The plant, which produces chemicals used to make fiber filling for pillows and other products has nine operating units and with 400 employees is the largest employer in this Panhandle town of 22,000 people 60 miles from Amarillo.

In Gulf Breeze, a Panhandle town that barely survived Hurricane Ivan, the assistant city manager, Dave Symanski, said his team was "in combat mode" and counting on volunteers to help.

Law-enforcement officials in this Panhandle town of 2,600 said they expected prosecutors to seek to try at least two of the boys as adults.

Tom Coleman, a former state narcotics agent convicted on Friday of aggravated perjury in a case that involved dozens of discredited arrests in Tulia, a Panhandle town, was sentenced to serve 10 years' probation.

Or Dalhart, Tex., a Panhandle town of 7,000 people where the murder rate last year was more than twice the national average.

Guns have always been a part of life in this Panhandle town, even before a new Florida law seemed to invite pistol-packing on city sidewalks.

For Mr. Hardy, it is in his genes: his parents were raccoon trappers in a tiny Panhandle town, and he never had electricity until he joined the Navy at 17.

Working undercover in the Panhandle town of Tulia for a multicounty drug investigation task force, Mr. Coleman arrested 46 men and women, most of them black, on narcotics charges during an 18-month period beginning in 1998.

A grand jury in Texas has indicted the ex-cop who conducted a slimy undercover operation that devastated much of the black community in the small Panhandle town of Tulia.

Erickson's parents left Midland in 1946 and moved to the Panhandle town of Perryton the farthest-north county seat in Texas, 550 miles northwest of Austin.