[Mb-civic] By Hook or by Crook, Surviving Storm - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

By Hook or by Crook, Surviving Storm
Miss. Officials Used Ingenuity -- and the Occasional Misdeed -- to Get 
Job Done

By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 19, 2005; Page A01

GULFPORT, Miss. -- Hurricane Katrina has transformed Mississippi's 
mayors into car thieves, and senators into blockade runners. Isolated by 
the initial hit of the storm and failed by the slow federal response, 
citizens have fended for themselves in some original and not entirely 
legal ways. Brent Warr, the Republican mayor of Gulfport, even ordered 
his police chief to hot-wire a truck.

"When you send your law enforcement out to steal things, that's when you 
know you're in a different situation," Warr says.

In Gulfport, Warr did everything by the book, right up until he started 
stealing. His force of 225 police officers and 190 firefighters stayed 
on the job in 24-hour shifts. Fire Chief Pat Sullivan went into the 
storm to cut away felled trees from the roads leading to the hospitals. 
In the city's sea-blue antebellum City Hall, Warr worked without power.

But Gulfport was still without help three days after the storm, and 
Warr's control over the situation was slipping. Looting broke out 
downtown. When Warr drove a utility vehicle down U.S. 90, he watched as 
his longtime family business, Warr's Men's Clothing, was ransacked.

Worst of all, the city was running out of fuel. Generators were about to 
fail, rescue vehicles were running out of gas. One local hospital 
radioed that it was on backup power and had no water, and that looters 
were circling.

Warr turned to his chief of police, Stephen T. Barnes. There was a 
private fuel transport vehicle -- Warr doesn't remember whose -- parked 
in a lot behind a chain-link fence. Warr had the lock cut. "Can we 
hot-wire it?" he asked.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/18/AR2005091801397.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050919/1d009a4a/attachment.htm