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Is the media forgetting about Mississippi?

redguru said:
Incredible local story about a Mississippi man from the Pensacola News-Journal

After 150-mile trek, man finds family in Milton
Angela [email protected]

Among the countless accounts of tragedy emerging from the ravaged Gulf Coast, one story of triumph found its way Thursday to West Florida Hospital.

After weathering Hurricane Katrina’s winds from a flooding restaurant window, Curtis Quate, 43, of Bay St. Louis, Miss., walked and hitchhiked about 150 miles to Pensacola in search of his family, who had evacuated in their motor home.

He was dehydrated, sunburned and sleep-deprived when he finally collapsed inside a Pensacola restaurant and was taken to a hospital for treatment.

He was discharged later in the day and again set out on foot. Paula Dixon, a West Florida Hospital nurse, followed him.

Dixon took Quate back inside and began calling recreational-vehicle parks from Pensacola to Tallahassee.

The two found Quate’s family at Milton/Gulf Pines KOA in Milton.

Quate said Dixon’s kindness was the first true sign of humanity he had seen in days.

“The further I got from the devastation, the more angry and hostile the people were,” he said. “If it wasn’t for her, I’d still be walking.”

Dixon said she was relieved to have the chance to help a hurricane victim on a personal level. She said acts of kindness were more difficult during Hurricane Ivan.

“When you are the one in the hurricane, it’s not possible to help other people like this,” she said. “For the first time, there was a victim who needed help, and I could do something about it.”

Quate said he never will go a day without thinking of Dixon.

“I know every single person has stories,” he said. “I’m just so fortunate to have this one.”


Unbelievable. Only one person extended their hand to help?
 
HumorMe said:
Unbelievable. Only one person extended their hand to help?

Well, I can believe it. We are the first city that is still considered civilized if you were walking east. Mobile still is basically non-functional but improving.
It's basically pure misery from across the Perdido to the other side of New Orleans.

We only had about three gas stations opened today. We received a 130M gallon delivery of gasoline yesterday, but it is consumed almost as soon as the tanker puts it in the ground. Trucks coming from MS and AL are filling up flatbed loads of 55gal drums of gas and carting it back. We're the only deepwater port left on the Gulf of Mexico, east of Galveston.
 
Katrina a Tough Political Test for Barbour

September 03, 2005 6:22 PM EDT

JACKSON, Miss. - Struggling with what he calls Hurricane Katrina's "nuclear destruction," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour shows the emotional strain of leading a state through a disaster of biblical proportions.

Bags are newly prominent under his eyes. He fights tears while talking about search-and-rescue efforts. His voice cracks as he acknowledges people's fears about getting food, water, fuel and other basics for survival.

"Sometimes I'm scared too. But we're going to hitch up our britches and we're going to get this done," Barbour says in his thick-as-sorghum drawl.

Thrust into the national spotlight by one of the worst natural disasters in the nation's history, the first-term Republican governor faces the kind of challenge no politician ever anticipates or wants. Though the disaster is natural rather than manmade, it's similar in scale to what Rudolph Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, faced because of Sept. 11.

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato praises Barbour's response so far.

"He's come across as a Giuliani-type leader," Sabato said. "He's risen to the challenge and he clearly has the leadership gene."

But there are critics, particularly Jackson residents who are desperate for gasoline, and country folk still forced to scrounge for food and clean water in a world without electricity. And, there are those who say Barbour may have been too soft on early evacuation decisions.

In public appearances and nightly news programs, Barbour says repeatedly: "We will rebuild bigger and better than ever. It's going to take some time, and people have to be patient."

Even as Katrina whipped through the state Monday, Barbour took a tough stance against theft.

"To me looting is about the equivalent of grave robbing," he said. "We're not going to stand for it."

Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman and influential Washington lobbyist, unseated Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove in 2003 by promising to use his own powerful contacts to help Mississippi. Months before Katrina, some Republican insiders started touting Barbour as possible 2008 presidential material.

On Friday, Barbour walked with President Bush through obliterated home sites and twisted trees along the coast. Bush decried the chaos in New Orleans and praised Barbour's tough stance against civil unrest.

"Haley made some clear rules and is following through on them," Bush said.

Marty Wiseman, a Mississippi State University political scientist, said he doesn't think Barbour would try to take advantage of the disaster to advance his political career. But Wiseman said: "This will give him the ultimate stage to perform on."

Barbour likens Mississippi's storm damage to Hiroshima. Along the 90-mile coastline, Katrina blasted away entire communities, shoved a hulking casino barge onto a beachside highway and toppled sections of two vital east-west bridges like dominoes.

State emergency workers say when no TV cameras are around, Barbour has paid early morning visits to Mississippi and Louisiana hurricane refugees at the coliseum in Jackson, just a few blocks from the Governor's Mansion.

Scott Hamilton, spokesman for the state economic-development agency, said Barbour asked him one day if he was tired. Hamilton said he was, and asked how the governor was holding up.

Hamilton said Barbour responded: "'I get tired, too, and when I do, I think about the people I'm doing this for and I'm re-energized.'"

The pressure on Barbour is intense. People along the coast and more than 100 miles inland are homeless, hungry and desperate for fuel and clean water.

Critics question whether Barbour emphasized evacuations strongly enough. Barbour says he's satisfied he did. Evacuation orders are made by local officials, and those were issued for the three coastal counties early Sunday, more than 24 hours before Katrina roared ashore.

Barbour said National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield called him Saturday night to warn that Katrina could rival Hurricane Camille, which devastated parts of the coast in 1969. Barbour said he told Mayfield to repeat that message relentlessly to the public.

Mississippi was already one of the poorest states, and a significant part of its economy is disrupted with most of the coast casinos destroyed and the shrimping and shipbuilding industries at least temporarily disabled. The state already struggles with a tight budget, and Barbour has fiercely opposed any tax increases. Democratic Rep. Steve Holland, a personal friend but frequent political foe of the governor, wants to know whether Barbour will soften that stance.

"This act of God has brought us to reality so there's no measure anymore for anybody's political philosophy," said Holland.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press.
 
HumorMe said:
What is gas going for there?

it is still under $3.00, Jeb laid down an ultimatim that he would rigorously investigate any instance of price gouging from the time it leaves the refinery and gets into our State to the time it gets in a car. He even asked the refiners to give out price points to the SecAg to plot throughout the entire cycle.
 
I was thinking that too.

I can only speculate that the media assumes that people can relate to New Orleans and not Biloxi or Mississippi.
 
I read about that. You have to admire him for that. Time for the higher ups to lay down the law and regain out of control gas prices.
 
Weather has always fascinated me. I always wondered why I didn't become some kind of meteorologist or stormchaser. I guess I got sidetracked along the way.

Hurricanes and twisters are always interesting to me. I went through Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and I have seen the destruction mother nature can do.

As soon as Katrina formed in the Bahamas, the Weather Channel was constantly on my TV and was never changed. I told my wife Thursday night about the time NO was being predicted to be the target or within the cone of certainty that if it hits NO, it will be awful. When this thing exploded overnight and picked up forward speed on Saturday, I knew this was going to be catastrophic.

I follow a weather chatboard and get a lot of my updates and info from there. A lot is reported there before it ever hits the newswires and outlets. A lot of accuracies reported there. A lot of speculation too although it is usually not too far off from the truth.

They were saying long before katrina hit that the real devastation would be the outcroppings of LA and MS. It would be on the worst side of the storm. The east side of the storm contains the majority of the violent bands that continually reeks havoc and is unrelenting and of course the eyewall winds usually have the highest winds.

Katrina started weakening just off the coast but the momentum and waves and environment it had already created did not have enough time to dissapate before making landfall. This is why this storm has been so destructive.

The strange thing about this storm though was that it appeared to be going through an eyewall replacement phase (in which it sort of weakens and gets a little disorganized before getting its act together again and strengthens more) before making landfall which is puzzling since it was so close to leaving it's energy source known as the warm gulf waters.

Hurricanes continually go through these phases while chugging along in the ocean. So in essence, it could have been a whole lot worse if it had had another 12 hours of fuel before making landfall. Plus it didn't hit NO dead center instead it tracked a little eastward and actually spared NO from the full brunt.

What is happening in NO is tragic and we can't even imagine in our worst nightmarish dreams. MS is being totally(well not totally ignored) because like an article I read...there isn't much exciting about debris. That is all that is left in these areas.

Entire towns have vanished from existance reclaimed by the Mississippi river and the gulf. I wonder how many remained to ride out the storm? We will probably never know.

I will post something from an article I read.....You can borrow the land from the rivers, marshlands and even the ocean by filling it in and building on top of it but mother nature will always come back to reclaim it as her own. She is very unforgiving and mostly underestimated.

God bless the people who have to endure this suffering.
 
HumorMe said:
Unbelievable. Only one person extended their hand to help?

Doesn't surprise me at all.
 
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