HACKBERRY, La. -- Ike's floodwaters blanketed most of Louisiana's 250-mile coast Sunday, impeding search and rescue missions while leaving behind vast destruction of a landscape still struggling since the deadly 2005 hurricane season.

Nearly 700 people had been rescued since Friday when the waters began to rise, but about 170,000 homes were still without power, taking a toll on some residents who stayed behind as the storm struck Saturday.

"This won't ever happen to me again," Levi Thomas said after being whisked from his home by National Guard troops in a motorboat in flooded Hackberry, about 15 miles inland of the Gulf Coast.

His wife took the other view: Peggy Thomas said she only relented and allowed troops to ferry her to dry land because her husband was so tired of living without electricity.

Other rescues took place in St. Mary Parish, where 65 people were moved to higher ground. Thirty people were saved near Gibson and Bayou Black on the outskirts of Houma, an inland oil and gas town.

Flooding extended far inland. In Lake Charles, officials estimated as many as 500 homes were underwater.

"We're hoping for the best, but with the water still being high in areas, we have to wait until it recedes before search and rescue teams can get in there," said Veronica Mosgrove, a spokeswoman for Gov. Bobby Jindal's emergency operations.

Rescue operations continued Saturday night in Vermilion, Cameron and Jefferson parishes, but officials said the need for those efforts was tapering off.

"We are starting to transition to the humanitarian aid and assistance," said Maj. Michael Kazmierzak, a spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard. "For all intents and purposes, our search and rescue missions are coming to an end, and it's really just as needed until the floodwaters have subsided."

Ike's surge inundated many of the same villages, coastal resorts and towns that hurricanes Katrina and Rita washed over in 2005. At least four have been attributed to the storm in Lousiana.

Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state's chief medical officer, said the two latest deaths reported Sunday were in Jefferson Davis Parish. He said two people died of natural causes brought on by the storm. The other two deaths had been reported in Terrebonne Parish where a 16-year-old boy in Bayou Dularge drowned and a 57-year-old man apparently was killed by gusting winds in Houma.

In flood-surrounded Erath, medical teams braved high waters to set up camp in a parking lot where they handed out medicine, stitched wounds and administered tetanus shots. Flood victims were out of medicine, some had cuts from scraping up against sharp objects in the floodwaters. Others suffered serious ant bites and boils.

"So far we've been able to handle everything," said Dr. Andy Blalock, president of Louisiana Emergency Medical Unit, a group set up to assist in disasters after Katrina.

Lines for water, ice and meals ready to eat, known as MREs, stretched a quarter of a mile, Blalock said.

The fresh round of flooding was a blow to efforts to repopulate the extremities of south Louisiana, a subtropical landscape that has steadily vanished and become more vulnerable to hurricanes because of 2,000 square miles of coastal erosion.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said the new flooding highlighted Louisiana's vulnerability due to coastal erosion. She said Ike's floodwaters rose into areas that hadn't ever flooded before.

"I sound like a broken record, but catastrophes are happening more frequently," Landrieu said by telephone.

"We've lost hundreds of square miles of coastline that served as our first barrier of protection," Landrieu said. "The nation is not investing anywhere near the money necessary to secure the coastal perimeter."

Severe flooding was reported over astonishing distances -- from bayou towns near New Orleans to Lake Charles, a casino-and-refinery city of 70,000 on the Texas border.

Many of the flooded homes were in places where a construction boom followed World War II and the discovery of oil and natural gas in the swamps and marshes of Cajun Louisiana.

One such area is Cameron Parish, next to southeast Texas, where flooding was widespread and marshes were littered with ruined cars and trucks, mobile homes and houses, storage containers and tractor trailers.

The Louisiana National Guard managed to get only a small number of huge military trucks all the way south to the Gulf Coast. Most of the convoy of Humvees and larger trucks couldn't get south of Hackberry -- where a wrecked shrimp boat for a time blocked the main highway. Guardsmen used a bulldozer to shove the boat out of the way.

But several feet of floodwater coursed across the highway. Strong currents and visibility problems made it impossible to move farther south to survey damage in towns such as Holly Beach and Cameron, Guard spokeswoman Sgt. Rebekah Malone said.

"You can't see the sides of the road, and if you left the road, you'd just be swept away," Malone said.

State transportation officials were with the convoy, waiting for the tide to go down so they could inspect the road's stability.

A stretch of the same highway near Hackberry was swept away during Rita.

Louisiana was on the northeast side of Ike's churning waters, and took on an extraordinary amount of water that began piling up on the coast Friday. Floodwaters will likely linger for days, ruining homes and spoiling sugarcane fields and crawfish farms.