GULFPORT, MISS. — The first stirrings of Hurricane Gustav on Mississippi's coast showed up late Sunday in the ominous rain that pelted down along Highway 49. The rain was accompanied by the drenched, forlorn Louisiana evacuees who showed up in hotel lobbies desperate for a place to stay.
Desperation was just as palpable on the other side of the projected hurricane zone, in Beaumont, Texas. There, thousands of residents were joining the auto caravans snaking eastward, leaving a nearly emptied ghost town for the Louisiana refugees who fled behind them.
With the 440-mile-wide storm advancing on Louisiana and primed to barrel inland, the state's immediate neighbors, Mississippi and Texas, were thrust into their own frantic versions of hurricane fever.
"I'm nervous and anxious," said Fatima Carter, 18, a college student who survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and found herself stuck in a Gulfport ice skating rink Sunday night, waiting with a friend to be evacuated by bus to Jackson. "We don't know what [Gustav] might do."
Carter and her friend April Atkinson, 19, were among 1,000 evacuees who were waiting to board buses Sunday night at the rink.
The two community college students had been on vacation in Gulfport and were quickly caught up in the tumult caused by the approaching hurricane.
"I was crying," said Atkinson, who added that she fears for the safety of her two brothers and a sister who still had not evacuated their coastal Mississippi home -- hours before authorities said it would be too late to drive out.
While some Mississippi residents headed out from Gulfport, bone-weary Louisianans were arriving in the rain, anxious for a place to stay.
At the Hampton Inn, JoAnn Sam-Pang, dampened by the rain, dashed up to the reception desk.
"Do you have any rooms?" she asked.
"All we have are rooms with a king bed in them," said Lisa Couch, the hotel's general manager.
"Who cares? It can be a room without a bed," said a gleeful Sam-Pang, who had arrived from Kenner, La., with her husband, Gustavo; three children, James, Amie and Michael; and their black Labrador retriever.
Couch said the hotel didn't normally accommodate pets, "but we do today."
The Sam-Pangs had just moved back into their newly renovated Kenner home in May after living a year in a hotel and almost two years in a trailer after Katrina flooded their home of 28 years.
