Some couldn't bear to leave homes as Gustav arrived

Connie and Sam Danese refused to evacuate when Hurricane Gustav approached their two-story house in the Oak Harbor subdivision of this small coastal Mississippi town. Three years ago, they had stayed home during Hurricane Katrina and ended up trapped by 14 feet of floodwater before being rescued by boat. By the time they were able to return they had lost everything.

This time around, they decided to chance it and stay behind again, figuring the storm wouldn't be as bad and they wouldn't be deluged. More pressing was the anxiety of leaving their belongings. "If you're here, you can salvage some things," said Sam Danese, 69, a retired auditor. "And if you can salvage something, it's easier to restart your life."

Pearlington, a tiny community surrounded by pine forests and marshland just across the border from Louisiana, was all but destroyed by Katrina. The town's population shrank from 2,400 before Katrina to less than 1,800, said Tim Kellar, a spokesman for Hancock County's Emergency Management Agency.

When Gustav approached, some families had just finished rebuilding; others were not yet done. Many couldn't face the prospect of abandoning their homes, he said. "There's a real concern for their personal property that so many of them lost three years ago," Kellar said.

The majority of residents in Hancock, the Mississippi county hit hardest by Gustav, heeded the evacuation order, Kellar said, despite the favorable projection that the storm probably would hit west of the area. As it was, about 500 homes across the county were flooded, including at least 100 in Pearlington, county officials said.

On Tuesday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour requested federal disaster assistance for 16 counties that experienced hurricane-force winds and power outages. As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 90,000 households were without power, mainly in the six southernmost Mississippi counties. About 12,700 evacuees were in registered shelters statewide.