assistance Teams (Dmorts), have begun to arrive with additional coroners.
Fema has co-ordinated with local law enforcement, and search-and-rescue units from around the country are conducting a grid search of the entire town, house by house.
After so many days, some of the discoveries are hideous. Ms Stiglet refuses to talk about such matters. "We don't discuss that," she said.
But other officials describe the conditions frankly.
Bodies have bloated, and heat, water and insects hasten their decomposition. Some of the bodies are so badly decomposed they don't have fingerprints. Others are damaged or torn apart. "It's not at all pretty," said James Johnson, emergency operations co-ordinator. "They're finding pieces. If you find an arm, do you call it a body? It's pretty grisly."
What keeps people working in such circumstances? "In my opinion, it's determination and love of your fellow man," Ms Stiglet said.
Born and raised in the area, Ms Stiglet has been the coroner for Hancock County since she was first elected in 1990, and must watch people she knows suffer the terrible uncertainty of loved ones unaccounted for. "It's hard, very hard on everyone, but it's harder on them than on me. And we just don't hardly have much info for people."
Sometimes, Ms Stiglet cannot confirm the identity of the corpses. The density of the wreckage, the intensity of the heat, and the depth of the water and mud have combined to make identification a gruesome task. She tries to match a body with an address where it was found, or an object.
"We're using the house numbers where they were found," she said. "We just never thought we'd see water like that." - (LA Times-Washington Post)