LOCAL PHYSICIAN LENDS SKILLS TO RESCUE TEAM IN MISSISSIPPI EMERGENCY-ROOM DOCTOR JOINS TASK FORCE IN URBAN SEARCHES.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

For four days, an Antelope Valley Hospital emergency-room physician has accompanied an 80-man search team in Biloxi, Miss., combing through collapsed buildings looking for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Water 18 feet deep from Katrina's tidal surge had covered the street, leaving behind wrecked and damaged houses and mounds of debris in the 50,000-inhabitant Gulf Coast city that Dr. Attila Uner walked through Friday afternoon.

``The scale of destruction is amazing,'' Uner said by cell phone as the team walked from a destroyed house in the city's center that they searched for bodies. ``This is not one block. This is not two blocks. This is across several states.''

Uner is volunteering in Mississippi with the urban search-and-rescue Task Force 1, called out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after New Orleans' levees were breached.

Consisting of Los Angeles city firefighters, two engineers, five dog handlers and the doctors, the task force was sent by FEMA to hurricane-ravaged Mississippi.

The team left Los Angeles on Aug. 31 in a convoy of big rigs and buses carrying 30 tons of gear and food, water and even gasoline enough to last them for 10 days.

Fourteen Los Angeles firefighters and three boats in a swift-water rescue team left the day before by airplane for New Orleans.

Task Force 1 began searching Tuesday in Biloxi, joining hundreds of other rescue workers from around the United States.

At first they were looking for survivors, but by Friday they were looking for bodies before bulldozers go in to clear away the wreckage. The team used dogs and remotely operated cameras to try to pinpoint victims.

The team had found neither survivors nor bodies by Friday afternoon - just dead animals and meat rotting in refrigerators and freezers. Other rescue teams that arrived earlier - some before the hurricane - saved many lives, he said.

Uner said he was called last week with six hours notice for the deployment. His colleagues at the Antelope Valley Emergency Medical Association, which staffs the hospital emergency room, are filling his shifts for him at the hospital while he is gone.

The physicians with the task force aren't there to treat hurricane victims, but are there in support of the search workers. They do get flagged down to render aid, such as to a dehydrated workman who got intravenous fluid and a rest from Mississippi's heat and humidity in an air-conditioned bus.

But the doctors are really there to care for injuries to the searchers. The searchers came to be self-sufficient, bringing their own medical care along with their food, water and supplies.

``Our personnel operate in tremendously dangerous environments,'' Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey said.

None of the task force has been injured, Uner said.

Besides searchers, Biloxi on Friday also contained hundreds of workmen restoring electricity, sewage and water service. A large contingent of military personnel, apparently National Guard troops, were there as well.

Residents were also allowed to return to the damaged areas.

``Lots of homeowners are wandering through here looking at what's left of their homes,'' Uner said Friday.

While the Los Angeles swift-water team members working just outside New Orleans were pulled out for a time for their own safety, the task force in Biloxi has seen no civil unrest, Uner said. Biloxi residents are glad to see them, he said.

``They are very appreciative, very supportive,'' Uner said. ``They offer us water.''

Charles F. Bostwick, [phone]

chuck.bostwick(at)dailynews.com