Hurricane Katrina's toll in Mississippi:
- Estimated dollar amount of damage: $125 billion
- Identified dead statewide: 231
- Unidentified dead: 5
- Missing: 67
- Houses in South Mississippi destroyed: 65,380
- Mississippi insurance claims filed (Katrina and Rita): 383,700
- Claims paid (as of Nov. 21 2005): $5 billion
- Insurance claims filed in South Mississippi: 141,000
- Claims paid in South Mississippi: $1.3 billion
- Red Cross money spent in South Mississippi as of Nov. 30 2005: $185 million
Last October when I got back from
my trip to South Mississippi, I wrote that the area had been forgotten in favor of New Orleans. South Mississippi is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the media's coverage of hurricane reconstruction, and this has uniformly been the case since the day New Orleans' levees broke.
Even the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch website is almost wholly New Orleans-focused, and has been since its inception. According to its report on New Orleans, scientists and the NOAA are predicting a very active hurricane season this year with between 13 and 17 named storms, 8 to 10 of which will become hurricanes, and half or more of those are expected to be category 3 or stronger. Four days after the official start of hurricane season 2006, Bay St. Louis is still largely forgotten:
LEFT BEHIND
By RYAN LaFONTAINE
BAY ST. LOUIS - With much of the national media attention still focused on New Orleans' struggle to recover from Hurricane Katrina, Bay St. Louis Mayor Eddie Favre says it's a wonder South Mississippi receives any help at all.
"There's still so much emphasis on saving New Orleans or rebuilding New Orleans that all of us in South Mississippi are being overshadowed," Favre said.
Since late August, arguably most of the national media attention has been on New Orleans, as reporters from network television channels and major newspapers flock to the city to cover its plight, and some Coast leaders say their story has become an oh-by-theway footnote at best.
Media attention to a disaster such as Katrina often turns into donated dollars from sympathetic news consumers around the world, and Favre said the spotlight on his small town is fading fast and the much needed help is dwindling even faster.
[...]
According to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, more than $3.6 billion in private donations has been sent to the Gulf Coast from corporations, foundations and individuals.
Of those donations, Bay St. Louis has received about $160,000 -- total -- and $50,000 of that came from one man, Favre said.
"With so much of the focus being on New Orleans," he said, "I think it's just short of a miracle that anyone in South Mississippi is getting anything at all."
In contrast, in New Orleans, $2 million will go to help arts organizations, Pennsylvania residents donated $80,000 for a truck to suck out the muck from the city's underground drainage system and a New York nonprofit sent $262,000 to public school teachers, to name just a few private donations.
The Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund sent a $50,000 grant to the New Orleans area to purchase library books, but nothing as of yet to Bay St. Louis, and Favre said the last he's heard, the fund is done mailing checks.
[...]
"When I talk about these things, I'm not talking about just Bay St. Louis," Favre said. "All of our cities have the same needs, the problems are farreaching -- away from New Orleans -- and nobody seems to understand that."
And let's not forget that there are thousands of families living in flimsy camper trailers all along the Gulf Coast. Should another hurricane bear down on the area (which is roughly a 47% likelihood), those trailers are toast. South Mississippi in general and Bay St. Louis in particular are still in urgent need of assistance, perhaps now more than at any other time since the storm's landfall.
If you can help or donate, contact the Sun-Herald reporter who wrote the story above -- he can probably direct you to local government and private contacts for hurricane relief.
[Crossposted from my site]