If nothing else, people still retain their knack for saying truly horrendous things at really odd times.
Past the razor wire that has been rolled out along the unusable railroad tracks separating the heavily damaged neighborhoods from the destroyed neighborhoods lies the port that gave this city its name.
Put generously, it is a mess. The cargo containers are scattered for miles, the poultry freezers are destroyed and 7,300 jobs are in limbo. In the middle of one of the major terminals sits a casino, the Copa, one of a fleet of floating gambling houses that had revitalized the Gulf Coast, pumping taxes into city, county and state governments and providing jobs to some 15,000 people. Now officials say 8 of the 12 floating casinos appear to be damaged beyond repair, including the Copa, which is slumped onshore, a big pink box with its guts exposed.
If the levees had held in New Orleans, the destruction wrought on the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina would have been the most astonishing storm story of a generation. Whole towns have been laid flat, thousands of houses washed away and, statewide, the storm has been blamed for the deaths of 211 people, a toll far higher than those from Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Ivan. But as it is, Mississippi - like the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 - is coping with an almost unimaginable catastrophe, largely overshadowed in the news media's attention and the national consciousness, in this case by the disaster in New Orleans.
On Sunday night, President Bush began his third visit to the region since the storm hit.
Two weeks since the hurricane, Gulfport and the neighboring city of Biloxi are no longer fighting for mere survival. Power has been restored to everyone who can receive it, gasoline is flowing at the stations and water is gradually beginning to trickle from faucets, though it is still undrinkable. There is even a man in a pizza costume enticing customers to a local Papa John's. But, as the community breathes a collective sigh of relief, the tougher question is beginning to arise: now what?
"It looks like we're going to have to build an economy from the ground up" said Connie Rockco, one of the five supervisors of Harrison County, where Gulfport and Biloxi are located. [...] Brent Warr, who has been the mayor of Gulfport for two months, has no doubt that his city will bounce back from Hurricane Katrina.
"Property values are going to skyrocket here," Mr. Warr said in an interview. "All the unattractive stuff has been blown away. The attractive stuff has been blown away, too, but we can rebuild that."
In Biloxi, which is about 200 years older than Gulfport, some things may be gone for good.
The East End of Biloxi, an old neighborhood of Balkan immigrants and Cajuns whose fathers and grandfathers arrived years ago as fishermen, was wiped out. The houses did not follow the current building codes and the mostly low- and middle-income district was in a prime real estate area, near the casinos.
The Vietnamese immigrant shrimpers, many of whom lived - and still live - in their boats, and who operated what was left of the area's shrimping industry, are unlikely to find work anytime soon. The harbors are destroyed and the shrimp freezers are gone.
Many of the older, lifelong Biloxi and Gulfport residents, quite a few of whom stayed because they had lived through Hurricane Camille in 1969 and figured they could live through Hurricane Katrina, lost everything and are unlikely to have the energy to rebuild their seaside homes. Ideally, Mr. Warr said, they would move into the condominiums that officials are still expecting to rise along the coast. "We have an opportunity now to make it an absolutely unique place," he said. "God has come in and wiped the slate clean for us."
Looking on the bright side -- if there is one -- is one thing. And it is true that Katrina managed to get rid of quite a few things that many people wanted to get rid of. Although whether or not you wanted it gone will depend largely on whether or not it was yours to begin with. The poor of Gulfport and Biloxi might argue that they were better off with substandard housing because, if nothing else, it was there. Now that it's been destroyed, the likelihood that there will be something built that they can afford is going to be vanishingly small, especially if it's in areas that might become more desirable. And while it is true that seaside homes are generally nice things to have, Mississippi might put some thought into forbidding building on the seafront, given that Mississippi does seem to get hit by at least one hurricane per year, and seafront homes would seem magnificently unwise under those circumstances.
But even so: Mr Warr ought to be ashamed of himself. The concept that God would come in, destroy thousands upon thousands of homes as a form of urban renewal is perfectly vile.
Posted by iain at September 12, 2005 06:16 PM
