We Feel Your Pain
…since no one’s remembered a little number named Ivan, either. Witness how we were left out of the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act. Bangla-cola might as well be in Asia.
Many on Miss. Coast Feel Overshadowed
GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) — Nicki Henderson has had plenty of reasons to be angry since Hurricane Katrina destroyed her Biloxi home, but it was a simple news item about dislocated dolphins that really made her blood boil.
Henderson lost her temper when she logged on to her computer and spotted this headline: “New Orleans Dolphins Find New Home.” She knew the dolphins actually came from a hurricane-ravaged marine park in Gulfport, not New Orleans.
The headline writer’s error reinforced her belief – shared by many on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast – that New Orleans has gotten a disproportionate share of the news coverage and the nation’s attention in the aftermath of the storm, now more than four months gone.
Unfortunately, all I can tell her is get used to it. If you think it s*cks now, try along about next December. The collective consciousness will be lucky if they can remember Mississippi’s a state, less mind what happened in Gulfport/Biloxi.
Welcome to our world.
Media | Mr. Bingley | 
January 16, 2006 5:06 pm
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Maybe you guys are not acting entitled enough… you know? Not acting enough as if the world owes you something?
Or maybe because Sean Penn’s little zodiac with the 15 HP Johnson outboard couldn’t float on anything in Bangla-cola and therefore not avail him of many photo ops?
I have family on Kauai which was trashed by Iniki in 1992. But it happened about 3 weeks after Andrew, so no one remembers. It was a beast. And although its damages only amounted to a paltry $3-4 billion, the physical damage to the island itself (forests, etc.) was not measurable. That’s a lot of damage for not a lot of island.
Charley, anyone? Did you know they were trying desperately to drag people in Port Charlotte out of FEMA trailers that they were still living in (a year later) to get those trailers moved over to New Orleans?
We also share the pain. (And, btw, I’m also in Lee County, the county immediately south of Charlotte County ) and we got PLENTY of damage, and very little mention, so I know how she feels on that score, too.
Exact same thing here, Kathy. Only you have a bigger advantage not being as close to New Orleans as we are. They might be trying to knock those poor folks out of trailers there, but here they’re taking housing that just became available and knocking OUR trailer folks-waitin’-on-a-home off a waiting list they’ve been on for over a YEAR.
Honest to God, I feel for those folks, but that they’re not getting it fixed NOW? When there’s a state full of suffering just to the right of Alabama? Like the ABCEvening News report a couple days ago, about the ‘bureaucratic snafus’ that kept Katrina folks out of 7000 homes the VA had empty because of defaulted mortages. By the time they got it squared away, there were only 2000 left. HelLO? Where was the VA after Ivan or Charley, then, huh? No one was talking to anyone in Bangla-cola about using abandoned houses for our folks this past year. And this is a big military/retiree town, so I’m DAMN SURE there’s more than a couple floating around we could’ve used. Even if just for the 18 months they were lending them out for.
On the plus side, the more attention that hits New Orleans, the harder it is for Ray “Out of His” Nagin to hide his tongue.