By Melin­da Des­lat­te and Stacey Plaisance

LAKE CHARLES, La. — The Louisiana coast­line dev­as­tat­ed by Hur­ri­cane Lau­ra began a long and gloomy recov­ery Fri­day as hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple still with­out water and pow­er con­front­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty that basic ser­vices may not return for weeks or even longer. The num­ber of dead climbed to at least 14.

A day after the Cat­e­go­ry 4 storm hit, more bod­ies emerged in the after­math in Louisiana and neigh­bor­ing Texas. The deaths includ­ed five peo­ple killed by fall­en trees and one per­son who drowned in a boat. Eight peo­ple died from car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing due to unsafe oper­a­tion of gen­er­a­tors, includ­ing three inside a Texas pool hall, where author­i­ties say the own­er had let sev­en Viet­namese shrimp boat labor­ers and home­less men take shel­ter. The oth­er four were in crit­i­cal condition.

The lack of essen­tial resources was grim for the many evac­u­at­ed res­i­dents eager to return.

Chad Peter­son planned to board up a win­dow and head to Flori­da. “There’s no pow­er. There’s no water. There’s no util­i­ties,” he said.

Thou­sands of peo­ple who heed­ed dire warn­ings and fled the Gulf Coast returned to homes with­out roofs, roads lit­tered with debris and the like­li­hood of a harsh recov­ery that could take months.

Lawrence “Lee” Faulk came back to a home with no roof in hard-hit Cameron Parish, which was lit­tered with downed pow­er lines. His met­al stor­age build­ing, 24 feet square, was thrown into a neighbor’s oak trees.

“We need help,” Faulk said. “We need ice, water, blue tarps — every­thing that you would asso­ciate with the storm, we need it. Like two hours ago.”

The White House said Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump would vis­it the region Sat­ur­day and sur­vey the damage.

Sim­ply dri­ving in Lake Charles, a city of 80,000 res­i­dents that sus­tained some of the worst dam­age, was a feat. Pow­er lines and trees blocked paths or cre­at­ed one-lane roads that dri­vers had to nav­i­gate with oncom­ing traf­fic. Street signs were snapped off their perch­es or dan­gled, and no stop­lights worked, mak­ing it a trust exer­cise with those shar­ing the roads.

May­or Nic Hunter cau­tioned that there was no timetable for restor­ing elec­tric­i­ty and that water-treat­ment plants “took a beat­ing,” result­ing in bare­ly a trick­le of water com­ing out of most faucets. “If you come back to Lake Charles to stay, make sure you under­stand the above real­i­ty and are pre­pared to live in it for many days, prob­a­bly weeks,” Hunter wrote on Facebook.

Car­a­vans of util­i­ty trucks were met Fri­day by thun­der­storms in the siz­zling heat, com­pli­cat­ing recov­ery efforts.

Forty nurs­ing homes were also rely­ing on gen­er­a­tors, and assess­ments were under­way to deter­mine if more than 860 res­i­dents in 11 facil­i­ties that had been evac­u­at­ed could return. Water out­ages remained a major prob­lem in evac­u­at­ed facil­i­ties, the Louisiana Depart­ment of Health said.

Mean­while, the hurricane’s rem­nants threat­ened to bring flood­ing and tor­na­does to Ten­nessee as the storm, now a trop­i­cal depres­sion, drift­ed north. Fore­cast­ers warned that the sys­tem could strength­en into a trop­i­cal storm again upon return­ing to the Atlantic Ocean this weekend.

In the storm’s wake, more than 600,000 homes and busi­ness­es were with­out pow­er in Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, accord­ing to poweroutage.us, which tracks util­i­ty reports.

The Louisiana Depart­ment of Health esti­mat­ed that more than 220,000 peo­ple were with­out water. Restora­tion of those ser­vices could take weeks or months, and full rebuild­ing could take years.

Ira Lyles returned to find that his down­town Lake Charles salon called The Par­lor House sur­vived with lit­tle dam­age, but his home was destroyed.

“It tore the front off, tore the front of the roof off, picked up my camper trail­er and hit the side wall, and the side wall buck­led and cracked inside,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a wash.”

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards called Lau­ra, which packed a top wind speed of 150 mph (241 kph), the most pow­er­ful hur­ri­cane to strike Louisiana, mean­ing it sur­passed even Kat­ri­na, which was a Cat­e­go­ry 3 storm when it hit in 2005. He said offi­cials now believe the surge was as high as 15 feet and added that tens of thou­sands of peo­ple were dis­placed by the storm.

Late Fri­day night, Edwards announced that the pres­i­dent had approved Louisiana’s major dis­as­ter dec­la­ra­tion request, say­ing in a state­ment that the step paves the way for get­ting aid to the hard-hit communities.

More than 580,000 coastal res­i­dents were put under evac­u­a­tion as the hur­ri­cane gained strength in the Gulf of Mex­i­co. Lau­ra was the sev­enth named storm to strike the U.S. this year, set­ting a new record for U.S. land­falls by the end of August. Lau­ra hit the U.S. after killing near­ly two dozen peo­ple in Haiti and the Domini­can Republic.

In Lake Charles, chain­saws buzzed and heavy machin­ery hauled tree limbs in the front lawn of Stan­ley and Dominique Hazel­ton, who rode out the storm on a bath­room floor. A tree punc­tured the roof just a few feet from where the cou­ple was tak­ing cover.

They regret­ted staying.

“There’s peo­ple with­out homes,” Stan­ley Hazel­ton said. “So it was dumb. We’ll nev­er do it again. We’ll nev­er stay through anoth­er hur­ri­cane again.”

Asso­ci­at­ed Press con­trib­u­tors include Jamie Sten­gle in Dal­las; Janet McConnaugh­ey in New Orleans; John L. Mone in Hol­ly Beach, Louisiana; Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas; Seth Boren­stein in Kens­ing­ton, Mary­land; and Adri­an Sainz in Mem­phis, Tennessee.