News from Central Gulf Focus: La./Miss (Ala contributors)

[Audrey2Katrina]

Gulf Coast Network Update:

June 7, 2006 GCN

Officials with the University of Southern Mississippi says they will not be rebuilding the Marine Education Center at Point Cadet in east Biloxi, but will likely build a new facility at another location. USM also says it will repair the campus at Long Beach, but is still looking for land to expand somewhere else on the Coast.

Gulfport's City Council has decided to waive building permit fees for residents after homeowners said they the fees were too high. The council voted unanimously to waive residential permit fees for 18 months from the date of the storm. This policy goes into effect in two weeks. Homeowners will have to pay $100 for the city to review their plans.

MDOT officials say that a plan to use ferries to move motorists across Biloxi Bay while the new bridge is built will probably not be feasible.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Ferry service sinking

By DON HAMMACK
SunHerald.com June 7, 2006

With traffic not expected to flow across the new Biloxi Bay bridge until two months later than MDOT had hoped, dreams of providing an interim ferry service remain just that.

The state's Transportation Commission awarded the U.S. 90 bridge contract as expected Tuesday. It will be built for $338.6 million by GC Constructors of Kansas City, Mo., which won a close competition when the final bids were opened Monday. The bid says two of the six traffic lanes will flow by mid-November 2007.

The Mississippi Department of Transportation has been working with Pacific Marine Technical Services on a study to determine the feasibility and research requirements for ferries across Biloxi Bay and the Bay of St. Louis.

"They're working on it, but I don't have a real good feeling about it, to be frank with you," said Southern District Commissioner Wayne Brown.

The obstacles are numerous, both on sea and on land.

The Department of Marine Resources has been surveying water depths at potential landing sites using side-scan sonar. There is the potential for dredging and the environmental concerns that entails, plus oyster reefs that have to be taken into account along the potential routes.

Then there is construction equipment to build the new bridges, which helps rule out the area between those bridges and the CSX Transportation railroad bridges.

"The areas between both the bridges on both sides, (the problems) look insurmountable at this point," said Jim Moak, director of MDOT's ports and waterways division.

The Washington Street pier area in front of St. Stanislaus in Bay St. Louis and an area on Henderson Point near the junction of U.S. 90 and Old Highway 90 south of the Gulfshore Baptist Assembly are being focused on as terminal sites on the Bay of St. Louis. On Biloxi Bay, Point Cadet on the Biloxi side and the old seafood factory at the foot of Jackson Avenue in Ocean Springs are areas of interest.

The locations would need significant improvement for parking and docking, even for the Biloxi Bay sites which could only be passenger ferry stops.

MDOT hopes to have the study wrapped up within three weeks, but even with the extra time that GC Constructors will take to get traffic flowing, ferry service is starting to seem even more a long shot.

" I do know it would be a great help to some people," Brown said. "I just wish we could make it happen in a hurry, but I don't have a good feeling about it."

[Audrey2Katrina]

Millions of gallons of water seeping away

Fissures in pipes traced to Katrina

Thursday, June 08, 2006
By Michelle Krupa - Times Picayune
Staff writer

About 85 million gallons of drinking water -- more than two-thirds of the total pumped into the pipes -- are leaking into the ground every day through breaks in New Orleans' hurricane-fractured water system, even after crews this week plugged a 15 million-gallon-per-day crack using a process that cut water pressure, in some cases to a dribble, from Uptown to Gentilly.

Even with that fix, the city continues to waste nearly twice the 50 million gallons per day that residents are paying to use, Sewerage & Water Board Executive Director Marcia St. Martin said. Given the difficulty of locating underground leaks, especially with so few residents around to report them in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, St. Martin said much work still must be done.

"That's still just the tip of the iceberg," she said.

Before Hurricane Katrina's winds uprooted thousands of trees, dislodging countless underground water pipes, New Orleans' 455,000 residents used about 120 million gallons of water every day, St. Martin said. About 30 percent of that regularly disappeared through cracks in the ground or pooled in the street or was expended for firefighting or other public uses.

Now, with the population estimated to have reached 221,000, the water board is pumping out more drinking water than before the storm only to see the bulk of it vanish underground. St. Martin said S&WB crews have repaired more than 17,000 leaks since Aug. 29, but most of the remaining fissures are hidden beneath the streets.

The water board has hired a contractor to use a sounding device to search electronically for breaks in main pipes. Officials also are asking residents to report any leaks, including the sound of water running underground, by calling (504) 52-WATER or through the S&WB Web site, http://www.swbno.org.

The water pressure problem prompted several days of complaints from residents, first in Gentilly and then throughout the east bank of New Orleans, of low water pressure or no water at all flowing from their faucets.

St. Martin said water pressure was restored across the city Wednesday by 11 a.m. after crews fixed a broken underground valve in the Upper 9th Ward. She said that although the job was isolated, many neighborhoods were affected because the 1,600-mile pipe system consists of a series of loops that carry water from a filtration plant on Claiborne Avenue to every corner of the east bank.

"To repair that location had a result of affecting pressure in other areas of the city," she said.

Two municipal buildings in the Central Business District, City Hall and the New Orleans Civil Court Building, closed early Wednesday after low water pressure reduced service in restrooms and water-cooled air-conditioning systems.

Low pressure also forced firefighters Tuesday afternoon to call in an extra tanker truck to fight a one-alarm blaze at 3918 Clematis St. in Gentilly, a two-story building housing three occupied apartments. Witnesses at a fire Wednesday in the 1300 block of Burbank Street, also in Gentilly, said a helicopter was brought in to help douse a fire that burned a one-story brick house to the ground.

St. Martin said the S&WB intends to alert the public in the future whenever major repairs might reduce water pressure. She said the water board already informs the Fire Department when repairs could interrupt the availability of water to fight fires.

Though City Hall was expected to reopen for normal business hours today, the court building at 421 Loyola Ave. planned to shut its offices for the clerk of Civil District Court, clerk of the First City Court, civil sheriff and jury pool, and the business office of Civil District Court today and Friday at 12:30 p.m.

Court spokesman Walt Pierce said low water pressure has been a problem since the judiciary moved back into its building next to City Hall on Jan. 3, after being exiled after Katrina.

St. Martin attributed those water pressure problems to the building's lack of a booster pump to force drinking water to the upper floors.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Furniture dealer to be sold; stores shut

Five Kirschman's sites will reopen as chain

Thursday, June 08, 2006
By Jaquetta White
Business writer

Kirschman's, a 92-year-old home furnishings company that was one of the metro area's leading local furniture dealers, abruptly closed Wednesday night after agreeing to be acquired by Rooms To Go Inc., the nation's largest furniture retailer, for an undisclosed amount.

Employees were notified of the sale in meetings Wednesday at 5 and 7 p.m.

Beginning today, the stores included in the deal will close for two weeks while inventory is assessed. They will reopen, still under the Kirschman's name, for a two- to three-month liquidation sale, said Peter Weitzner, vice president of Rooms To Go. Then the stores will close again, will be redesigned and will reopen one by one in the fall, beginning with the Metairie location on Veterans Memorial Boulevard, as Rooms To Go.

Kirschman's has about 300 employees in stores and at a warehouse. The furniture company had about 320 employees before Hurricane Katrina.

Weitzner said Rooms to Go stores are more labor-intensive than Kirschman's operations and will have jobs available for all of the Kirschman's retail staff, about 225 people. All of Kirschman's employees will have to apply for jobs with Rooms To Go. "We'll certainly want to talk to all employees," Weitzner said.

But employees at the Kirschman's warehouse on Almonaster Boulevard, which is not being bought, might lose their jobs.

The Kirschman family is retaining the rights to its name and has not ruled out opening a separate business in the future.

Under the deal five Kirschman's stores -- in Metairie, Gretna, Covington, Baton Rouge and Gulfport -- will be taken over by Rooms To Go, which owns more than 100 stores in eight states.

Four other Kirschman's stores that have closed in recent months are not included in the deal. Two of those stores, in Slidell and Gentilly, have not reopened since Hurricane Katrina. The other two, in Lafayette and Houma, opened briefly after the storm but closed because of labor shortages.


Offer unsolicited

Arnold Kirschman, the company's president and chief executive, said he had not been seeking a buyer but was approached about five weeks ago by Rooms To Go, which is based in Florida and had been scouting locations in the New Orleans area.

"The main thing they wanted was to get the prime locations that we own or have under a lease," Kirschman said. "The energy and their concern for our people seemed to fit our culture."

In addition to the rights to the company's name, Kirschman will retain ownership of the land at the Metairie and Baton Rouge locations and will lease that space to Rooms To Go. Kirschman's financing arm, which extends credit to customers and is a "small percentage of the (company's) portfolio" is not included in the deal. Three Ethan Allen franchises operated by the Kirschman family will not be sold.

Since opening its first stores in Orlando in 1991, Rooms to Go has grown into the nation's largest furniture retailer. Last year the company, described as a "full-service, mid-priced chain," had estimated furniture sales of $1.6 billion, up 12.7 percent from the previous year, putting it ahead of Ashley Furniture Homestores, Pier 1 Imports and Ikea, according to a report by the trade magazine Furniture Today.

Rooms To Go has built its business around selling furniture in packages, by the room. The stores are arranged so customers see complete, designed rooms. Customers can have a fully designed room shipped to them in days.

"Their genius is being able to create nice looks. They take the guesswork out of designing" said Ray Allegrezza, editor-in-chief of Furniture Today. "They're smart. They're really good merchants, very aggressive."


Swift growth

Indeed, in just 15 years, the company has added stores in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

"New Orleans is a place we've wanted to get to for a long time," Weitzner said. "We think the people of New Orleans will like our stores."

Allegrezza said it's not surprising that the longtime local company sold to a national chain. The furniture industry, he said, is undergoing a period of consolidation. The increase in the popularity of Internet furniture shopping, the rise of nontraditional furniture sellers such as Wal-Mart and Target, inexpensive manufacturing in China and growing competition from suppliers-turned-retailers such as La-Z-Boy, combine to make it tough for local furniture retailers to thrive, Allegrezza said.

"The guys that are trying to do business the way their mom and dad did business, they're going to be out of business," he said.

Kirschman, whose grandfather Morris Kirschman founded Kirschman's in 1914 as a 16-year-old after immigrating to the United States from Poland, believes there is still a place for the small firms.

"The future for the independent retailer, I think, continues to be very strong," Kirschman said. "The New Orleans industry continues to be one of the best."

He said the Kirschman family does not intend to leave the industry, but plans to pursue a niche market.

"We don't see this as the end of Kirschman's in any way," Kirschman said. "We see it as a change of direction."

Although Kirschman's, as part of its agreement with Rooms to Go, is prohibited from opening a general furniture store, the company could go after a smaller market. It's too early to tell what that segment might be, but Kirschman said a new venture will likely carry the family name.

"My grandfather built the company into a great name and a great organization," he said. "You can't put a price on it. You can't let it go."

[Audrey2Katrina]

Any of you remember the jingle:

3-0-6-0 Dauphine Street,
Where the Thrifty Shoppers meet,
Take a cab there,
We'll pay the cab fare,
Cause you always get more,
At Kirschmann's furniture store....

Memories, memories... another institution bites the dust.... D.H. Holmes, Godchaux, Maison Blanche... and now this *sigh*

A2K

[Audrey2Katrina]

To stay or go? More people deciding

Activity is replacing paralysis, report says

Thursday, June 08, 2006
By Coleman Warner
Staff writer-- Times Picayune

New Orleans homes for sale have reached a new peak and the city is reporting an escalating number of residential building permits, two seemingly conflicting facts that combined suggest homeowners are accelerating their decisions on whether to rebuild or get rid of their Katrina-flooded homes, the Brookings Institution said Wednesday.

In releasing its latest Katrina Index report, the Washington nonprofit research organization gave a sobering interpretation of the home-sales figure: "This may signal the decision made by families to leave Orleans Parish." But a measure of hope can be gleaned from both home sales and building permits, according to the group's deputy director, Amy Liu. Together they signal a turn away from paralysis, and sales could improve the rate at which homes are cleaned up and put back into use, she said.

Though in earlier months "there was absolute stagnation, paralysis, a holding pattern, now we're starting to see a lot of activity," Liu said. "At least now we see homeowners making decisions, families making decisions."

The number of homes listed for sale at any given time in Orleans Parish has increased steadily, from 2,899 in early January to 3,884 this month, according to the Louisiana Realtors Association. The same pattern can be seen generally across the metro area, with sales listings for the area's eight parishes increasing from 8,047 in early January to 9,756 this month.

The rising number of listings may be attributed in part to a traditional uptick in homes placed on the market at the end of a school year, or to an accumulation of homes for which there are no buyers. The published figures also don't capture a for-sale-by-owner market that has flourished in some areas since Katrina, as many owners try to avoid marketing fees.

But just as homeowners decide to sell, the Brookings report shows many more also are seeking to rebuild. It indicates that more than 21,000 New Orleans residential building permits have been issued this year, raising the total since Katrina to almost 34,000. Brookings officials say the bulk of the activity is found in renovations, not new construction. The group didn't include permit figures for other parishes.

New Orleans permits issued for work on homes totaled 4,959 in May, the highest monthly total for the year with the exception of the 8,156 issued in February.

Mayor Ray Nagin's office said this week that including residential and commercial properties, the city has issued about 70,000 permits representing work valued at more than $1 billion since Katrina.

"Since September we've issued more than 10 times the number of residential permits that were issued in all of 2004," said Department of Safety and Permits Director Mike Centineo.

Although Centineo's department lost many of its employees after Katrina, "over the last nine months, the department has issued what would normally take us up to five years," he said. With the city issuing permits online and through self-service kiosks at City Hall, long lines faced by applicants soon after Katrina have been eliminated, officials said.

"We are very excited about the number of permits issued daily to our citizens so that they can start the process of rebuilding our neighborhoods," Nagin said.

City officials expect thousands more homeowners to make decisions on their properties in the near future, as Congress this week is expected to approve another $4.2 billion for a state housing program that would give homeowners up to $150,000 in grants for rebuilding or buyouts.

The Brookings report suggests Nagin's re-election also might offer some stability, because it has brought "clarity and renewed energy" to the city's rebuilding process, making it easier for city leaders to plan.

Among other Brookings findings:

-- With more than 100,000 federal trailers in use for emergency housing across the region, the bulk of them in Louisiana, local officials will face additional problems during a mass evacuation. They must take extra measures to get information to families in trailers, "many of whom live in isolated situations" without TV or Internet access, and there is a threat that trailer residents will try to evacuate with them, clogging evacuation routes. Government officials repeatedly have warned residents not to move trailers.

-- The metro area's unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent in April, the lowest level since Katrina, but the positive reading could be a result of a nearly 12 percent drop in the size of the Louisiana labor force. Since Katrina, the New Orleans area suffered work-force losses of 43 percent in education and health services, 35 percent in the leisure/hospitality industry and 28 percent in trade and transportation.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Times Picayune reporter Video of Katrina in Gulfport:

Doubtless many of you have seen this, or some of it; but every now and then to see what we've gone through, survived, and ARE coming back from, it's a bit of cathartic therapy.

http://www.nola.com/hurricane/video/?/hurricane/video/content.ssf/gulfport052006.wmv

As we approach the anniversary of this day of infamy, in the words of Tiny Tim: God Bless Us All!

A2K

[Audrey2Katrina]

Gulf Coast Network, update:

June 8, 2006-- GCN


Army Corps of Engineers to soon leave debris removal to Hancock County authorities...Coast officials say the post-Katrina loss in population reported by the U.S. Census is too high. Around 50,000 people have left the Coast's three southernmost counties...Burn bans are in effect along the Coast... Gulfport's City Council waives building permit fees after citizens protest high costs...A plan to get federal help to buyout the CSX railroad tracks fizzles...

[Audrey2Katrina]

Gulfport bank robbed

Courthouse Road bandit carried gun

By ROBIN FITZGERALD--Sun Herald

GULFPORT - An employee of Regions Bank wrote a description of a robber on Wednesday while the armed man held up a teller, authorities said.

Police continued to search for the robber early in the evening, looking for a white man described as 6-feet-2 and wearing a safari-looking hat, khaki pants and a backpack.

The holdup is Gulfport's first bank robbery since Feb. 10, 2005, when a man disguised as one of the Beatles claimed he left a bomb at AmSouth Bank on U.S. 49. That holdup coincided with the anniversary of the Beatles' American debut on Ed Sullivan's television variety show.

Wednesday's holdup occurred shortly after 2 p.m. at the bank's Courthouse Road branch.

Deputy Police Chief Alfred Sexton said the man produced a handgun and left with an undisclosed amount of money.

Police believe the robber left on foot, heading southeast.

The bank is on the corner of Victory Drive just south of Pass Road.

Anyone with information about the robber is asked to call police investigators at 896-5959.

Union Planters Bank, before its merger with Regions, owned the bank the last time the Courthouse Road branch was robbed at gunpoint. The man who robbed the bank on Dec. 10, 2003, was captured in a Biloxi hotel parking lot later that night after he was identified from bank surveillance cameras.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Counties question count

They doubt estimate of 50K residents lost

By KAREN NELSON June 8, 2006--Sun Herald

The recent Census figures of the Coast's population shift since Katrina are considered a snapshot, only a partial picture, and Coast officials say they believe the loss numbers are high and don't reflect the optimism of residents who plan to return.

The new government estimate shows the three Coast counties losing about 50,000 in population from July 2005 to January 2006 and the other three South Mississippi counties gaining 4,600.

Census officials warned the figures had larger margins of error than most census estimates because, for example, only people living in households were counted, excluding hurricane refugees living in hotels and shelters.

"In Pascagoula, 95 percent of the city was under water," said Kay Kell, city manager. "There are a lot of people who are temporarily living somewhere else. But we have issued 5,000 building permits, so we know people are coming back."

Kell said property values are strong and lots are hard to find.

Tim Kellar, Hancock County administrator, would really like to have accurate population figures when estimating county fees for services, but the Census estimates are just one version he's seen.

"If it's true that almost 25 percent of the population has disappeared, we're going to have to sit back and reconsider," Kellar said, referring to the 11,111 Hancock County was supposed to have lost.

Tish Williams, executive director of the Hancock County Chamber, said she has two studies that paint a different picture. One counted people living in parks and parking lots and using electrical hookup data; one shows a population loss closer to 1,000.

"We're trying to show retail businesses they can and should invest in this county," Williams said. "If no one's here, how come everyone I know is here?"

Gulfport doesn't have a grasp on what its population is with the influx of construction workers and volunteers, said Kelly Jakubik, public information officer. It was 73,000 pre-Katrina and the city has indicators people are coming back, she said.

Promising signs for Gulfport: Property-tax collections exceeded the budget set before Katrina by $163,000.

"That's a sign that people are committed to Gulfport and are planning to rebuild," she said, adding the city has issued 25,000 building permits since the storm.

Connie Rockco, president of the Harrison County Board of Supervisors, said she believes people moved to the north part of the county or moved in with relatives and might not have been counted.

"And there's a huge influx of development people," Rockco said. "I don't know if they're transient or not."

Rockco said efforts to get an accurate picture using telephone lines failed, and she expects it to be two or three years before the county has an accurate accounting of the population.

Jackson County Supervisor Manly Barton said he thinks 8,000, the loss estimated by the Census Bureau for his county, was a little high.

"We have certainly lost a good many. There's no question about that," he said, looking at employment figures and the population increase in neighboring Mobile County, where he said many of the county's professional people moved temporarily.

What disturbs him, Barton said, is places like Old St. Martin where there's lot after lot whose house was destroyed, and no FEMA trailer is in the yard.

[Audrey2Katrina]

House-Senate talks produce agreement on bill funding Iraq war, hurricane aid

6/8/2006, 11:12 p.m. CT
By ANDREW TAYLOR
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — House and Senate Republican leaders Thursday finalized agreement on a long-sought $94.5 billion bill to pay for the war in Iraq and deliver a much-needed infusion of relief to Louisiana and other hurricane

The bill won't clear Congress for President Bush's desk until next week, but the official submission of the deal eases Pentagon worries of a money crunch caused by weeks of delays in creating a compromise bill.

GOP leaders overcame the last snag to agreement — insistence by two Senate GOP moderates that the bill include a promise to increase future spending on education and health programs — by winning endorsement from Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.

The bill includes $65.8 billion for military operations and maintenance in Afghanistan and Iraq, personnel and energy costs and new weapons and ammunition and a $2 billion initiative to locate and disarm roadside bombs.

Lawmakers added funding to upgrade Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles for National Guard troops and nearly doubled the Pentagon request for new, better-armored Humvees.

The bill also contains $19.8 billion in new money for hurricane relief along the Gulf Coast, including housing aid and flood control projects for Louisiana, small business disaster loans, rebuilding federal facilities damaged by Hurricane Katrina and replenishing Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief coffers.

The agreement caps weeks of mostly behind-the-scenes talks on Capitol Hill over how to balance lawmakers' hopes for additional hurricane relief with Bush's demand that the bill stick to his original $92.2 billion request for Iraq and Afghanistan and hurricanes, with an additional $2.3 billion to combat bird flu.

The Senate-passed version of the bill had exceeded Bush's request by more than $14 billion, adding large sums for farm disasters, fisheries aid, veterans medical care, port security and to compensate Texas for taking on evacuees of Katrina.

Most of that extra money was dropped, as was $289 million to create a fund to compensate people if they were to be injured by a pandemic flu vaccine.

The last snag involved a demand by Senate leaders to use the must-pass war funding bill to get around a House-Senate impasse over the annual budget blueprint Congress is supposed to produce each year.

The measure endorses Bush's $873 billion "cap" on the annual appropriations bills Congress passes each year. Under Congress' arcane budget rules, setting a cap on appropriations bills makes them much easier to pass through the Senate.

But GOP Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio sided with Democrats on a House-Senate negotiating committee to insist on $7 billion in additional money on top of Bush's $873 billion cap for the upcoming annual spending bills. The pair refused to endorse the war spending bill without the additional promises for the future bills.

They wanted to dedicate the $7 billion to health and education programs; the White House and House GOP leaders were dead set against the idea.

"Period," said House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

"These are things I care very much about, education and children's health issues," DeWine said. But DeWine and Specter were overruled when Inouye and Landrieu signed on to the agreement.

The $19.8 billion included in the bill for hurricane relief includes:

_$5.2 billion for grants to state, with $4.2 billion expected to go to meet Louisiana's housing recovery needs.

_$3.7 billion for federal flood control projects in the New Orleans area.

_$6 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster fund. That includes $400 million for temporary housing sturdier than FEMA trailers. The funds also go toward debris removal, reimbursing state and local governments for infrastructure repairs and direct aid to individuals.

_$500 million in farm disaster aid for Gulf states.

_$550 million to rebuild a veterans hospital in New Orleans.

The compromise bill includes Bush's plan to provide 1,000 more Border Patrol agents along the Mexican border, deploy about 6,000 National Guard troops and build detention space for 4,000 illegal immigrants.

The bill also contains $4 billion in military and foreign aid for Iraq and other allies, and to combat famine in Africa and Afghanistan and support U.N. peacekeeping missions in Sudan.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Man shoots former girlfriend, two sons and himself in Terrytown

Times Picayune: Friday, June 9, 2006

A man shot his ex-girlfriend and their two sons early Friday before eventually turning the gun on himself, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office said.

Anthony Aguillard, 43, was booked with three counts of attempted murder after he shot his former girlfriend and their 17-year-old and 14-year-old sons at the Terrytown Village Apartments on Carrollwood Village Drive shortly after midnight.

None of the three victims received life-threatening wounds, but Aguillard is in critical condition at West Jefferson Medical Center after shooting himself once in the head, according a Sheriff's Office press release.

[Audrey2Katrina]

While singing, Kenner man kills friend

Times Picayune: June 9, 2006

A Kenner man shot and killed a friend while imitating the words of a rap song, police said today.

Ronnie Webber, 27, told officers he was playing with a gun while singing the lyrics when he came to a line about a weapon firing. The gun in his hand discharged, fatally wounding Johnathan Beasley, 23.

The shooting occurred Thursday about 4:40 p.m. at Beasley's house at 3024 Phoenix St. It was Beasley's gun.

Webber called the police, who found Beasley in a rear bedroom with a gunshot wound to the chest, Gallagher said. He was taken to the Charity Hospital trauma center at Elmwood Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Webber told investigators he had thought the gun was unloaded but did not check to make sure, said Capt. James Gallagher, a Police Department spokesman.

Police booked him with negligent homicide.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Forum on Gulf Outlet set in Tammany

St. Tammany bureau

The future of the controversial Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet will be discussed at a public forum on coastal restoration on June 21 north Mandeville.

The event, sponsored by the League of Women Voters of St. Tammany, will be held at 6:30 p.m. at the Parish Council chambers at 21490 Koop Drive off Louisiana 59.

State Sen. Walter Boasso, R-Arabi, will be among the participants, and Carlton Dufrechou, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, will present the organization’s post-Katrina plan to restore coastal Louisiana. Central to the foundation’s plan to restore the eroding coastline as a vital line of defense against storms is the closure of the Gulf Outlet channel.

[Audrey2Katrina]

GOD! I hope they close the MRGO... It DOES need to GO!!!

A2K

[Audrey2Katrina]

Water leaking faster than city is using it

Sound waves will search for busted pipes

Friday, June 09, 2006
By Michelle Krupa
Staff writer

Near the corner of Frenchmen Street and St. Claude Avenue, a half-mile from the Mississippi River and more than four miles south of Lake Pontchartrain, Gregory App can hear the gushing.
Since at least February, App has been able to lounge in his front room and listen to water flowing beneath the floorboards of his raised 1845 cottage. Peering out the window, he can keep tabs on the growth of a 5-foot-deep cavity that has slowly enveloped his street.

"I literally have a sinkhole in front of my house," said App, a real estate investor who said he has called the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board four times to request repairs, to no avail. "Finally, I bought a piece of plywood to put down over the 5-foot hole under my brick sidewalk.

"I could take a chlorinated bath underneath that piece of plywood on my sidewalk," he said.

Nine months after Hurricane Katrina, S&WB officials are scrambling to plug an untold number of underground leaks, cracks and gashes, most of which sprung when the epic storm's winds uprooted trees and pried loose the water pipes around them.

Even after the water board plugged a 15 million-gallon-per-day break this week in a main water pipe in Bywater, an estimated 85 million gallons of drinking water still are flowing every day into the easily eroded southeast Louisiana soil.

Local experts say the seepage not only leads to low water pressure but also threatens city streets, sewerage lines and potentially the structural stability of houses.

To try to get a grip on the problem, S&WB officials have hired a contractor to install 400 sensors along 80 miles of water pipes beneath the city. The detectors are designed to sense vibrations and pinpoint leaks hidden beneath the pavement.

But the water board, already facing an apparent backlog of complaints, still will have to make repairs. And because of fiscal constraints, the contract initially will cover only 5 percent of the 1,600 miles of water pipes that snake through subterranean New Orleans.

Meanwhile, officials in Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes say their water systems are back to pre-Katrina status, or that no significant problems persist. Even in St. Bernard, which flooded border-to-border during Katrina, only about 10 percent of drinking water is escaping from the system, compared with at least 63 percent in New Orleans.


Washing away

The potential problems associated with a leaky water system are many. Foremost is the condition of roadways, which are prone to sink into ground made mushy by seeping water.

"The physical condition of the streets is really destroyed because of the water leak," said Enrique LaMotta, a professor of environmental and civil engineering at the University of New Orleans. "There is really not a good foundation once the soil is washed away by the water."

Leaky water pipes also could lead to a ruined sewer system, LaMotta said, noting that sewer pipes could bend or crack under the weight of wet soil or because of its instability.

"If the sewer system sinks, we could have wastewater leaking out of the sewer pipes," he said.

Denise Reed, a professor of earth and environmental science at UNO, said moistening the city's soil, if done consistently and in moderation, actually may be beneficial during an arid period.

"The reason we have such subsidence is because the soils are dry," she said, adding that exceptionally dry soil could bring about pipe fissures. "If the Sewerage & Water Board were able to irrigate the subsurface in an equal fashion, some might say that's a good thing."

However, she stressed that large breaks that shoot powerful streams of water into the subsurface, especially the irregular ground beneath New Orleans' streets, certainly imperils infrastructure.

"Trying to maintain some kind of rigid pipe system while everything is subsiding is a very, very difficult task," she said.

Considering the additional damage wrought by Katrina, Reed said that perhaps the city's only saving grace is its proximity to a reliable water source.

"We're lucky in Louisiana in that we have a lot of fresh water," she said. "The Mississippi River provides us as much fresh water as we could want. If we were out in the West, could you imagine what this waste of water would be worth?"


A losing proposition

Water board officials have not revealed how much money they lose every day from the millions of gallons of water escaping through the busted underground pipes, though they said this week that seepage has always been a problem for the city's aged water system.

Before the Aug. 29 storm, New Orleans' 455,000 residents used about 120 million gallons of water every day, and about 30 percent of it regularly disappeared through cracked pipes, or was used to fight fires or for other public uses, said S&WB Executive Director Marcia St. Martin.

That means that 84 million gallons served the city's pre-Katrina citizenry.

Now, with the population estimated at 221,000, the S&WB is pumping out even more than before the storm: about 135 million gallons per day, she said. Billing records show that only 50 million gallons are needed for private use, so 85 million gallons are pouring into the ground.

Since Katrina, water board crews have patched 17,000 leaks in the drinking water system, St. Martin said. But because officials don't know exactly where to find the remaining breaks, they have hired Fluid Conservation Systems Inc. of Ohio to help with reconnaissance.

Under a six-month pilot program, the S&WB will pay $192,500, most of it to buy 400 "permalog" devices that will be installed by contractors every two or three blocks in one section of town, said Tom McGee, the company's director of operations. The location has not yet been set.


Listening for leaks

Roughly the size of a soda can, the battery-operated units are attached with magnets to water pipes near shutoff valves. They have radio transmitters and are programmed to turn on every day at 2 a.m., when they go to work "listening" for leaks.

"The water spring makes a noise on the pipe, a vibration, that can be heard from two or three blocks away," McGee said. The process is best done at night, he said, because there's little traffic noise and water use is low, meaning water pressure in the pipes is at its height.

Once readings have been made, contractors drive around the neighborhood where the "loggers" have been planted and receive radio transmissions of the underground data.

"But these devices don't tell you where to dig," McGee said. "They just tell you there's a leak on the block."

To further home in on the problem, Fluid Conservation Systems sends in a two-person crew to attach sound-wave sensors at the end of each block in a section where a leak was detected. Again relying on vibrations, the sensors become "sophisticated stopwatches" that track the amount of time it takes vibrations to reach each end of the block, McGee said.

Judging by the length of the pipe, workers can pinpoint the leak's location.

"The normal average in a city the age of New Orleans would be to find one leak for every three miles of pipe," McGee said. "We'll probably find about one every mile of pipe, given the stories I've heard about how much water they're losing."

Fluid Conservation Systems expects to begin installing sensors June 19. Until then, and after the process gets under way, water board officials are asking residents to report any leaks, including the sound of water running underground, by calling (504) 52-WATER or through the S&WB Web site, http://www.swbno.org.


Prioritizing repairs

The reporting system, however, is not always user-friendly, some residents have said. Pat Denton said she called three weeks ago to report "a big pool" of water at Camp and Amelia streets Uptown. A pipe had been leaking for at least two months, she said, but even after registering her complaint, the pond still stood Thursday.

"The birds have been really enjoying it, so on the one hand, I really hate to see it go," Denton said. "But it is seeping. It's making everything mushy. You can't really park in front of the house that's right there."

S&WB spokesman Robert Jackson said he did not know whether his agency had a backlog of work orders for water system repairs. But he noted that the board often puts off mending small leaks on public property in lieu of major problems, such as broken hydrants, busted water mains and pipe fissures that leave whole blocks or neighborhoods with no water service.

"We have to ask: Is it a small trickling leak, or (do) you have water pouring out of a hole or you have no water in a whole part of town?" he said.

Jackson also said S&WB employees cannot enter private property without the owner's permission to fix a leak, even if water has flowed onto public ground. And he said some problems that may appear to be water board issues, such as sinkholes, may actually be the responsibility of the city streets or public works departments; those are referred to City Hall.


Neighbors working

Though the scope of the water system damage in New Orleans is unclear, officials agree that the rebuilding task is huge. Meanwhile, nearby parishes have managed to resurrect their drinking water pipelines and have had few, if any, major service interruptions since getting back online.

In St. Bernard Parish, drinking water is available as far south as Verret, and in areas where service has been restored, seepage from cracked pipes is only about 10 percent, Chief Administrative Officer David Peralta said.

Though he conceded that leaks likely are more prevalent in lower St. Bernard, Peralta said officials have not considered hiring a contractor to root them out.

"We probably are not facing the problems New Orleans is," he said. "They're just so much bigger than we are. We're just using our normal procedures: word of mouth."

In Jefferson Parish, Water Department Director Randy Shuler said that within three weeks of Katrina, while much of New Orleans still was under water, 30 parish and contractor crews repaired 480 breaks in the water system, the equivalent of an ordinary year's worth of work.

The department fixed about 50 more leaks discovered by residents when they returned home, and soon after that, "everything that was related to the hurricane was fixed," he said.

Shuler noted, however, that he fielded three calls Thursday for broken water pipes, an unusually high number for one day.

"We haven't had a lot of rain lately and the temperatures are getting hot, so you're going to see some soil subsidence, and you're going to see some lines break at the joints," he said, adding that similar problems could begin popping up in New Orleans.

St. Tammany Parish, which has several private and public water systems, has had no significant water-pressure problems. A parish government spokesman said the Engineering Department was unaware of any problems, and municipal systems reported no pressure issues.

"We have had no water pressure problems during the storm, after the storm or now," Mandeville Mayor Eddie Price said. "Our water pressure's as high as it's ever been."

In Slidell, Public Utilities Superintendent Michael Isenberg said Katrina-related water system repairs are complete. "We don't have any problems," he said. "The breaks that we had after the storm, we addressed."

. . . . . . .

Reporter Bruce Hamilton contributed to this report.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Addition of pumps delayed, corps says

17th Street Canal goal shifted 5 weeks

Friday, June 09, 2006
By Sheila Grissett
East Jefferson bureau

The goal of adding more pumps by Aug. 1 to better drain the 17th Street Canal if new floodgates must be closed against a storm surge this hurricane season has fallen further behind schedule and now isn't expected to occur until Sept. 8, the Army Corps of Engineers confirmed Thursday.

The five-week delay results primarily from cramped site conditions that are forcing most major pieces of the mammoth project to be done in sequential order, not simultaneously, as was initially envisioned, Col. Lewis Setliff III said. The work includes pile-driving; pump installation; construction of gates, gate housings and engine platforms; and injection of concrete into too-soft canal soil.

"Our earlier schedule was based on a government estimate made before site and soil conditions were known," said Setliff, the Task Force Guardian commander overseeing floodgate construction. "Now we have a contractor schedule . . . a real schedule that is based on the sequencing of activities that is required in this restricted area. We overlap where we can, but you can only have so many barges and cranes working at once."

The delay means the goal of providing 2,800 cubic feet per second of drainage capacity -- which itself is a 70 percent reduction in normal canal capacity -- won't occur until well into the peak of storm season, which generally begins in mid-August.


'Unconscionable' delays

It is the latest in a rapid series of devilish developments that are landing like punches to the gut of local residents and their elected representatives, who fear the floodgates being provided in this first season since Katrina ravaged the system may actually increase flooding in neighborhoods that drain into the 17th Street and London Avenue outfall canals.

At a minimum, government leaders in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish are imploring the corps to meet earlier goals of providing at least 4,000 cubic feet per second, or cfs, by mid-August and 6,000 cfs by early September. And before next season begins, they want the agency to replicate the maximum capacity of 17th Street and London Avenue canals, which is 10,000 cfs and 8,000 cfs, respectively.

"This continuous changing of dates, goals and commitments is unconscionable," said Jefferson Parish Councilwoman Jennifer Sneed, whose district includes low-lying parts of Old Metairie and Old Jefferson that would be among the likely spots to experience increased flooding if enough rain falls while gates in the 17th Street Canal are closed: a scenario that automatically would decrease potential pumping capacity by as much as 70 percent to 90 percent.

"The people of Jefferson and Orleans should never, ever be forced to choose between flood protection and hurricane protection," she said. "The corps built floodwalls that failed, and the corps should be made to replicate the pumping capacity that we are losing because of the gates they are building to fix the problem they caused."


Friction over pumps

Gates in the 17th Street, London and Orleans canals are key elements of about $800 million worth of repairs and flood defense structures that Task Force Guardian has undertaken since January to shore up the damaged system for this hurricane season, which started June 1.

The task force also is responsible for adding the so-called "temporary nonportable" pumps that will move canal water around the gates when they are closed -- and that's the lightning rod of contention now between locals and corps officials.

How many of those new pumps can they add, and how fast?

When the gates are closed against storm surges driven by tropical weather -- as they must be to stop the kinds of breaches in canal floodwalls that occurred in Katrina -- the mammoth New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board pumps routinely used to drain the canals will be forced to power back and move only the significantly reduced volumes of water that the smaller "temporary nonportable" pumps can handle.

In effect, that means that when the gates are closed, the big pump stations that drain the 17th Street and London canals will become transfer stations moving limited amounts of water north to the gates and their downsized pumping systems.

"If we could match the capacity of those stations, we would," Setliff said. "But anything beyond that basic (2,800 cfs) number becomes a far more complex engineering challenge that must be handled properly to ensure that we don't damage those canal walls by sucking too much water out."


Supplementing capacity

So what about just the 4,000 cfs that local officials are begging for in August?

"I know that people don't like it when the numbers and the dates change, and we fully understand people's fear of flooding and the desire for increased capacity," Setliff said. "But as I said, the original dates and numbers were set out by estimators when the contracts were issued. We couldn't wait to investigate the sites before we got started or we would have had no chance of getting the work done this hurricane season."

Setliff said the corps and its contractors hope to supplement the 2,800 cfs by using portable pumps that might add 1,000 cfs. But even that requires engineering and careful placement so the pumps don't interfere with construction at the 17th Street Canal, where space is so restricted that crews cannot work from both land and water at the same time.

At this point, Setliff said it just isn't known whether 4,000 cfs can be obtained at any point during the season's traditionally active months of August and September.

He said the best chance to reach 4,000 cfs in August would be for the contractor to somehow get so ahead of schedule that there is space to add portable pumps on the west side of the canal, where the first group of nonportable pumps are being installed to provide the initial 1,400 cfs of capacity by July 9.

The second set of pumps, the ones that will increase that number to 2,800 cfs, will be added on the east side of the canal.

"The real message here is that despite the changing numbers and dates, we're doing as much as we can to get as much capacity in that canal as we can get as fast as we can get it done right," Setliff said.

Under the latest, tentative schedule, gates at the 17th Street Canal should be operational on July 9 with 1,400 cfs of pumping capacity from nonportable pumps if needed. On Sept. 8, that number should increase to 2,800 cfs, and portable pumps may be able to add to that number.

If a surge threatens before July 9, a wall of braced sheet piling will be driven at the Hammond Highway Bridge, and 1,000 cfs will be provided by portable pumps.

The London Avenue Canal is to be operational on July 1 with 2,800 cfs of capacity from nonportable pumps and the potential for more through the use of portable pumps.

The Orleans Avenue Canal came online June 1 with 1,000 cfs. By July 1, that number should increase to 2,200 cfs, where it will remain. The canal has a much lower water volume and will suffer no loss of capacity once that number is reached, engineers said.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Gulf Coast Network: Update

June 9, 2006 from GCN

Hurricane forecasters are watching a large area of thunderstorms in the Caribbean that could become the seasons first tropical depression...As GCN has been reporting for months, the loss of property tax revenues is proving to be catastrophic for some local governments. Hancock County officials say the county is nearing bankruptcy and could cease some operations...Some west Gulfport residents are questioning a plan by FEMA to build a trailer park near the beachfront...

[Audrey2Katrina]

Our Summer of Discontent

Gulf Coast Network Special:

As the President's Polls Plummet. Democrats Smell Blood. Conservatives Fear Revolt and Katrina Survivors Worry About the Future

By Perry Hicks and Keith Burton Filed 5/22/06

The concern most of us feel these days is quite difficult to get our arms around; this sense that our nation is heading down the wrong road; that we, as a nation, are in jeopardy. There is simply so much that has gone awry in so many sectors for so long a time that finding the right words to describe, much less make sense of it, is very, very difficult. Those of us who live in the Katrina Disaster Zone feel the sharp edge of the nation's problems perhaps more than elsewhere. We see what has gone wrong at the ground level and our vision is perhaps clearer. In an area with so much loss, words like "strong economy" and "increased business profits" do not inspire confidence.

We can readily see the problems though, manifest in a war whose Vietnam-like prosecution will insure fighting extends far out into the distant future.

We can see it not just in our national government’s refusal to secure our borders, but how illegal aliens can take to our streets demanding- and probably getting- special favors from Washington.

We feel the pain of it at the gas pumps and in our heating bills- even as others protest the creation of energy terminals because of a supposed threat to zooplankton.

And those of us who live on the Coast, ground zero for Hurricane Katrina, we wonder if the nation can remain focused in the aftermath of true catastrophe when facing a future that is so uncertain.

It is all too evident in how the Supreme Court has upheld the use of Eminent Domain so that government may take one citizen’s private property, not for public use, but to give it to anyone else they choose and for any reason. This is no small concern for those that survived the hurricane in the few remaining beachfront neighborhoods along the Coast. As the New York Times recently said, Biloxi was one of the last working class beachfront communities.

At the same time, there is this unfathomable Federal indifference toward even the most fundamental relief- not just toward individual citizens who have lost everything- but even the municipalities utterly destroyed by Katrina.

And, it is apparent in the high divorce rates suffered in this country that is brought about as much by Federal avarice as it is by some individual’s devotion to matrimony.

Summing it all together; it is what more and more Americans are coming to believe- is that we as people no longer matter; that the situation is growing hopeless. Our wants, needs, and even lives must be subordinated to that of the state, the corporation, and foreign powers if they so demand it.

And this is what some in the Republican Party are coming to fear: the middle class coming to perceive that they are losing their freedom and are increasingly under the government’s foot. It is a recipe for social upheaval.

No Common Cause

Hoover Institute fellow Shelby Steele has recently explained his view why America has been reluctant to win any war since 1945.

Look at the record here: Because there has been no official treaty ending it, the “police action” on the Korean peninsula is technically still on-going. Vietnam was lost not by the failure of combat arms, but the undermining of national support by a virulent ant-war movement. Iranian mullahs were allowed to seize our Tehran embassy. Thus, their brothers were emboldened not just to attack our embassies, fighting ships, and armed forces overseas- which they did for two decades- but even mount an attack on American soil itself.

Shelby, a specialist in civil rights and related topics, connects America’s temerity to a legacy of racism; America chooses to lose because it somehow sees winning as damaging to our moral authority.

It is the same mechanism by which securing our borders from unlawful entry is branded racist. It doesn’t matter if Mexico truly abuses its illegals making the crossing from Central America to the United States. Guilt is the legacy of white supremacy.

The man does make a point.

However, Steele’s model places the effect just a couple of decades ahead of the cause. What emerged from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not an unintended consequence of the civil rights movement. It was the rise of multinational corporations.

Contrary to what you have been told, warfare is not good for business- at least not unlimited war. Thus, what had been called the Department of War had to change its name to the Department of Defense. Consequently, the mission changed, too.

The same for illegal immigration: Cheap labor is needed for business here to compete with communist China. Thus, if illegals can no longer be allowed to flood over our borders, Washington will just double, triple, or even quadruple legal entry with the Republican Hagel-Martinez immigration bill.

In order to make the government look tough, Bush will send thousands of National Guardsmen to the Mexican border.

Resisting this nexus of government and global business could put button-down conservatives at the same barricades with the anarchist left- an unholy alliance that Republican politicians fear and Democrats anticipate with glee; a wedge that could finally split Lincoln’s log into smaller and so more easily managed pieces.

However, if a Republican president does not a conservative make, expect nothing less from a Democrat. That party has become the exclusive domain of liberals.

Reality Check Waiting

It is said that time is a healer of all wounds, and certainly that is true for the Mississippi Coast. But it would be better said that time well spent is a healer of all wounds if the Coast is to move affectively toward its new future. There seems to be a lack of real leadership in that those that are so called now, all have clearly evident self interests. If leadership is defined by vision and inclusiveness; those are qualities still absent in our post-Katrina days.

On the local front, a good many people may be fooled by the apparent good news rolling out over the next few months. Waveland has just won a grant from the Clinton-Bush Katrina Fund money machine so Mayor Tommy Longo will have enough funding to cover the 10% FEMA match. And Faith Hill and Tim McGraw will raise perhaps 4 million more badly needed dollars to help small charity efforts with Katrina relief.

Yet, the billions in Federal aid and private insurance said to be raining down on Mississippi has actually very few dollars reaching the ground for those most affected, and what does is wholly inadequate. Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis didn't receive a grant like Waveland just did, and those cities need it just as badly. Then there are those residents struggling to rebuild their homes. Few of them will have the combined insurance and Federal grants pay enough for their coastal homes to be rebuilt to the new FEMA standard.

None the less, as autumn approaches, politicians will stand alongside newspaper publishers (who should otherwise be independently reporting on the former) and jointly announce how wonderful the Coast’s future will be.

Insurance spokesman Bill Bailey suggested some foreknowledge of this future when he told GCN that the rich would be coming and that this would be a good thing for Mississippi.

Could he mean flattened middle class subdivisions will be turned over to condominium developers or collected to form large new estates for the mega-wealthy?

What won’t be said is that this brilliant “coming back” will be at the cost of thousands of foreclosures, if not forced sales; how tens of thousands of native Mississippians will have had to take up new lives in far away states- not by freedom of choice- but because when all was said and done, there was nothing for them to return to.

The loss of homes and businesses on the Coast has still yet to be measured. Taxes on homes and businesses have yet to reflect the loss. The counties have not even begun reassessing property values and taxes, but it is certain that people will balk on paying property taxes on slabs at the same rate as last year. This unknown loss of tax income frightens public officials and it should. What is certain is that it will take several years to sort out. Then watch as property becomes valued at the new, much higher, post-Katrina rate, which could force those that survived the hurricane to move.

Certainly there is new development on the way. Numerous condominiums are in the works for certain areas of the Coast, mostly in Biloxi. But until these new condominiums, private estates and new condos and casinos can be realized, there will simply not be enough tax revenue to keep some governments running - unless they raise taxes, surely a redevelopment hurdle no one wants to cross. Even then, who will pay higher taxes on empty lots? Then the really bad news will hit: So many businesses will not have not returned, so many homes will not have been rebuilt, that some city and county coffers will start going empty.

And if Katrina is but one natural disaster away from being a memory, what do you think will happen if say, a major storm slams into the Carolinas, or New England? Or, God forbid makes landfall again on the Coast? Where will the money come from to rebuild what has yet to be rebuilt?

Be forewarned. This is going to be one long, hot summer.

[Audrey2Katrina]

Dane’s Story – Part 1

From Gulf Coast Network:

The following is a recalling of recent events as they really happened in a little unincorporated town called Clermont Harbor, just on the other side of Waveland, MS after Hurricane Katrina delivered her catastrophic blow to the Gulf Coast. The story is being told by Dane St. Pe, a resident for many years of coastal Mississippi. His story is so powerful, that it cannot be taken in all at once, but is broken up into a three-part inspirational series of stories that shows the true depth and breadth of the human spirit of tough, coastal Mississippians.

By Mark Proulx - Special to GCN Filed 6/3/06

I hope that I can do a good job of expressing these events to you as they actually happened - Dane

The Friday before the storm (Katrina, Aug. 29th, 2005) Dane St. Pe (pronounced Sahn Pay) was in Baton Rouge working on LSU stadium as an electrician. Saturday morning, he had been told by his company in Biloxi to report back to work on Monday. Rather than drive all the way to Biloxi, he stopped in Clermont Harbor, just on the west side of Waveland. Dane lived only a block from the beach and at some point in time figured he should maybe go see if his friend, David, was at his mother and father’s house, about four miles inland. Hearing that this was going to be a big storm, he thought it would be a good idea to get away from the beach, just in case. When he eventually got to his friend’s house, David was getting ready for the storm, taping up the windows and deciding to ride it out alone. His parents had already gone to Florida. Sometime during the day, Dane had remembered his father telling him how people had died during Hurricane Camille (August 17th, 1969) because they had no way of getting out of their attics, so he retrieved an ax and a maul and some other tools…just in case. (Dane St. Pe-photo right)

“The wind was blowing hard Sunday evening and it was raining just as hard. We couldn’t really see much since it was so dark, but we could hear the damage being done in the tree branches snapping off around the house,” remembers Dane. “The really strong hurricane force winds started up around 2:00am. I couldn’t really tell how bad the damage was around the house until early the next morning when the sun came up. I was telling David that this was gonna be bad.”

David hadn’t take Dane seriously up till then but by the time they got up Monday morning, David had gathered the tools up. Around 9:00am, Dane was on the phone with his brother, Lance, who was in a hotel in Shreveport, LA. Dane noticed the water was flooding all over the yard, thinking it was flooding due to the rain the night before, so Dane told his brother that he had to go and needed to move his truck closer to the house.

“That was the last conversation I would ever have with my brother.” Dane moved his truck to the front of the house, and by the time he walked back into the house and looked out the window, the water had suddenly reached the house.

Just then the house phone rang. It was David’s nephew, Eugene, who lived on the property. Dane and David had both thought that he and his wife had left the night before. He told them over the phone that they were headed over to “mama’s house.” Eugene had his wife with him and her eight-month-old baby in a baby carrier with a diaper bag. By the time they got inside, the water had started to seep into the house. Dane told them they needed to get everything they needed into the attic: water, food, batteries, light, candles, radio, and the tools…even had the beer on ice in the attic. He told Eugene to get into the attic with his family and that he and David would stay downstairs.

“How foolish was I! I was standing in the kitchen next to a sliding glass door watching the water come up. When it got to about three feet, the sliding glass doors in the den on the other side of the house broke. When the water hit us, it knocked us off our feet.” The water surprised them even more by rising to four feet of water within ten minutes…and it slowly kept rising. Dane was much taller than David, so when it got to his chest, Dane yelled, “Let’s get in the attic, too!”

“So there I am, sitting there with my feet hanging from the attic. When the water got to my feet, I said, ‘We gotta get on the roof.’” Dane looked at the attic vent at the peak of the roof in the direction he was sitting thinking maybe he could break through there. By mere chance, he turned to look behind him and saw the back of some sheet rock in the form of a square.

“What is that?” Dane asked. Eugene yelled with glee, “That’s Mama’s skylight over her bathtub!” David took a hammer and knocked the sheet rock away, exposing a plastic skylight. By the time they got everyone on the roof, the water was coming into the attic, now about 12 feet high. When Eugene’s wife got onto the roof, she went into hysterics thinking that she and the baby were going to die. Eugene spotted a boat caught in some trees, and assured her that if they had to they would swim to the boat.

“No matter how much we tried to convince her that we were going to be alright, I thought for sure that we were going to die. I mean, we had this much water come up in an hour, and I knew we had six to eight more hours to go. I thought for sure the water would continue to rise.”

According to Dane, he had been called to the ministry, and even spent two years in Bible college in Texas when he was younger, but considered himself a “back sliding Christian” for about six years since his divorce. When all hope seemed lost, he walked to the backside of the house and prayed. Dane said he prayed to the Lord that He could take his life, but that he was not going to watch this young family die.

After a little while, the eye passed us and they were relieved. The storm had subsided and they were hoping against hope that the worst was over. They had thoughts of leaving the house roof…the only problem was, they were surrounded on all sides by water and cut off from the rest of the world. Nobody would be able to rescue them anytime soon. They simply sat and waited. “We got scared again when we noticed that the water had come up about another foot and a half. We didn’t know how much more we were going to get, when it finally stopped rising. When it stopped, I can tell you I let out a big sigh of relief. We felt like were going to live through this after all.” Just about the time they began feeling better, however, the storm started up again….from the other side.

The house had a huge fireplace on the south side at its highest peak. It was one of the round top chimneys, so Eugene slid the diaper bag and cell phones into the side of the chimney. They all sat behind it as the wind picked up and started to howl from the opposite direction. None of them had ever heard wind like that in their lives. They couldn’t see them, but there was no doubt about what was now headed their way - tornadoes. Now scared beyond comprehension, the group huddled together for dear life.

“The wind and roar of the tornadoes were deafening. We practically had to scream at each other to be heard. That big brick chimney protected us from the wind. Somehow, not one piece of debris hit that house. As we watched, we saw huge pine trees snap like toothpicks. Nothing fell near the house, but we got pinged with a pine needle every once in a while.”

During the fever pitch of the backside winds, they saw a cow struggling and swimming by. David tried to call the cow onto the roof, and Dane yelled to leave it alone because it would make the roof collapse. Dane began to reminisce and sharing his stories to the others about what his parents used to tell him about Hurricanes Camille and Betsy, when David – obviously frightened, but trying to lighten the mood– chided, “So……you’ve waited your whole life for this, huh?”

“Up till then, I had ridden out every storm either in Clermont Harbor or on the Westbank, except for Hurricane Eleanor because my mom made us leave.” Well, Dane definitely had one up on his parents!

Around 3:00pm was when the wind and the water changed direction, and the rain really started to come down hard. The water in the yard had been sucked back enough to allow Eugene, his wife and the baby back into the attic for protection from the pelting and stinging drops being shot at them. Only problem was…as fast as that water came up, it got sucked back out...and left a horrifying Gulf muck over everything.

As the water got lower, David and Dane crawled out of the attic and looked out. David’s parents’ Winnebago had gone under water, but since it was locked tight, it was not full of the mud. So they broke into it. Eugene went scavenging for clothes around the neighborhood, and found dry clothes and blankets in the top of a closet in a nearby house on stilts.

When it seemed safe, the rest started to venture out a little. According to Dane, it was eerie seeing what they saw: damaged trees, collapsed houses, mobile homes in the road. They made their way down to the store and saw dogs stranded on the roof of the school. There was a lady who had been bed ridden in the house across the street from the store. They checked on her and found her dead. “We thought that this was the most horrible thing we had ever experienced. Little did we know, it would get much worse.” When they finally got back to the Winnebago, they settled in for the long, dreary night ahead.

“I think that sometime after midnight we heard a bullhorn. It was a guy on a four-wheeler who said he and some others had been trying to get this way, but had been having a tough time clearing the road.” The group turned out to be a bunch of local men with their chain saws and trucks who had obviously escaped being totally flooded out and were now attempting to rescue survivors. Two of these locals, according to Dane, were Hancock County police who had escaped with their lives and who had returned to try and save as many lives as possible in the unincorporated areas of Hancock County. It took them another couple of more hours to cut their way to them because of the huge piles of debris. Getting out was not going to be easy. When they finally broke through, they all piled into a nearby truck that had somehow survived and headed out.

“We headed off toward Ansley to see if we could find more people who needed help,” Dane said. “It was so dark by then and we had no idea what time it was. I decided to stay with the guys in the truck and go to a shelter, but David and the others said they were sick of riding around and were going to walk back and stay in the Winnebago. The police told us that they might evacuate all of Hancock County, so I figured I would see David and them within a couple of days anyway. In the meantime, I had to try to get to a place where I could get in touch with my family to let them know I was okay. The truck took me – and many others - to the Stennis Space Center. When I got there, I couldn’t believe it…they had no communication whatsoever.”

After waiting it out for two days for David and his family, Dane decided to find his way back on foot and look for them. He hitched a ride back to Lakeshore, and when he got back to the house, everyone had already gone. Having no one around, Dane felt the overpowering need to see what was left of Clermont Harbor. As he walked out to the road, a Humvee with some rangers came by and gave him a ride toward Clermont. The military had cleared the road half way down Clermont Boulevard towards the railroad tracks. Not able to travel any further, Dane set out on foot. He climbed over huge piles of trees and destroyed houses just to get to the tracks. As he was climbing up and over a pile of trash to look around, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The town was gone!

“The whole of my childhood memories were gone. The only things that were recognizable were the concrete pillars that stood in front of Garcia’s Grocery. I tried to get to the home I had grown up in, but there was too much debris. It reminded me of photos I had seen of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb. It looked as if a bomb had exploded in a lumberyard. I was numb. I couldn’t think straight. All I could do was walk.”

Dane backtracked to the place where some volunteers were still clearing the road and hitched a ride in a FEMA truck to the Save-a-Center in Waveland, on Highway 90. The flood waters couldn’t begin to prepare Dane for the sea of people there. Dane witnessed people as far as the eye could see all the way around the huge parking lot, standing in line and waiting politely to get water and ice that military trucks were giving out. Unlike the images he later saw on television of the lawlessness in New Orleans, there was no rioting and no arguing– just good Southern people waiting and talking to one another making sure that everyone was okay.

“I am so very proud to be from here. People who had lost everything were conducting themselves with concern for others and with dignity and respect. Everyone cared.”

At least Dane was alive. That was something at least. Sitting there with only the ripped shirt on his back, his head began to clear. The pain of seeing everything he had ever known completely destroyed was slowly being replaced by the big question…..

“Now what do I do?”

In Part Two, Dane makes a life altering decision and his life takes him in a direction he never expected.