But when asked for insurance information he didn't have and didn't know how he could get since he'd lost everything and had no place else to turn, he just broke down and cried. We finally heard of one man who got through to FEMA - at 2:30 a.m. Most people we met still didn't have electricity or phone service. No one had been able to successfully complete "Registration Intake" via the toll-free number. We never found a resident who had ever seen even one FEMA official. It was day 13 after Katrina struck, and no one was coordinating the relief effort in one of the poorest communities along the coast. Chaos, devastation and an apparent inability to deliver the most basic help to so many people in so much despair. Armed with 25 copies of "Help After a Disaster," FEMA's applicant guide, and cases of bottled water, we headed south to let people know law schools and lawyers would be providing help with the myriad legal issues they'd be facing.īut when I arrived in Gulfport on Saturday, I was simply not prepared for what I saw. In the midst of this effort, two other out-of-state volunteers - Bonnie Allen, also with MCJ, and Trisha Miller, a Skadden Fellow with Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law - and I left for the Mississippi coast.
ELSEWHERE SALON PRO
I arrived in Jackson, Miss., from Washington, D.C., last Wednesday, hoping to help the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm, coordinate pro bono attorneys, law professors and legal aid offices, an army of whom are ready to respond to the overwhelming need that hurricane victims have for legal assistance.
0 kommentar(er)
