Cliff Keeler

Kurt Olsen, Pascagoula, Mississippi stood near the skeleton of his Katrina shelled house. Its gutted frame, incongruously elevated on temporary 10-foot high wooden pillars, loomed over us in the background as he related a post-Katrina “carpetbag” story. It mirrors, in one form or another, tens of thousands, or more, of other ripped-off Gulf Coast residents struggling against almost insurmountable odds to recover their “American Dream” after 2005’s murderous hurricane season.

Olsen is employed by Northrop-Grumman shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi. His employer is a large naval manufacturing facility that currently builds U.S. Navy military vessels under very lucrative contracts. They are Mississippi’s largest employer providing stable jobs with excellent income potential for their employees. Yet, Olsen’s paycheck has not provided the cashflow necessary to buy his family’s quality of life back since Katrina took it away August 29, 2005.

FEMA provided a small trailer for his wife and three school age children to live in – temporarily. They also provided his oldest son, who left home previously and also works for Northrop-Grumman, a trailer as well. Mr. and Mrs. Olsen allowed him to place it on the lot the family home formerly occupied next to the FEMA trailer sheltering the rest of the family. For the time being, they all had shelter, jobs and each other. Things went rapidly downhill from there.

To compound the economic pressures that began to weigh his family down, an 18-year old daughter, four months pregnant, was tragically killed in a local traffic accident within weeks after the storm devastated the area.

His insurance company denied the damage claim on the family’s house stating that the destruction was caused by flooding due to the storm’s gale-force winds driving an initial surge of up to 27 feet of seawater when Katrina charged ashore. The surge penetrated generally six miles inland along the entire Mississippi Gulf Coast and up to twelve miles inland along bayous, inlets and riverine systems. Mississippi officials calculated that 90% of homes within a half mile of its coastline were utterly destroyed by Katrina. Not solely by gale force winds, but by a wall of water driven with battering-ram force by Category 3 hurricane winds that downsized from Category 5 just before landfall - reportedly among the strongest in recorded history - and wreaked destruction 100-miles-plus either side of its eye when making landfall near the Louisiana/Mississippi border.

In addition to the initial surge, 35 to 55 foot tall seawaves crashed ashore behind the surge.

Olsen in due course contacted his bank and discovered they had imposed a small amount of flood coverage on his mortgage lien. He collected $28,500 from that policy on a house and lot formerly valued in the vicinity of $200,000. Because he collected minimal insurance funds, he was denied any Federal FEMA disaster funds. If they had paid him, the most he stood to recover from the latter was $10,000.

Olsen was fortunate in one respect - sort of. He only had $4,000 remaining against his old mortgage. Money from the token insurance settlement paid the latter off. There are reportedly millions of other Gulf Coast residents whose mortgages on ruined homes run to hundreds of thousands of dollars each of uninsured debt. New mortgages incurred, when and if homeowners rebuild, are stacked on top of the site’s original mortgage debt. Additionally, regardless whether Gulf Coast homeowners rebuild or not, mortgages on ruined or destroyed homes are not forgiven by the lenders.

Olsen signed a contract June 2006 with a contractor to start the rebuilding process. The contractor required $30,000 out front. Olsen borrowed money from savings to add to what was left of the small insurance payment to satisfy the contractor’s retainer.

As shown in the above image, the contractor raised Olsen’s house on temporary piers but since then ceased all work. Olsen stated he hasn’t seen or heard from the contractor since August 2006. He also hasn’t seen the surplus money paid the contractor beyond the estimated $6000 cost to raise the structure off the ground. Former employees of the “carpetbag” contractor that raised Olsen’s house have since knocked on his door asking him to make good wages that the contractor alledgedly never paid.

Updated local building codes, driven by adjusted insurance regulations as a result of Katrina’s massive surge, now require certain houses to be raised to specific heights determined by the structure’s proximity to the gulf’s shoreline. Interestingly enough, the shelled house just beyond Olsen’s was advertised for sale with a notation on the FSBO sign (For Sale By Owner) that it didn’t have to be raised. David Kilbern, our host, just shrugged when I asked for an explanation.

David Kilbern, Pascagoula local businessman and local Disaster Recovery Team coordinator (Operations Director) through the auspices of Pascagoula’s Central Church of Christ (www.123jesus.com) stated that Olsen’s story was just one of millions of similar ones throughout the Gulf Coast. Since the week after Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, Kilbern claims to have collected and disbursed more than $10,000,000, from August 29, 2005 through March 4, 2007, in donations for disaster recovery efforts in Pascagoula.

The donations came, for the most part, in the form of food, goods, clothing, building materials, ice, fuel and cash. Kilbern stated that all monetary funds were channeled through local Central Church of Christ’s disaster account. The day of this interview, his pastor had just informed him they were down to their last $5000 in the church’s disaster recovery fund.

Kilbern described securing the first donated pickup load of groceries several days after Katrina. He stated, “Within thirty minutes it was all gone. People grabbed anything they could get as fast as they could lay hands on it. Didn’t matter what station in life they held before the storm. They were all equal when grabbing for packages out of that truck. None of them had anything left except what they could lay their hands on and claim for their families. The storm took everything they had. No matter who they were - laborer, lawyer, banker - no matter who they were, everything they once had was virtually gone.”

Kilbern stated his church quickly initiated a disaster recovery program administered by him. In a matter of days, the church was securing and delivering meat and ice to 1500-2000 people a day. “We delivered M.R.E.s (Meals Ready to Eat) to houses because no one - absolutely no one - had vehicles to come and get them.” He and a friend started volunteering to sheet-rock previously gutted homes with material secured through donations to the local Central Church of Christ.

A national volunteer response also gradually gathered steam through websites such as www.disasternews.net. Kilbern and various other community volunteer organizations worked through numerous Gulf Coast church affiliations to connect with volunteer organizations scattered across the nation. Churches, college groups, church sponsored youth groups and hosts of additional volunteer groups from the nation’s private sector signed on to visit the Gulf Coast and contribute skilled and unskilled labor to help gulf residents rebuild. The dining hall’s ceiling, where our volunteer crews were fed, was checkerboarded with tiles featuring logos of all the teams that visited ahead of us.

Kilbern’s church endeavors to coordinate the purchase of building materials with either FEMA state awarded grant money and donated funds or materials with the scheduled arrival of Disaster Recovery Teams who book their trip to Pascagoula in advance through his Central Church of Christ. Three meals a day and a bunkhouse were provided for our recovery teams.

It should be noted other church affiliations throughout the Gulf Coast conduct similar volunteer efforts. Kilbern emphasised, “The arrival of a skilled Disaster Recovery Team goes through an average of about $10,000 worth of material a week. This doesn’t include the cost of the kitchen rental and food dispensed to feed all the volunteer crews.”

Kilbern stated he contributed $15,000 from his personal savings the week our Missouri UCC delegations visited to buy enough materials to keep those teams working. He put out a desperate call for additional funds to continue helping Pascagoula residents rebuild. He estimated that, two years after Katrina, 40% of the area’s 13,000 homes still needed work. He added, “It takes about $30,000 average in materials applied with volunteer labor to reestablish a Pascagoula average home site.” He emphasized that these home-sites belonged to middle or below average income families – ones that usually had the least insured protection from Katrina’s ravages.

Kilbern is highly and warmly regarded by many we talked to while there. His seemingly untiring efforts to help his neighbors rebuild their lives has endeared him and his family to displaced residents they have so unselfishly assisted - time after time since August 29, 2005.

Dale Lenger, Hartsburg, Missouri, (lengerd@missouri.edu) initially started a Disaster Recovery Team sponsored by his Peace United Church of Christ to repay the public for the volunteer help Hartsburg residents received after a devastating 1993 Missouri River flood. It virtually washed the entire community away. He stated, “It took till 1994 to rebuild Hartsburg. In 1995, a number of us felt the need to repay the public’s generosity that eventually put our town back on the map. We went to Newton, Georgia that year to help rebuild a flooded area there. For the most part, they were impoverished people – no money – no insurance. We’ve gone someplace we were needed every year since.”

Lenger also recruited other churches to consider responding in kind. Spurred initially by Lenger’s encouragement, Jefferson City, Missouri’s Central United Church of Christ recently made a third annual trip to Florida and Mississippi hurricane damaged areas this last March. Springfield, Missouri’s St. John’s Chapel United Church of Christ made their first trip this year. Brazito, Missouri’s Friedans UCC have partnered with Hartsburg’s Peace UCC virtually from Lenger’s conceptualization of this volunteer effort.

All four of these Missouri UCC groups teamed up as a unit to caravan to Pascagoula during March of this year. Twenty six volunteers from the four locations spent a week helping Pascagoula residents get a portion of their quality of life back. The group included professional carpenters, electricians, roofers, sheet rockers, white collar and blue collar “journeymen,” in addition to women in their 60s and 70s that painted doors, trim and walls eight hours a day minimum so volunteer carpenters and electricians could work nonstop at their skills.

Pastor Becky Hebert led her St. John’s Chapel UCC Springfield, Missouri group. Larry Long, retired Missouri State Highway Patrolman, unofficially captained the Central UCC Jefferson City, Missouri group. Dale Lenger and Biff Barner (the latter is Long’s son-in-law and husband of Brazito’s UCC Pastor Carol Barner) led the crews from Hartsburg’s Peace UCC and Brazito, Missouri’s Friedans UCC.

All the groups took their own tools, ladders, compressors and personal supplies in three self contained trailers and a total of six vehicles. The various Missouri churches and the volunteers themselves paid the caravan’s travel, food and lodging expenses while enroute to and from Pascagoula.

On arrival, Kilbern furnished the group’s chief “gofer,” Springfield’s Lee Bartell, a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center credit card and a loaner pickup to secure material at the local Lowe’s as the various groups furnished Bartell lists of material needed to complete projects on the homes Kilbern assigned the groups.

I was part of the Jefferson City Central UCC group when not filming and interviewing people for this posting. They worked on the house Sharon Colle was helping her family rebuild for her widowed 87-year old mother, Mrs. Gandy. She and her sisters determined to get their mother’s life back as close as possible to how she enjoyed it pre-Katrina. The family’s matriarch temporarily resides in a nearby nursing home facility while work progresses getting her house habitable. Additionally, she fights valiantly against severe disabilities caused by rheumatoid arthritus as well as the onset of Alzheimers.

The Gandy family portrait, posed in a room filled with construction clutter, is where Sharon recalled in our interview that the family celebrated holidays and various family functions for many years. The people in the portrait include the elderly mother’s three daughters and a son-in-law.

FEMA contributed a small grant of money to address damages to the house but reduced it by the amount of an even smaller payment of insurance paid for damage to a garden shed in back of the house. Conversely, the insurance company disavowed any responsibility for damage to the actual house. They denied the house claim stating the policy didn’t cover wind generated flood damage. Fema did loan a trailer for temporary living quarters.

Sharon Colle stated, “My husband and I lost our home. Mother suffered her loss here. It was virtually overwhelming. Sometimes the personal pressures seemed impossible to cope with. My husband and I are not together for now. The storm damaged far more than just material things. I finally came to the realization that this problem was more than I could cope with alone. I prayed fervently for help and turned the problem entirely over to Him. Virtually the next day your groups showed up. We feel extremely blessed with the solutions our prayers brought us upon your groups’ arrival.”

At times workers from all four groups of our caravan swarmed over the Gandy house like a colony of two-legged ants. Our goal was to see it ready for habitation before we left. We eventually came up several days short of accomplishing that. It was difficult to accept that fact when time to leave.

The excitement written on the family’s faces as the work proceeds, and they see their homes regenerating in front of their eyes, infuses the same enthusiasm mirrored in their faces into the hearts and souls of the volunteers. The motivation to see these people migrate back into their dwellings from nearby oversized-closets called FEMA trailers becomes all powerful - a singular goal fueling the engine driving the entire team of volunteers. This is why they came in the first place.

Yet, to keep these individual stories in proper perspective, stories like the Gandy/Colle family’s represents just one heart-wrenching tale amongst literally millions of others similar to any one singular situation. Any Gulf Coast resident residing there when Katrina hit August 29, 2005 has a similar tale to tell. Many, far too many, live tenuous existences today crammed into borrowed living quarters (mostly FEMA trailers) unless they benefited from an almost unheard of, for the most part, cooperation from an insurance company. FEMA disaster assistance funds usually maxed for any one grant in the vicinity of $10,000 per grant. Beyond the loan of a FEMA trailer, those limited funds cannot rebuild the overwhelming burden of damaged coastal residences and put homeless gulf residents back in their homes without significant volunteer assistance.

There were reports of homeless families in Pascagoula that never received a FEMA trailer nor a state dispensed Federal FEMA grant. If a homeowner was not able to afford property insurance of any kind prior to Katrina, alledgedly, the state denied dispensing them Federal FEMA grant money. Reportedly, that often influenced whether a FEMA trailer was loaned such disenfranchised homeless storm victims. It was also reported that even when a FEMA trailer was initially brought to a site and hooked up to live in, many times it took three to four months before authorities turned the keys over to the storm victims.

Last June, Hope, Arkansas, boyhood home of Bill Clinton, displayed several thousands of new unlived-in empty FEMA trailers parked shoulder to shoulder at the airport grounds there. The local explanation at that time was they were not needed and were being stored there temporarily.

New Orleans got the most hype in the national media during the storm’s aftermath. While those people’s sufferings should not be regarded lightly, conversely, the rest of the Gulf Coast area impacted by the storm was just as devastated physically and is being forced to make do on much less than was financially accorded New Orleans whether from the nation’s corporate insurance sector or from Federal government disaster relief funds.

The entire Gulf Coast from Central Louisiana to Florida was flooded by Katrina – not just New Orleans. The main difference in the flooding of different areas of the coast, if in the final analysis there is any significant difference in resultant damage, was the length of time the floodwaters remained out of bounds.

Only New Orleans was built below sea level. While flood water devastated the latter city for an extended period, the storm’s battering ram surge of water at landfall along the entire Mississippi coast reached as far as 12 miles inland. That intrusion of water caused, proportionately, the same displacement and homelessness along the entire Gulf Coast as was inflicted in New Orleans.

This latter story has not being adequately aired in the national news media.

The Hartsburg/Brazito UCC crew worked on a variety of additional Pascagoula homes. Dorothy Powe struggled to rebuild her 100-year old wheel-chair-bound father’s house. Tom Walley and Dorothy currently live in an oversized FEMA-closet next door to Walley’s devastated house.

Material gutted from its interior was piled in a small mountain of debris at curb side while a virtual stream of new material was unloaded and carted inside after the Hartsburg and Brazito crews arrived. Sheet rock started going up while electricians finished stringing wire, connected breaker switches, repaired and replaced wall studs and shored up a damaged foundation - all seemingly at the same time. Volunteers swarmed all over the Walley building helping install $10,000 worth of material - all the money that FEMA awarded Tom Walley to get his life back - once again, - no insurance funds.

We went out one night, after showers, to an outstanding seafood buffet at Biloxi’s Isle of Capri Casino. Our waitress, upon discovering why we were in the area, told us her story. Attractive, displaying a poised conservative demeanor, Violet looked to be in her 50s – a young 50 at that - teeth perfectly crowned, a well educated bearing about her. She didn’t fit the mold of the job she filled.

She now lives in a FEMA trailer on the lot where her former home once stood. Immediately after the home disappeared, so did her husband. She struggled to control her emotions at one point when relating her story. Tragic as Violet’s tale is, it is just one of millions of others – all virtually as tragic as her’s.

People like Sharon Colle and Kurt Olsen have decent paying jobs involved with maritime industries that are employment’s backbone in that Gulf Coast area. Sharon helps with fleeting of tugboats and barges operating in the Pascagoula Bay area. However, while their cash flow might have stayed the same as before Katrina, it isn’t enough, in millions of cases similar to theirs, to get most other people’s lives and homes back without creative assistance.

For example, a homeowner that lost a $200,000 house with $175,000 still owing on the mortgage still has a $175,000 mortgage. Rebuilding adds a new mortgage on top of the $175,000 still remaining on the old one. The debt service is now effectivelyalmost twice what it was before Katrina because of the virtual abdication of responsibility by the private insurance sector and, additionally, a disgracefully limited, and often arbitrary, Federal disaster financial response.

Kilbern stated that private lenders were forbidden by Federal mandate to foreclose on properties in arrears until October 1, 2007. After that, the hammer can fall. In the meantime, carpetbagger copycats paralleling those depicted in post civil war history have returned to the South as evidenced by the Olsen debacle.

If you ever visited a third world country, you saw cultures living their lives the way countless ancestors before them lived. In Zimbabwe’s Zambezi River’s bush, I saw indigent people living a completely subsistence life style wrestling out a daily living with nothing but what their hands produced.

They didn’t know what they didn’t have.

The faces I saw in Mississippi this March, and last June in Louisiana, reflected what those people remember they once had and, as it stands now, for many, their American Dream is virtually lost. It is nothing short of what the rest of us claim as our American heritage – something often referred to as the “American Dream.” Virtually the only major solution to the ongoing Gulf regeneration problem has sprung from a growing nationwide cross-denominatinal volunteer response to the desperate needs of our neighbors to the South.

Another night our group ate out at a highly recommended seafood restaurant in D’Iberville, Mississippi. We met two other recovery groups similar to ours dining in that somewhat out of the way location that evening. The U.C.C. Disaster Recovery Team’s group leaders from Laconia, New Hampshire, Rev. Dave Williams (Ret.) and Emily Clement, as co-leaders, greeted our group as did Mr. Wally Strauch.

In the following exchange, it was discovered that Pastor Rev. Gary Schulte, who migrated from near-to-home California, Missouri to New Hampshire, was connected with this group of volunteers. He is well known by many of the Jefferson City entourage. Rev. Schulte also now sits on the National Council of UCC. Another example of how small, (or, possibly, how big in this case) the world can be at times.

The New Hampshire volunteer group was hosted in Biloxi by the local Back Bay Mission organization. Volunteer teams wishing to work in the Biloxi community can visit www.backbaymission.com for more information on booking disaster recovery teams there.

Another Disaster Recovery Team’s group occupied an additional long-table in that same restaurant that evening. They were from Buies Creek First Baptist Church, North Carolina. Gene Lewis from that group related how Gulf Port, Mississippi turned the city’s local armory over to an association of Baptist churches affiliated as North Carolina Baptist Men (www.ncmissions.org). The group built sleeping, cooking and bath facilities in the armory to house revolving North Carolina volunteer Baptist teams.

Figures provided by Lewis magnified the scope of their overall effort far beyond just rebuilding homes. Between September 5, 2005 and February 28, 2007 the NC Baptist Men’s group lays claim to 129,546 volunteer days, 497,886 meals provided, 2300 total mud/tearout jobs completed, 500+ total rebuild jobs completed, and 200+ rebuild jobs in progress. Access their web site at: www.ncmissions.org.

Never has this country experienced the magnitude of destruction and upheaval of so many lives as Katrina and Rita alone inflicted during the hurricane season of 2005. In effect, those horrible storms created a third world country on our gulf shore. Corporate insurance companies for the most part have shamefully walked away from responsibility to policy holders in the storm damaged areas. State and Federal governments have certainly not done all they could, and should have, to help struggling taxpaying citizens, afflicted by these storms, get their lives and homes back.

A wide variety of church affiliated denominations’ volunteers from all over the U.S. and some from Canada are contributing the lion’s share of labor to fuel the entire reconstruction effort focused on the Gulf’s private sector. This outstanding, ecumenical national volunteer movement has generated a life of its own. It is one of the largest, and possibly the most unselfish, national volunteer response to a natural disaster of an unparalleled scale in this nation’s history.

A recent quote by Mary Beth Senkewicz, former Sr. Executive of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners recently summed up the nation’s corporate insurance companies lack of addressing the horrendous Gulf situation. She stated, “The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims. They’ll do anything to avoid paying because if they wait long enough, they know the policy holders will die.”

Our Gulf Coast citizens deserve a better chance at a more legitimate obituary.

Disaster Recovery Missions Information:

For information to target a gulf community to take a volunteer team to on a Disaster Recovery Mission, you might find the following helpful:

* This website is used to organize Gulf Coast disaster team efforts in advance: www.disasternews.net.

*For information organizing Missouri disaster recovery teams, Dale Lenger, Hartsburg, Missouri’s email is: lengerd@missouri.edu

*To contact the Biloxi, Mississippi area directly to organize disaster-recovery-teams Biloxi-visits contact web site: www.backbaymission.com.

*Central Church of Christ’s web site in Pascagoula : www.123jesus.com. Pascagoula, Mississippi’s Central Church of Christ’s contact is Pastor John Dobbs.

* David Kilbern’s Pascagoula, Mississippi email is: dkilbern@cableone.net

*North Carolina disaster recovery mission groups contact: www.ncmissions.org.

*North Carolina Baptist mission efforts with disaster recovery teams go to: www.baptistsonmission.org.

Pascagoula Statistics & Historical Perspectives

* Pascagoula is Mississippi’s 8th largest city, the state’s busiest and largest port and home to Mississippi’s largest employer - Ingalls Shipbuilding owned by Northrop-Grumman Ship Systems.

* Chevron’s Pascagoula Refinery is primarily a fuels refinery and is owned by Chevron U.S.A. Inc. It is Chevron’s largest refinery and one of the ten largest in the USA. The site processes an average of 330,000 barrels of oil (13.9 million gallons) per day. Two hundred tanks at the refinery have the capacity to store 600 million gallons.

*It is quoted that, “… it is the sea that defines Pascagoula. It gives her a sense of place, it is the life blood of her economy and of the entire region. It connects her to the world beyond and a global economy.”

* Hernando DeSoto was the first European to contact the Pascagoula tribe that originally inhabited the area. Pascagoula meant “Bread Eaters.”

* Pascagoula was part of the French Colonial Empire from 1699 until the English occupied the area from 1763-1781. Pierre LeMoyne D’Iberville claimed it for the Sun King, Louis XIV. Pascagoula was Spanish Territory from 1781-1798 after which she entered the United States.

* “Old Hickory,” Andrew Jackson, bivouacked at Pascagoula prior to the Battle of New Orleans with the British. Gen. Zachary Taylor was an early developer of the city. Several streets he laid out are still in use today. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, while guesting at historical Bellevue Plantation, penned his “The Building of a Ship” while there.

Other historical residents and visitors were Pirate Jean LaFitte, Jackson’s ally against the British at the Battle of New Orleans, Union Admiral David Farragut and William Faulkner.

*Modern day politicians and celebrities from Pascagoula include: Sen. Trent Lott, birthplace of Jimmy Buffet, NFl players Ray Brown, Jimmy Marsalis, Fred Cook, NBA forward Antonio Harvey, actor Wm. Nakia Yellam, and major league baseball player Harry Walker. Pulitzer Prize winner Ira B Harkey was publisher of the Pascagoula Chronicle.

*Ray Stevens featured the city in his signature song “Mississippi Squirrel Revival.”

* City of Pascagoula’s website: www.cityofpascagoula.com

LODGING:

* Chandeleur Lodge - 228-762-5807

* La Font Inn - 228-762-7111

* Super 8 - 800-800-8000

* Economy Inn - 228-762-9414