A March 10 article on Mississippi's recovery from Hurricane Katrina referred to the IP Hotel and Casino Biloxi, which was renamed in December, by its former name, the Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino.
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Mississippi's Reversal of Fortune
Roulette dealer Thu-Ha Nguyen spins the wheel for, from left, Carlos Church, Anne Browne and Rosa Johnson last month at the Imperial Palace in Biloxi.
(By James Edward Bates -- Biloxi Sun Herald)
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In New Orleans, only about 34 percent of residents in the city of 460,000 are back and drawing power. Temporary housing is available to about half the 98,000 families who need it to return to the region and rebuild, and FEMA maps were not due until this month at the earliest, paralyzing homeowners, city planners and lenders.
Although Katrina crushed Mississippi, driving floodwaters as far as 10 miles inland and dragging structures within a quarter-mile of the beach into the Gulf of Mexico, water subsided in a few hours.
In New Orleans, by contrast, the contaminated water and mud of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River flooded dozens of square miles of urban and suburban neighborhoods for weeks last year, doing much greater damage.
New Orleans's below-sea-level status has also required agreement on multibillion-dollar levee-restoration projects before rebuilding plans can proceed. And the complexity of leading a city that is generally older, poorer and more dependent on outside aid -- and more divided racially and politically -- has slowed New Orleans's recovery.
While officials in politically conservative Mississippi say proudly that small cities and counties are pulling themselves up, much as they did after Hurricane Camille in 1969, the state's powerful GOP leadership has also secured a disproportionate share of aid compared with each state's share of lost housing.
Former Republican National Committee chairman Barbour, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran (R), former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R) and Rep. Gene Taylor (D) enjoy staunch support for their efforts, which helped limit Louisiana's share of $11.5 billion in federal Community Development Block Grant funds for rebuilding homes to 54 percent. (Bush has asked for $4.2 billion more for Louisiana.)
Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) said his state's crisis is simply bigger and more complex, but he acknowledged being "impressed" that Mississippi moved faster to develop state and local rebuilding plans and took care in making its case to Congress.
"There is a lot of anxiety that things haven't happened as quickly," Jindal said. "Certainly we are learning from their example."
