A Very Sad Situation And Story:

[EV_Ares]

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- Life has hung Linda Addison out to dry like the torn and twisted pieces of fabric still snagged in the high branches of the oak trees here, two years after they were carried aloft by Katrina’s howling winds.

In a 250-square-foot plain white box amid rows of identical FEMA trailers on a bare gravel lot on the western edge of this rebuilding town, Linda sits and quietly tells her story.

Listen carefully because Linda’s pitiful predicament is shared in one way or another by thousands of hurricane refugees who are still living in FEMA trailers without the resources to regain the small shreds of independence they enjoyed before the storm. While a million volunteers and billions in grant money flow to many residents who owned property before the storm and the booming recovery economy blesses others with new fortunes, Linda and those like her are being left in the dust.

“It’s a very sad situation,” says Reilly Morse, an attorney with the Mississippi Center for Justice. “It’s one of 17,000 or 18,000 tales of woe out there.”

In the summer of 2005, Linda and her poodle Trixie were happily keeping house in a one-bedroom apartment a few miles away in neighboring Waveland. Her $643 monthly Social Security disability checks was just enough for her to pay the $109 a month rent on her federally subsidized place, keep an old car running and indulge in her only vice: Coca-Cola.

By some standards, it wasn’t much of a life, but it was hers. She could get to church when she wanted, take a few ceramics classes at the senior center and host grandson Dustin, 11, and granddaughter Hannah, 5, the children of her only child, on weekend visits from Gulfport. She could look forward instead of backward on three marriages that had twice left her a widow – the first time when she was just 22 -- and once a divorcee, and on a lifetime of toil in the retail sector in which “I sold everything but fast food and my body” before winding up disabled in 2002 at age 60 with spine, hip, thyroid and blood-pressure problems.

Then came Katrina. She fled to Bogalusa, La., with a neighbor and returned to find that water had filled her ground-floor unit to the rafters. “When we tried to open the door, honey, my couch was in front of the door, the refrigerator on its side,” Linda recalls in her soft, lilting voice.

(entire story @ link below)

http://risingfromruin.msnbc.com/2007/08/hurricane-recov.html

[Freedomofspeech]

1. Who would have ever thought...

we would be hearing stories like this in the good ole USA? Thank you once again, Mr. *, for ruining this once great country.