Jackson, Miss. ? With mops, brooms and wheelbarrows, residents along the Gulf Coast were cleaning up Saturday in homes and yards flooded by the Tropical Storm Isidore surge and up to 12 inches of rain that fell Wednesday and Thursday.

“I didn’t think the water would get this high. It just kept coming and coming and coming,” said Susan Serpas, whose front yard in Delacroix, La., was under 4 feet of water.

Most areas hit by Isidore were drying out Saturday as the storm broke apart over the Northeast. Flooded rivers and creeks in the Midwest remained high, but water levels were expected to drop over the weekend.

Most National Seashore areas in Florida and Mississippi were expected to remain closed pending further damage assessments.

In Florida’s Escambia County, which includes Pensacola, 103 homes were flooded, but the damage was relatively minor, said Michael Hardin, the county’s emergency management chief.

“Catastrophic, no, but we definitely have some damage,” he said.

President Bush has declared about a dozen counties in Louisiana disaster areas, and Musgrove planned to request a federal declaration for Mississippi.

Across Mississippi, some 4,400 homes or apartments were damaged, according to preliminary estimates. At least three deaths in the United States, in Mississippi and Tennessee, were blamed on the storm.

Biloxi resident Bernard Carlson said he received an evacuation notice via telephone at 3 a.m. Thursday, but by then had three feet of water in his house.

“That was too late. They should have told us before,” Carlson said.

But would he have heeded a mandatory order had one been called earlier?

“Probably not,” he said.