posted
Federal Government still paying $350.00 per night for cheap Motel rooms........
Posts: 10729 | From: oregon | Registered: Feb 2005
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we have a lot of people that can't get their insurance companies to cover any of the damage cuz the storm surge came in AFTER the wind knocked everything down...
the MS State legislature is getting involved....
there are a lot of people STILL living in tents in our state.....
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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Our disaster relief crews spent a good deal of time in MS. Actually more time than we did in LA, because there was a greater need.
It really bugs me that the Hollywood types take up the cause for the poor folks in New Orleans while even more are suffering in MS.
-------------------- Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth -- Proverbs 27:1 Posts: 476 | From: East Texas | Registered: Dec 2005
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posted
we are most worried that so many are without a good shelter coming into the next hurricane season...
FEMA trailers will have to be evacuated for even CAT 1's.... and of course anything less is not even safe in the thunderstorms we had today, which were pretty ruff....
-------------------- Don't envy the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise. Posts: 36378 | From: USA | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
52 days til Hurricane season begins. June 1st thru November 30th.
The 2006 Bill Gray Hurricane forecast calls for:
17 named tropical storms; an average season has 9.6. 9 hurricanes compared to the average of 5.9. 5 major hurricanes with winds exceeding 110 mph; average is 2.3.
PS: Notice I have moved out of Florida
-------------------- It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious. Posts: 3311 | From: St. Louis | Registered: Feb 2005
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Updated: 7:38 a.m. ET March 10, 2006 BILOXI, Miss. - On a recent Saturday night, traffic inching toward the 1,100-room Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino backed up for a mile on Interstate 110. Inside, gamblers jammed all 52 tables and 1,900 slot machines on the casino's three burgundy-carpeted floors.
Dickie Doucet, an IP executive host, smiled amid the electronic din of the casino floor, the $15-minimum blackjack tables and the whirl of cocktail waitresses in black skirts. Since reopening Dec. 22, the IP can scarcely find rooms to comp for guests, even on weeknights, he said.
"It's like New Year's Eve every night," Doucet bragged.
Six months after Hurricane Katrina smashed through a fragile necklace of Mississippi coastal towns, the region is enjoying a post-storm boom. Fueled by insurance money, federal reconstruction aid and speculative capital, surviving hotels and restaurants are filled to overflowing, beachfront land prices are soaring, and developers are placing billion-dollar bets that shattered antebellum mansions will give rise to condominium resorts.
The shared sense here is that Mississippi's recovery, while still in its early stages and reliant on continuing outside help, is moving much faster than Louisiana's. Blessed with less damage, more federal aid and greater political clout -- and know-how from past storms -- Mississippi's lightly populated coastline is emerging from chaos, while large parts of the metropolis next door remain a silent, rotting wasteland.
• Special report: Gulf Coast hurricanes
The guarded optimism is tempered by continued human suffering in one of the nation's poorest states, where 36,000 families remain housed in trailers and hundreds more live in plywood barracks and tents in the winter chill. To the west, the smaller towns of Waveland (population 7,100), Bay St. Louis (8,300) and Pass Christian (6,800) remain largely obliterated by Katrina.
‘A long journey’ "It's going to be a long journey -- we know that," said Pass Christian Mayor Billy McDonald, whose beach colony lost every business that generated sales taxes and 75 percent of its housing. Only about 2,000 residents remain. "First, we have to get cleaned up. Then we have to get people to come back. The hard part is in front of us."
But evidence of short-term recovery is everywhere in the cities President Bush visited this week. In Biloxi, a city of 50,000 that lost a quarter of its structures to Katrina, the three casinos that have reopened did $63 million of business in January -- close to the $83 million taken in by the city's nine gambling venues a year ago.
Harrah's Entertainment is building two new casinos at a cost of more than $1 billion. Landry's wants to build a Golden Nugget casino and boardwalk on part of 23 parcels it has bought, and MGM Mirage is pouring $1 billion into its Beau Rivage resort. The city has approved a $500 million Bacaran Bay casino complex.
Brent Warr, mayor of neighboring Gulfport (population 72,000), said the nation's discovery of the area's 26 miles of white-sand beaches has boosted land prices along the devastated shoreline by 50 percent -- between $1 million and $2 million an acre. Investors are also seizing on federal post-storm tax legislation, which lets companies immediately write off half the cost of new investments.
‘FEMA cash’ Sales tax revenue has surged 30 percent ahead of last year's total in Gulfport, the largest city on the Mississippi coast. Contractors in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers caps pack bars each night, and displaced families flock to home-improvement stores and auto dealerships on six-lane U.S. 49, the highway that leads north to Jackson. Doctors such as Philip Hage, 75, are coming out of semi-retirement to treat waiting rooms of patients flush with "FEMA cash."
"I'm jam-packed now, as a matter of fact," said Hage, who hired a fifth assistant after the storm and plans to start rebuilding his 7,000-square-foot house, the largest on Gulfport's east beach before it was swept away by the waters.
Warr, a developer sworn in seven weeks before Katrina hit, has hired New Urbanist architects from Oakland, Calif., to redesign the local banking and retail center into a pedestrian-friendly Dixie Riviera, combining the residential charm of Charleston, S.C., with the resort life of Palm Beach, Fla.
"We want it to be a city that is uniquely Southern and a city that our residents -- who lived here and built it -- still recognize, like and want to live in after it's been redeveloped," said Warr, 42, who envisions new shopping, dining, museums, even an aquarium. "The quality level will step up, but we want to make sure that culturally it addresses what is charming about the South."
In neighboring Biloxi, veteran Mayor A.J. Holloway, 66, expects that casino operators will more than double their pre-Katrina presence of 15,000 jobs and 7,000 hotel rooms in the region, which has been historically reliant on the military, seafood processing and shipbuilding.
"My prediction is . . . within the next 10 or 12 years, Biloxi will be the second casino revenue-producing center in the United States," said Holloway, a 13-year incumbent who has steered a pro-business recovery. "Casino gaming is going to be the economic engine for Biloxi and the Mississippi Gulf Coast."
Posts: 10729 | From: oregon | Registered: Feb 2005
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posted
It's Snowing!!! 'Been doing it all night and a good amount of the DAY!
I live at the beach, inland a little, but this is really strange for this time of year!
When people ask me if I can see the waves? I tell them, I hope not! That would mean a Tidal Wave is coming..lol
Posts: 10729 | From: oregon | Registered: Feb 2005
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