RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Hurricane Katrina

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Senator Says Gulf Coast Help Insufficient
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The government has not done enough to help large swaths of the Gulf Coast recover and rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, a key Republican senator said in a push for Congress to retain its focus on delivering aid in the new year.

Though lawmakers have approved $67 billion for Gulf Coast emergency relief and long-term recovery programs, and President Bush has called for an additional $1.5 billion to strengthen New Orleans levees, hard-hit areas in Mississippi and Louisiana need more federal resources and attention, said Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), R-Maine.

"I don't think the government has done enough," said Collins, who is leading a delegation of senators on Tuesday to Gulfport, Miss., and St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana — two areas that she said have been overlooked compared to New Orleans. Both areas were nearly obliterated by high wind during the Aug. 29 storm.

The lawmakers also will tour parts of New Orleans, including inspecting progress on rebuilding levees that are crucial to encouraging residents and businesses back to the previously flooded city.

"This is a long-term commitment," Collins said in an interview Saturday. "The devastation is so widespread that a sustained federal commitment is going to be necessary. I think Congress realizes that, but there's also a growing concern about whether the money is well spent."

Democrats, too, are watching how Congress will pay for what they called continued necessary assistance to the Gulf Coast amid a rising deficit and other high-cost expenses, including the war in Iraq.

"This is really a catastrophe of enormous proportions, and I don't think we appropriated nearly enough to help," said Rep. Barbara Lee (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., after reviewing damage Friday in the New Orleans area. She is calling for Congress to repeal Bush's tax cuts to help pay for Katrina-related rebuilding.

Last month, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, chastised Congress for failing to approve emergency funding, thus stalling state transportation, school and housing projects.

The state last week released a report calling for bold moves to improve its transportation and housing systems to a better level than before Katrina hit.

In prepared testimony for a Senate hearing in Gulfport on Tuesday, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast rebuilding czar outlined two top priorities for Mississippi: debris removal and temporary housing for evacuees.

So far, Mississippi has cleaned up 27 million cubic yards of debris — about two-thirds of the total, said Donald Powell, the federal Gulf Coast coordinator. He estimated that Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties in Mississippi were left with more debris after Katrina than totals after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the World Trade Center from the 2001 terror attacks combined.

Powell also estimated that fewer than 2,000 evacuated families remain in Mississippi hotels, and that 280,000 state residents have received transitional housing assistance.

"Every time some type of natural disaster has hit, the people of this region have come back, and come back stronger than before," Powell said in his prepared remarks, obtained by The Associated Press. "Failure is not an option. ... It's too important a task not to do it right."

Collins, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which is holding the hearing, said she planned to examine whether Powell has enough authority in his post to order changes for progress.

Powell, the former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a wealthy Bush campaign contributor, serves as a liaison between state and local authorities in the region who are developing rebuilding plans, and Congress and Bush administration officials who will help fund them.

"He cannot direct what needs to be done," Collins said, adding that Powell has been working with a bare-bones staff. "He's very much a straight-shooter, and is hard working, but I wonder if he has the troops that he needs."

Collins also said senators would examine rebuilding progress on New Orleans levees — and the ongoing controversy over whether Congress should approve funds to make them strong enough to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, as local residents and business leaders have demanded.

Some weather experts believe Katrina, a Category 4 hurricane when it hit the coast, had weakened to a Category 3 or 2 storm by the time it reached New Orleans. Bush and Powell have called for rebuilding the floodwalls to withstand a Category 3 storm.

"I clearly want the levees to be stronger, taller and tougher than they were before, but there's not a common definition what it means to build to a Category 5," Collins said.

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Many on Miss. Coast Feel Overshadowed
By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press Writer

GULFPORT, Miss. - Nicki Henderson has had plenty of reasons to be angry since Hurricane Katrina destroyed her Biloxi home, but it was a simple news item about dislocated dolphins that really made her blood boil.

Henderson lost her temper when she logged on to her computer and spotted this headline: "New Orleans Dolphins Find New Home." She knew the dolphins actually came from a hurricane-ravaged marine park in Gulfport, not New Orleans.

The headline writer's error reinforced her belief — shared by many on Mississippi's Gulf Coast — that New Orleans has gotten a disproportionate share of the news coverage and the nation's attention in the aftermath of the storm, now more than four months gone.

There is a growing sense the catastrophic damage along Mississippi's 70-mile stretch of coastline is being treated as a mere footnote to the story in New Orleans, which was ravaged by flooding.

Worse, some say the lack attention could hamper the recovery of an area that had experienced an economic renaissance in the past decade thanks to billions of dollars of investment by major casino and hotel companies.

"I am terrified the American people are going to forget about us," Henderson said.

On Dec. 14, The Sun Herald in Gulfport devoted its entire front page to an editorial, headlined "Mississippi's Invisible Coast," that argued the region is fading into a "black hole of media obscurity." Next to the editorial was a graphic tallying Katrina's toll on the region: $125 billion in estimated damage, 236 dead, 65,380 houses destroyed.

Louisiana's death toll stands at 1,078. More than 6,000 homes in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish may have to be demolished.

The piece ended with a plea to the national media to "tell our story."

"The depth of the suffering and the height of the courage of south Mississippians is an incredible story that the American people must know. But, in the shadows of the New Orleans story, the Mississippi Coast has become invisible and forgotten to most Americans," the editorial read.

Sun Herald publisher Ricky Mathews said more balanced coverage would give Mississippi's residents a sorely needed morale boost. "They need to know they haven't been forgotten," Mathews said.

Mississippi residents are not the only ones feeling overshadowed by New Orleans. Larry Hooper, 63, has been living on a campground since Katrina destroyed his home in Empire, La., about 60 miles from New Orleans.

"Our town was wiped off the map," he said. "We feel as left out as the people in Mississippi and Alabama because of all the New Orleans reporting."

Rem Rieder, editor and senior vice president of the American Journalism Review, said it is obvious New Orleans has gotten the overwhelming share of headlines.

"Part of it has to do with the mythical status that New Orleans has in this country," he said. "It did become the focal point of national attention. The unfortunate byproduct is that the story on the Mississippi Gulf Coast can be backburnered."

Mathews said he worries that a "national obsession" with New Orleans will cost Mississippi its fair share of federal aid, private investment and help from volunteers.

"The government can help us get our important infrastructure rebuilt, but it's the private investment that's going to tell the story long term," he added.

Congress has approved tens of billions of dollars for recovery and rebuilding on the Gulf Coast. Only time will tell how the money is divided, but news coverage "does have an impact on what Congress does," said Biloxi native Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.

"When it's off the screen of the media, it's off the screen of the federal government," said Nelson, who landed his first newspaper job at The Sun Herald.

Not everybody is clamoring for a brighter media spotlight, because bad news can be bad for business.

"I really think there's a downside to overexposure, if it's exposure that says things aren't working well," said Stephen Richer, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau. "Yes, there has been less coverage here, but I think in the long term we may come out ahead, because there's been more focus on the constructive things we're doing."

Three casinos already have reopened in Biloxi and others have vowed to be back before Katrina's anniversary on Aug. 29. In 2004, the dozen casinos on the Mississippi coast generated $1.2 billion in gross revenue.

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MISSISSIPPI'S INVISIBLE COAST

As Aug. 29 recedes into the conscious time of many Americans, the great storm that devastated 70 miles of Mississippi's Coast, destroying the homes and lives of hundreds of thousands, fades into a black hole of media obscurity.

Never mind that, if taken alone, the destruction in Mississippi would represent the single greatest natural disaster in 229 years of American history. The telling of Katrina by national media has created the illusion of the hurricane's impact on our Coast as something of a footnote.

The awful tragedy that befell New Orleans as a consequence of levee failures at the time of Katrina, likewise, taken by itself, also represents a monumental natural disaster. But, of course, the devastation there, and here, were not separate events, but one, wrought by the Aug. 29 storm.

There is no question that the New Orleans story, like ours, is a compelling, ongoing saga as its brave people seek to reclaim those parts of the city lost to the floods.

But it becomes more and more obvious that to national media, New Orleans is THE story - to the extent that if the Mississippi Coast is mentioned at all it is often in an add-on paragraph that mentions "and the Gulf Coast" or "and Mississippi and Alabama."

The television trucks and satellite dishes that were seen here in the early days have all but disappeared.

While there has been no study to quantify the amount of coverage accorded to the plight of so many here or in New Orleans, it is obvious to any observer that the number of news stories on New Orleans is many times that of those focused on Mississippi.

So, why does that matter?

It matters first as it relates to journalism's obligations to cover human beings whose conditions are as dire as those that exist here.

The depth of the suffering and the height of the courage of South Mississippians is an incredible story that the American people must know. But, in the shadows of the New Orleans story, the Mississippi Coast has become invisible and forgotten to most Americans.

Could it be possible that the ongoing story of an Alabama teenager missing in Aruba has received more coverage on some cable networks than all of the incredibly compelling stories of courage, loss and need of untold thousands of Mississippians? Maybe a lot more coverage?

The second reason that the coverage matters is in the realm of politics. If the American people and their elected representatives do not truly know the scope of the destruction here, and if they are not shown the ongoing conditions afflicting so many, then there are consequences which are playing out even this week in Washington, where Congress will act, or not act, to relieve the incredible pain that has reduced the condition of so many American citizens to Third World status or worse.

If the people do not know, they cannot care.

We believe if they are shown the extent of the devastation and the suffering, they and their representatives will respond.

So the coverage matters. A lot.

The problem, to some extent, is that you have to be here and see it for yourself to comprehend the utter destruction that is so much like Berlin or Tokyo after World War II.

We would like to invite our news colleagues from across the nation to come and view the Coast with us. It is impossible to comprehend this disaster from afar. A television can display only a single screen of the damage. When you have driven mile after mind-numbing mile and viewed the complete nothingness where cities and homes and businesses once stood, only then will you begin to understand what has happened here.

Then you will begin to wonder, where are all the people who used to live on this beautiful shore? What has happened to their families and all of those shattered lives? That is when you will understand that the story of Katrina in South Mississippi isn't over, it has only begun.

On the third day after Katrina crushed us, this newspaper appealed to America: "Help us now," the headline implored. America answered with an outpouring of love and help. That response saved us then.

Our plea to newspapers and television and radio and Web sites across the land is no less important today: Please, tell our story. Hear the voice of our people and tell it far and wide.

We are here. Do not forsake us.

We are no footnote.

And one more thing...

Thank you. To every out-of-state volunteer, to every friend and family member who has sent supplies or prayers, we sincerely thank you.

And we ask that you do one more thing: Call your senators and your congressional representative and ask them to support additional aid for South Mississippi's recovery.

We couldn't have gotten off our knees without you. But we can't get back on our feet without federal help.

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