WaPo: By Hook or by Crook, Surviving Storm

[DemsUnited]

Miss. Officials Used Ingenuity -- and the Occasional Misdeed -- to Get Job Done

By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 19, 2005; Page A01

GULFPORT, Miss. -- Hurricane Katrina has transformed Mississippi's mayors into car thieves, and senators into blockade runners. Isolated by the initial hit of the storm and failed by the slow federal response, citizens have fended for themselves in some original and not entirely legal ways. Brent Warr, the Republican mayor of Gulfport, even ordered his police chief to hot-wire a truck.

"When you send your law enforcement out to steal things, that's when you know you're in a different situation," Warr says.

In Gulfport, Warr did everything by the book, right up until he started stealing. His force of 225 police officers and 190 firefighters stayed on the job in 24-hour shifts. Fire Chief Pat Sullivan went into the storm to cut away felled trees from the roads leading to the hospitals. In the city's sea-blue antebellum City Hall, Warr worked without power.

But Gulfport was still without help three days after the storm, and Warr's control over the situation was slipping. Looting broke out downtown. When Warr drove a utility vehicle down U.S. 90, he watched as his longtime family business, Warr's Men's Clothing, was ransacked.

<snip>


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/18/AR2005091801397.html?nav=hcmodule

[Buck Turgidson]

1. Trent Lott was right about this.

But when Lott asked a Harrison County sheriff how they were faring, the sheriff reported that he was worried about FEMA diverting supplies.

Lott told him, "If anyone from FEMA tries to confiscate anything, arrest them."

[MountainLaurel]

3. That may be the one time that phrase is true

But Lott's on target. Now excuse me while I wash my mouth with acid after uttering that phrase.

[Pirate Smile]

2. Excellent article. It shows how FEMA was disastrously slow in

Mississippi also. Their Mayors were looting and stealing to survive - everyone had to.

While reading about the struggles of these smaller cities and towns I was just thinking about how if they had a large urban population center which was 80% flooded it would have made everything so unbelievably worse.

This kills the idea that some Republicans are trying to put out there that Mississippi worked fine because it had a Republican Governor. The problem was local and state, not feds - this shows that to be the complete bullshit we already knew it was.

In addition, the Ocean City Mayor who worked for Lott but is now a Democrat - that lady should have a big future in politics.

"In Ocean Springs, Mayor Moran slept on the floor of City Hall for 12 days.

A charming oceanfront bedroom community of 17,500, Ocean Springs was cut off from Biloxi by a knocked-out bridge and was virtually incommunicado for the better part of a week. Apart from a brief assessment visit by a FEMA medical strike team, Moran and her 40 police officers, 25 firefighters and 40 public works employees were alone for five days before they received any response from outside.

"We knew we would be on our own for 72 hours, but after five days, totally exhausted, we were just left saying, 'Where's the relief? Where's the cavalry?' " she says.

Finally, help came in the form of two tractor-trailers of supplies -- from New Life Community Church in Chicago. An interfaith alliance of 15 churches in Ocean Springs had arranged for the delivery. The trucks carried water, diapers, cleaning supplies, dry food and used clothes. When the drivers said they couldn't unload without a secure place to put the supplies, Moran ordered the locks cut on a county warehouse.

Next, she broke into her own public works building "to hijack a forklift." She also had staff members break into a fish-and-tackle shop to get waders. They left an invoice.

Moran, 49, felt Ocean Springs had done all it could to prepare for Katrina. She is an experienced public official with a master's degree in economic development from Georgetown University. She interned for Lott and served as Mississippi's economic development representative in Europe for several years, before returning home to Ocean Springs to run for mayor as a Democrat. She took office July 4.

"We tried," Moran says. "We had our radios. We know how to fill out the FEMA reimbursement forms. We know what we're supposed to do. We were as well-organized as we could be for a small town facing something of this magnitude."

Moran was so organized that before the storm came, she notified FEMA that she had readied a building, a former Kmart, for its workers to occupy. But apart from a brief visit from a medical strike team, she didn't hear from FEMA until a week after the storm.

Moran has improvised. She enlisted the City Council to form an emergency operations center. She established phone lines and staffed them 24 hours a day -- with workers from the water and sewer departments. The planning director has been unloading trucks, and the parks director brought a casket that had floated out of a graveyard breached by the tides to his office for safekeeping.

-snip-
When Moran finally fielded the long-awaited call from FEMA, the official had a question.

"Can you get us a building?" he said.

Moran says it was another two days before FEMA got fully up and running.

The professor who drove from Boston to Turkey Creek, picking up supplies and maxing out his credit card is incredible also. They knew they weren't going to get any help - guess why.

Please read entire article.