The Mississippi Division's Recovery Efforts

By Cecil Vick, FHWA Division Office

Another Mississippi bridge to nowhere. 5 State bridges were lost.

Despite the lack of electrical and telephone service to their personal homes and to their offices, the Federal Highway Administration's Mississippi Division Offices' Hurricane Katrina Recovery Team reported to work the morning following Hurricane's Katrina's landfall along the Gulf Coast. Left with only sporadic cellular telephone service and no gasoline, they began to quickly coordinate with State and local transportation officials to assess the damage to Mississippi and Louisiana's surface transportation system and to arrange for emergency repair work to begin.

For the first week following the disaster, team members manned Federal and State emergency operations centers twenty-four hours each day. Some employees stayed mostly in the capitol city to coordinate the recovery. They were challenged to manage limited recovery funding while awaiting appropriations of emergency relief funds. Innovative contracting techniques were developed. Travel arrangements were made for visiting Washington officials. Offices in Washington were constantly updated. It was a challenge just to manage the logistics of keeping the other team members in the field.

Within twenty-four hours of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, members of the Recovery Team were onsite in the most devastated areas. Within forty-eight hours of the most destructive natural disaster in our Nation's history, and working with their State partners, the Team helped reestablish a basic transportation infrastructure.

In the first few weeks following the storm, team members worked long hours and endured personal hardships. While their homes in the state capitols mostly still lacked power and while their families had no gasoline for their personal vehicles, the team members worked their way through the storm damage with their state and local partners. They determined first hand the repair tasks and costs that lay ahead. It was paramount to get the roads and bridges passable for emergency vehicles, construction workers, and displaced citizens, and the Team was successful.

Devastation was not just limited to coastal areas. Katrina was a Class I Hurricane when it left the northern border of Mississippi and entered Tennessee. Almost the whole of the States suffered damage. The coastal areas were devastated.

Team Members often left their homes before dawn, drove two hundred or more miles into the devastation, worked a full day, and drove home well after dark. Often they worked on weekends. In the areas with the worse devastation there were no hotel rooms, no restaurants, and often no water. Team Members were going into the damaged areas with MRE's and bottled water. For most team members one of their most difficult tasks was to adjust mentally to the destruction and human suffering they saw.

Everyone did their best and helped to provide the citizens most directly impacted by this overwhelmingly disastrous natural event with a sense that their government was at work and would help get them through it.