THE HUGE SCALE of the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina has taken a few days to become clear. But the facts we now know are staggering, and worse might come:

• New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin offered a chilling estimate of the death toll there: At least hundreds, likely thousands. Many bodies may be in attics and collapsed buildings, or simply floating.

• More than 100 are dead in Mississippi, including dozens in one coastal apartment building that was submerged by the storm surge. The coastal tourism industry is just gone.

• Eighty percent of New Orleans is flooded, and levees must be repaired before any effort to pump out the water. The city has been ordered evacuated, probably for months.

• An estimated one million people are homeless, including more than 100,000 students who will need to enroll in different schools. Texas has agreed to take 25,000 people into the Houston Astrodome and another 25,000 elsewhere in the state. South Carolina will get a few, too.

• Baton Rouge now is the most populous city in Louisiana, with thousands of refugees, and it is likely to keep that status. Some believe the city will double in size permanently, to 800,000.

The scale of Katrina’s devastation is mind-boggling, even to South Carolinians who lived through Hurricane Hugo in 1989. It had been hard to imagine a storm that did more damage than the Category 4 Hugo; sadly, it is not now.

Hugo flooded the coast with a storm surge of 20 feet or more; Katrina’s may have reached 29 feet. Winds of 135 mph ripped through Charleston; Katrina landed at 145 mph. Hugo killed 29 people, Katrina possibly 100 times that.

Rebuilding the structural damage, and the lives of those affected, will be the work of years, just as it was with Hugo. But it will be done, as it was in South Carolina. And that rebuilding should include bitter lessons learned about how and where to build along the coast, where hurricanes inevitably will return.

It will be a massive undertaking, using resources from the governments — from federal to local — strained insurance companies and the help of charities.

Here are some ways South Carolinians can help the victims of Hurricane Katrina:

• Red Cross: (800) HELP-NOW or http://www.redcross.org/.

• Salvation Army: http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/ or (800) SAL-ARMY.

• Catholic Charities: http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/ or (800) 919-9338.

• Episcopal Relief & Development: http://www.er-d.org/ or (800) 334-7626.

• United Methodist Committee on Relief: (800) 554-8583 or http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/emergency/ hurricanes/2005/.

• Operation USA: (800) 678-7255 or http://www.opusa.org/.

• United Jewish Communities: http://www.ujc.org/.

• Humane Society of the United States: http://www.hsus.org/.

South Carolinians who remember Hugo have a greater understanding than many elsewhere of the destruction a great hurricane brings. We should pitch in to help those in need now.