Mississippians' Suffering Overshadowed
Sep 03 11:49 PM US/Eastern


By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS
Associated Press Writer

JACKSON, Miss.

Mississippi hurricane survivors looked around Saturday and wondered just how long it would take to get food, clean water and shelter. And they were more than angry at the federal government and the national news media.

Richard Gibbs was disgusted by reports of looting in New Orleans and upset at the lack of attention hurricane victims in his state were getting.

"I say burn the bridges and let 'em all rot there," he said. "We're suffering over here too, but we're not killing each other. We've got to help each other. We need gas and food and water and medical supplies."

Gibbs and his wife, Holly, have been stuck at their flooded home in Gulfport just off the Biloxi River. Water comes up to the second floor, they are out of gasoline, and food supplies are running perilously low.

Until recently, they also had Holly's 75-year-old father, who has a pacemaker and severe diabetes, with them. Finally they got an ambulance to take him to the airport so he could be airlifted to Lafayette, La., for medical help.

In poverty-stricken north Gulfport, Grover Chapman was angry at the lack of aid.

"Something should've been on this corner three days ago," Chapman, 60, said Saturday as he whipped up dinner for his neighbors.

He used wood from his demolished produce stand to cook fish, rabbit, okra and butter beans he'd been keeping in his freezer. Although many houses here, about five miles inland, are still standing, they are severely damaged. Corrugated tin roofs lie scattered on the ground.

"I'm just doing what I can do," Chapman said. "These people support me with my produce stand every day. Now it's time to pay them back."

One neighbor, 78-year-old Georgia Smylie, knew little about what's happening elsewhere. She was too worried about her own situation.

"My medicine is running out. I need high blood pressure medicine, medicine for my heart," she said.

Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, said he's been watching hours of Katrina coverage every day and most of the national media attention has focused on the devastation and looting in New Orleans.

"Mississippi needs more coverage," Sabato said. "Until people see it on TV, they don't think it's real."

Along the battered Mississippi Gulf Coast, crews started searching boats for corpses on Saturday. Several shrimpers are believed to have died as they tried to ride out the storm aboard their boats on the Intracoastal Waterway.

President Bush toured ravaged areas of the Mississippi coast on Friday with Gov. Haley Barbour and other state officials. They also flew over flooded New Orleans.

"I'm going to tell you, Mississippi got hit much harder than they did, but what happened in the aftermath _ it makes your stomach hurt to go miles and miles and miles and the houses are all under water up to the roof," Barbour said.

Keisha Moran has been living in a tent in a department store parking lot in Bay St. Louis with her boyfriend and three young children since the hurricane struck. She said National Guardsmen have brought her water but no other aid so far, and she was furious that it took Bush several days before he came to see the damage in Mississippi.

"It's how many days later? How many people are dead?" Moran said.

Mississippi's death toll from Hurricane Katrina stood at 144 on Saturday, according to confirmed reports from coroners and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Barbour had said Friday the total was 147, but he didn't provide a county-by-county breakdown.

In a strongly worded editorial, The Sun Herald of Biloxi-Gulfport pleaded for help and questioned why a massive National Guard presence wasn't already visible.

"We understand that New Orleans also was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, but surely this nation has the resources to rescue both that metropolitan (area) and ours," the newspaper editorialized, saying survival basics like ice, gasoline and medicine have been too slow to arrive.

"We are not calling on the nation and the state to make life more comfortable in South Mississippi, we are calling on the nation and the state to make life here possible," the paper wrote.

Speaking of Mississippi I noticed that Nar hasn't posted since the storm. Talked with another friend in the Pearl/Jackson/Clinton area the other day - after days of trying to get through - he advised that things were pretty bad even up there. Not anything like the coast, but worse than he's seen for a long time. As of Fri, they were still without power or phones in many areas plus there was no gasoline.

Have you has contact with Nar? I was gonna try calling his cell but figured if the electricity was out there was no sense running down his battery. I was supposed to be leaving for my yearly trek to Jackson in the morning, but understandibly the event has been cancelled. The hotel where I had reservations (Pearl) had been without power all week (as of Sat) making it 4 star primitive.

We'll see if I get tapped for NOLA this week.

__________________
Mike Tangas
'73 280SEL 4.5 (9/72)- RIP
Only 8,173 units built from 5/71 thru 11/72

'02 CLK320 Cabriolet - wifey's mid-life crisis

2012 VW Jetta Sportwagon TDI...at least its a diesel

Non illegitemae carborundum.

Yea I've been chatting with him, he's cruising around with a tank full of Crisco. His house made it but he is still without power or phone, I guess beer is a valuable commodity too.

I heard from some friends in So Mississippi that came through nearly undamaged. I do not believe that they understand how fortunate they are.

There are lots of communities that got struck by the storm. Some were annhilated. Like Buris and Venice. This article does a fine job of conveying the emotion of it. From the NY Times.

Bot

Destruction on Peninsula Illustrates Danger of Living at Earth's Edge

VENICE, La., Sept. 5 -Before Hurricane Katrina, people around here took pride in living at what they called the end of the world: far from New Orleans in miles and in spirit, at the bottom of a narrow peninsula that juts into the Gulf of Mexico as if in dare.

The only main road, Route 23, meandered past marinas and oil refineries, little shops and the occasional church, in small, distinct towns: Happy Jack and Sunrise, Buras and Boothville, and then pretty much just Venice, where people who worked long shifts - seven days on, seven days off - hopped helicopters to oil platforms somewhere out in the gulf.

The local boast about being at the end of the world no longer smacks of hyperbole, now that the hurricane has wiped the smile off the face of Happy Jack and all its neighbors. These towns remain mostly submerged, deserted and dead quiet, though the destruction easily conjures a hurricane's furious howls.

Few if any houses survived; those not still under water were flattened in place or thrown acres away. Hundreds of pleasure boats, fishing vessels and small ships were indiscriminately dry-docked, tossed onto embankments, into swamps, even onto the state highway. Oil refinery tanks crumpled into balls; bits and pieces of homes scattered like confetti; downed telephone wires snaked off into uselessness; and virtually no living thing was around, save for stranded livestock, crying seagulls and a few dogs looking for masters.

There is no visible National Guard presence, no smaller version of the hectic recovery taking place farther north. This is partly because the hurricane essentially severed the area from the rest of Louisiana; the view by helicopter, the only way to get here other than by boat, shows impassable Route 23 submerged then dry, submerged then dry.

Another reason, the law enforcement officials here say, is that two days before last Monday's hurricane, they went door-to-door, telling people it was time to go. Most people obliged, they say, fleeing to a high school in Belle Chasse, to a relative's home in Folsom, to safe places in Alabama and Mississippi. Residents here know that when it comes to hurricane season, defiance can be fatal.

Now, sheriff's deputies from the local parish of Plaquemines are looking for people, alive or dead, on the levee banks and in the darkness of all those upturned boats. "We still have people out here hiding from us," Deputy Sheriff Timmy Arceneaux said Monday. "But when they get tired of no food and water, they'll be found."

From the sky, it is hard to imagine anyone still living in Lower Plaquemines: amid the black, oil-slick waters lapping against the doors of the Family Dollar store - with "Family" stripped from the marquee - or near the Buras water tower with steel legs buckled beneath it, or among those small yellow atolls - the rooftops of school buses that will not be transporting children anytime soon.

Setting ground in Venice only reinforces the twinned senses of devastation and isolation. The hurricane hit with such force that it dragged large fishing vessels across Route 23, scarring the pavement, and twisting two pumps in front of a gasoline station's skeleton into grotesque bows.

Broken gasoline lines churn the water with bubbles. A few stacked sandbags suggest an aborted attempt at shoring up. The air reeks of diesel fuel and the sea and dead things.

A few miles north, in the town of Empire, there was movement, human movement: sheriff's deputies from Plaquemines Parish, surveying the damage, chasing ghosts of people reluctant to leave and steeling themselves to look for the dead in those upturned boats.

At that moment, they were marveling at the clump of boats, including two massive fishing vessels, the Sea Hawk and the Sea Falcon, now plopped smack in the center of Route 23. "Someone was camping out here," Deputy Sheriff Arceneaux said, standing in the clump's large shadow. "We found some beer and potato chips."

He started walking north on a deserted stretch of Route 23 called the Empire Bridge, accompanied by his oil rigger of a son, Ryan, and Lt. Steve Zegura. They pointed out how the hurricane had twisted the bridge, bending it west toward the bay. They noticed this because the Lower Plaquemines area is, was, their home.

Deputy Sheriff Arceneaux, a weathered 44, used to live in a trailer at the northern end of the bridge. It is destroyed, he said, along with the neighboring One-Stop convenience store. He pointed straight ahead, where the highway slid back again underwater. That green house in the middle of the submerged road is owned by his cousin, he said, and it used to be 200 yards to the east.

He looked around at what had been his town and pointed out pieces of the community's jigsaw puzzle that had been moved and shoved to form a different puzzle altogether. The Delta Marina used to be east of Route 23, and now it was west. The severely damaged civic hall over there - "They had weddings and dances and all kinds of stuff" - used to be on Highway 11, only Highway 11 is now nowhere to be seen.

"And this," he said, nodding toward what looked like a lake, "this was a trailer park."

He stopped talking, and then there was no sound other than the howl of either a dog or a coyote. It served as a reminder that animals outnumbered humans here.

Lieutenant Zegura, 44, squat, and wearing rubber boots that he called "Cajun Reeboks," started talking. How he was born and raised with Timmy Arceneaux. How Timmy was with him when he was shot 10 years ago in Sunrise. How word had come to the Zegura family that the hurricane may have killed a nephew of his in Slidell.

How an Empire man - Charlie Martin, wasn't it? - died; some Mexican fishermen found his body floating near their boat, and they laid it out on dry land. And how another local man survived the hurricane clinging hands and feet to a telephone pole. The meat on his limbs was torn away, but he survived.

More silence on a highway without traffic, in a town without the hum of motorboats, the lazy buzz of Labor Day, the sound of children. Not to worry, the three local men said. Lower Plaquemines will rise again.

"Next year we'll be fishing," Lieutenant Zegura said.

His lifelong friend, Timmy Arceneaux, agreed. "Redfish," he said. "Flounder. Speckled trout."

Then again it got quiet.