 GCN Recovery News Report
This report will constantly be
updated as information becomes available
Father Dennis Carver, pastor of Holy Family Parish, Pass Christian, announced Aug. 17, plans to demolish the former St. Paul church structure situated along the beach in Pass Christian. The structure was severely damaged by Katrina August 29, 2005. Father Carver noted that refurbishing the existing A-frame steel structure was not considered an option due to structural problems discovered by engineers who inspected the building, leaving demolition as the remaining and most reasonable course of action. (More Here)
Gulfport's Katrina damaged fire station No. 7 near the
beach
at Cowan Lorraine Road has been without walls since August 29, 2005
when hurricane Katrina slammed into the Coast. The storm severely
damaged the building and efforts to get it rebuilt have moved slowly since
then. Earlier this year, Gulfport spokesman Ryan LaFontaine
said the city was finally in a position to move forward to rebuild the
building at a slightly different location and
relocated to a parcel directly north of Pass Christian's new City Hall has reopened. The original was destroyed by Katrina nearly five years ago. The city's Water Department is also moving in to the 8,000 square foot building. Pass Christian was severely impacted by Katrina which destroyed all of the city's governmental buildings. The city's government has been operating out of trailers since the 2005 hurricane
The work is a follow up to a city project that began in 2007, when the city’s Community Development Department used contour and high-water marks provided by FEMA to create a list of Katrina water marks at high-traffic locations. (More Here) Biloxi contractors have began a 120-day, $187,000
project that will see the restoration of Guice Park, the site of the USS
Biloxi mast and other war-related markers on U.S. 90 at the Biloxi Small
Craft Harbor. Chuck Collins of J.O. Collins Contracting – the Biloxi
firm that has restored the Biloxi Lighthouse and White House fountain
and is wrapping up Costs for Katrina recovery in Bay St. Louis is rising, reports the Sea Coast Echo. The costs for a variety of projects involved in the recovery are up due to change orders by contractors working on hurricane infrastructure repairs and renovations to the city sports complex. (More here) Tremendous progress is being made across the Coast region in Katrina recovery issues. Work on new public buildings such as new City Halls in Long Beach, Pass Christian, D'Iberville are not far from finishing. Many other public projects are also well underway. There is the new Biloxi Library and the huge new welcome center that should be finished by next year. There is also considerable work underway underground as utilities that were damaged or destroyed by Katrina are fixed. Cities across the Coast are also clearing the last remaining structures that were left damaged by Katrina from high visibility areas along the beachfront and within neighborhoods. Still there is much left to be done. Unfortunately, while dilapidated buildings and houses have been removed, very little new is going back in. In east Biloxi, once crowded neighborhoods are open lots. And much of the beachfront, where stores, motels and apartments once stood are still empty lots. While the slabs and broken buildings are gone, it is clear that high insurance costs and the depressed national economy are sharply slowing rebuilding. But there is some, and there is hope in that. The Coast still has a growing population but many folks in the former beach-area neighborhoods have moved inland, many to new neighborhoods built since Katrina. There is enormous progress though everywhere you look, but still much to be done. For example, in the Biloxi beachfront neighborhoods that survived, sidewalks are still broken and even missing from the heavy debris equipment that moved through the area after Katrina. And many neighborhood streets have the scars of front-end loaders that took a portion of the road along with the debris from the 2005 hurricane.
Then
there are the harbors, all of which are still getting repaired, from
Biloxi to Bay St Louis. It seems the work to repair and rebuild much of
the infrastructure is still moving too slow.
Some good news from Biloxi is that it's historic lighthouse has been completely renovated. Built in the mid 1800's, the lighthouse has weathered every hurricane since its construction, but Katrina was particularly hard on the steel and brick structure. Biloxi also recently completed repairs to the White House fountain. But in every community on the Coast, there remain real scars of Katrina, both in the absence of what was once part of the community, and in the hearts of residents.
The New Orleans Times Picayune reports four years and five months after its creation by President George W. Bush, the federal agency charged with coordinating Gulf Coast rebuilding efforts went out of business on March 31. The White House said Tuesday that President Barack Obama, who twice extended the life of the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast Rebuilding, remains committed to the recovery effort. The decision to eliminate the office, administration officials said, was made, in large part, because federal agencies are now working in a more coordinated fashion on recovery issues, something that became a major issue in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. State officials agreed that the office is no longer needed to cut through the red tape that plagued recovery issues in the months after the storms. (More Here)
The Mississippi Development
Authority Disaster Recovery Division (MDA DRD) and the Gulf Coast
Housing Resource Centers have launched an online listing of all
available affordable rental units provided through MDA’s Small Rental
Assistance Program (SRAP), Public Housing Assistance and Long Term
Workforce Housing (LTWH) programs. Biloxi saw nearly 4,000 lots cleared of code issues last year, mostly property that saw damages from Katrina. This was more than the number cleared in 2007 and 2008 combined, and permits for new homes jumped to 271 last year, almost triple the number issued in each year since the storm, thanks to a new development in Woolmarket. "We're just doing our jobs, to
be honest," said Biloxi Community Development Director Jerry Creel.
"It's like I've always said, there's a lot going on in Biloxi, whether
it's new home construction, new businesses opening, or property owners
taking action to clear up their property. The difference in Biloxi is
that it's not all in one concentrated place, which means you see growth
in different pockets throughout the city." The impressive numbers on
code enforcement and housing are included in a series of economic and
community indicators that
was included in the "State of the City" report,
Sears Automotive Center has its Grand Openings at Edgewater Mall late February. The new store is a $2 million, state-of-the-art automotive center covering 14,000 square feet. The store actually had a soft opening a week earlier. The new store sits on the same, pre-Katrina footprint but has new design. The Sears Automotive store had been closed since Katrina severely damaged the earlier structure on August 29, 2005. Since this past summer, all the Coast has been watching the progress of the restoration of Biloxi's historic lighthouse. The historic lighthouse was operational after Katrina, but the light was temporarily extinguished for the restoration to take place. A $400,000 restoration project on the lighthouse was
completed in February and in a
ceremony, February 19 the lighthouse was relit. The Biloxi lighthouse
had become of symbol of the Coast's recovery effort becoming with its
image being placed on U.S. Postal Service Stamp and on Mississippi
license plates. (More
Here)
The Mississippi Development Authority Disaster Recovery Division’s (MDA DRD) Small Rental Assistance Program (SRAP) has completed and received certificates of occupancy for more than 2,000 small rental units in less than two years, halfway to SRAP’s projected 4,000 unit goal. SRAP, along with the state’s Long Term Workforce Housing and Public Housing Assistance programs, represents almost $1 billion committed by Governor Haley Barbour to build or rehabilitate affordable housing throughout the Coastal counties impacted by Hurricane Katrina. (More Here) Biloxi city contractors have
begun in work on 11 sections
of roads and sidewalks, and expect to have the $922,000 federally-funded
project completed in about 100 days.
"Obviously, this has been a time-consuming process to get to this point," said City Engineer Damon Torricelli. "The biggest chore was for an engineering firm, Neel-Schaffer, to identify what was where before the storm, and then design the replacement infrastructure. After that, we went to MDOT to help with the funding. To be honest, the actual construction should be the quickest part of the entire process." Bay St. Louis announced recently that their Katrina-damaged Beach Drive is now restored. The road was nearly destroyed by Katrina in 2005. Work continues at mid-July on Pass Christian's Police station. Katrina destroyed every municipal building in the small city west of Gulfport in 2005.
Biloxi has begun a huge $356 million reconstruction project that will repair, restore and fix every street and pipes flooded by Katrina. Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway (photo left) described the project and the restoration work in the city as marking the "end of the beginning," during the mayor's State of the City report in January. (More Here) In Gulfport, Mayor George Schloegel's administration is trying hard
to put hurricane Katrina in the past. The mayor said he is stepping up
code enforcement to force property owners with derelict property to clean
up and restore their land. To that
end, the city sent a final notice
within water bills of problem properties, or the property owners will face
prosecution in the city's recently formed (GCN Photo right: Mayor George Schloegel) Warr pleaded guilty of federal Katrina fraud this past August and had not sought re-election. He had served only one term. The audience listened attentively to Schloegel's speech, applauding occasionally, but Schloegel's speech was not a feel-good moment. Said Schloegel, "The work that lies ahead will be difficult, the challenges will be daunting, but the future does not belong to the timid; it belongs to the brave. None of this will come without a cost. Nor will it be easy." (More Here) Biloxi relocated the 1800's era Slay House in January saving another piece of Biloxi's history from Katrina. The so-called Slay House, an historic structure on the corner of Reynoir and Jackson streets south of Biloxi Regional Medical Center, According to the city book “The Buildings of Biloxi: An Architectural Survey,” the home was built between 1893 and 1898. Its uniqueness – it's one of only two of this style in the city – is the bracketed overhang across the main façade.
“Such overhangs,” according to “Buildings of Biloxi,” “are numerous in New Orleans, but this is one of two extant examples in Biloxi.” (More Here)
GulfCoastNews.com received a prestigious award during the Online News Association annual meeting held in Washington, Oct. 6-8, 2006. During award ceremonies Oct. 8, GCN received the ONA Excellence in Service Journalism Award for small websites for its GCN Survivor Connector Database. "This is truly a deep honor," said Keith Burton, GCN's owner and editor. "The GCN database was created to help people that were relocated from evacuations during Hurricane Katrina, but I never realized at the time how it would help so many people." (More Here)
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A Biloxi Public Works crew has been
updating the so-called K-lines throughout the
city, the foot-wide blue lines on more than 70
utility poles that provide quiet reminders of the height of the Katrina
storm surge.
(Photo Right: Arrow points to marker on
telephone pole)
restoration of Biloxi City Hall – said the park
project will involved erecting a huge tarp over the 35- to 40-foot tall
USS Biloxi mast to allow workers to remove paint. (
an
annual follow-up to Mayor A.J. Holloway's annual State of the City
address. The 16-page report, due out in April, will update an array of
city recovery and rebuilding efforts. (
Contractor B&B Electrical and Utility Contractors is working on four
areas initially, where more than 400 lights will be installed overall. B&B
is also working on an additional phase of the lighting, which involves seven
areas and 200 lights. That project was expected to by completed by July,
but the work by mid-August has yet to be finished.
A
new City Hall and Jeff Davis Avenue in downtown Long Beach is also showing
progress. The city's main thoroughfare from the beach U.S. 90 was
completely wiped out in 2005.
Environmental Court. Former Gulfport Mayor Brent Warr and his
wife Laura attended the speech. Schloegel said that, "Gulfport owes a deep
debt of gratitude to Mayor Warr and the previous city council for the
laying the groundwork for the successful rebuilding of Gulfport..."