Handling errors

I don't know if this is a SOAP question or just a general PHP question but when I construct and new SoapClient object with a wsdl that cannot be found (i.e. the server is inaccessible) warnings and errors are generated. Instead of having those print out and execution stop I'd like to catch them and redirect to an error page or do something else. I've tried use @ when making the client but execution still stops instead of just not printing out the warnings. Any ideas how to continue execution with knowledge of errors? Thanks, Patrick