The nearest beach is about 20 miles south.

So begins the journey to the end of the earth — or, at least, the town of Biloxi on America’s Gulf Coast. Largely ignored by the media in favour of New Orleans, Biloxi suffered the full wrath of hurricane Katrina, and may never recover.

It is now a town without electricity, mobile phone reception, landlines, food, petrol, water, or, indeed, any recognisable architecture.

Even most of the residents have fled, leaving behind a solitary police patrol and a few emergency workers.

The overpass that connects Interstate 10 to the town centre — with its landmark Hard Rock Casino marked by a gigantic red Fender Stratocaster — is still waist-deep in water. What remains of Biloxi’s other roads looks more like pristine white beach, apart from the litter of car parts, household goods and smashed traffic lights. The Gulf shore, meanwhile, has a surreal, junkyard tide line of flotsam including dining room chairs, DVD players and jeans.

The slow drive towards Biloxi is like glimpsing the post-oil future, a scene out of the post-apocalyptic movie Mad Max.

Motorists line up around the block outside crumbling, shuttered petrol stations, with “sold out” signs over the pumps. A police officer trying to calm tempers at a petrol station said: “I don’t know why they come here.”

In front of him, a tattooed Cadillac driver was rattling the nozzle of an empty pump as if to shake out one last drop. “They just won’t leave,” the officer said. “It’s insanity.” Fortunately, The Times found a farm with a solitary pump of unleaded before its rented SUV ran dry. In Biloxi, those without petrol end up living on the street.

Ida Punzo, 48, a sunburnt blonde, is one of the homeless. She sits on a chair looking at her $400-a-month attic apartment, which is still standing. Unfortunately, the two floors below hers are not. Her home of 13 years is being held up by only an outhouse and two crumbling columns, built in the 1800s. “Maybe we can put some stilts under it,” she said. “Maybe it can be saved.”

Beside her apartment is a tree stripped of its leaves and covered, like a bad student joke, in ladies’ underwear. The clothing came from the top floors of the hotel-casino opposite. Ms Punzo said she fully expected to die when the hurricane landed on top of her. “The water came in at 4.30am,” she said. “It reached the bottom of my apartment by 11am. You can’t imagine the adrenaline; the terror. We had already accepted the fact that we were going to die.”

However, Ms Punzo escaped along with two of her neighbours, a friend and her cat by jumping out of a back window. Even when the water subsided, the hurricane continued to hurl seawater at the shore. “It was like being sandblasted,” Ms Punzo said. “I’m still covered in salt because I don’t have a bathtub any more.”

Nevertheless, Ms Punzo continued to smile and chat to emergency workers. “Well baby, here in the South we’ve been through this kind of thing before,” she said. “We just clean up and get on with it. I know that God will take care of me.”

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