Email from Nov 13, 2005\r\nHello Boys & Girls,\r\n\r\nI have indeed been remiss with my communications. I generally compose long emails of great pith and moment as I drive up and down (back and\r\nforth?) Interstate 10, then by the time I get back to the computer I either get shanghaied into something else or I have just flat forgotten everything. Probably redounds to all our benefit.\r\n\r\nMSNBC has a web site devoted to the rebuilding of Waveland and Bay St. Louis. I just became aware of it last week. I ran into one of their photographers at Ellis Anderson\'s house on Friday night. We shifted the geography a bit and instead of Friday being Mexican Night at Ellis\'s we had Cajun night. I made jambalaya which was well received and someone else made the better of the two gumbo\'s I have had in Mississippi.\r\n\r\nWhile I was ecstatic when we started playing music at Ellis\'s Friday night gathering, it has largely petered out. I think people\'s emotions here are still too flayed. Folks around here have good days and bad days and really bad days. Usually someone has had an R.B.D. and just doesn\'t feel like playing (except for me - even my really bad days aren\'t even in the same league with my local friends so if I\'m conscious, I\'ll play) and we fail to achieve critical mass. Ironically, one of last week\'s team, Brian Driscoll brought a guitar (Gibson J-45) and turned out to be very good. Scary good. Been to the crossroads? He\'s an amazing songwriter as well. He works on buildings for the Arkansas State Historic Preservation Office. He and I played some but Scott was having a bad day so he dropped out almost immediately. It was the first time he had played his guitar since the storm. Until ten days ago, it was still filled with water from the storm. It was in a storage facility in its hard shell case which had filled with water. Annie only worked her way back to it after nearly two months. It\'s slowly been drying out in the wet case since then but it still feels very heavy. Apparently the neck is not warped and the whole instrument is hanging together. I encouraged Scott to string it and even got him a set of strings. I guess compared to the way he remembered it feeling and sounding it was just another reminder of all of the things that would never be the same. He played for five minutes, put the guitar in its case and went home. Ellis pled hostessing duties and wouldn\'t get her fiddle out. It\'s disappointing but I only have ten more days and nights and I will have served my forty and I am going home for turkey day. I return to MS around Dec. 11 after going to the World History Producers Congress in Rome.\r\n\r\nThings here are incredibly busy and everyone I know does whatever it is they do seven days a week. People are making the really hard decisions about their property daily. The pressure to sell is very great as most people\'s insurance didn\'t even begin to cover the cost of rebuilding. The pressure is greatest in Biloxi and Gulfport where the Casinos are coming ashore permanently and need land. House prices here in BSL have risen nearly a hundred percent since the storm. People need places to live and they are in short supply. A number of groups are coming to do \"workshops\" and \"demonstration projects\" but they won\'t do much good for the people here as by the time the start, say Jan. 1, most people will have already decided what to do and how to do it. Also the deadline for applying to have FEMA demolish and remove your house for free is Nov. 18. Taking down and taking away a house can cost between $10K and $40K so this is an important consideration. From our point of view, the fact that FEMA is waaaayyyyyy behind schedule is a good thing. There are 3,500 right of entry applications that people have filed in Hancock County and only 54 have been processed. That may give us some time to convince/help people to save their historic homes. Another concern is the new FEMA flood plane rules for the coast. They won\'t be ready for 18 months. In the meantime thousands of people want to come back and rebuild because the mortgage is still running and they need a place to live. But no one knows what the new standards will be or what happens if you build to the old standards and then they change the rules. Could you get insurance? Would you have to jack your house up ten feet? No one knows. Pressure on municipal officials to allow building now is enormous. And all the while, developers are walking around with wads of cash.\r\n\r\nI\'ve been running teams on a weekly basis. As soon as I get one acclimated and working I start preparing for the next week\'s team - figuring out where they\'re going to work, what they\'re going to do, where they\'re going to sleep & eat. Mostly what we\'re doing is identifying buildings eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. That puts them within the purview of section 106 of the Historical Preservation Act that requires a review whenever federal money is used to do something that would impact a historic resource or property. As I have mentioned before in my emails, we also do structural assessments of many of these buildings. This is all information relevant to the section 106 review.\r\n\r\nThe Trust has no official role in the 106 process. That is largely between the property owner, the State Historic Preservation Officer\r\n(SHPO) and FEMA. We have worked in aid of the SHPO to provide volunteer professionals to gather the information necessary to make decisions about what buildings die and what live. Until a couple of weeks ago we also cooperated closely with FEMA. Then it happened, the Fucking New Guy showed up, said you\'re doing everything wrong and you need to start doing it my way. Then they sacked the person we had been working with (Cherylin Widdell - she was the California SHPO during the Northridge\r\nearthquake) for weeks and dumped her workload on another woman who is totally overwhelmed and freaking out. Every time I try to help her she yells at me. Two of the women on last week\'s team refused to work with her again after one day. While this was happening the SHPO was out of state for a week or ten days thinking he had left things in the hands of a competent subordinate. It was hard to tell if he was competent because he did virtually nothing for the whole period. When the SHPO returned last Monday we had a big hour-long conference call (after the FEMA lady started yelling at me because I had too many volunteers to help her accomplish her task - go figure). I told everybody that things were beginning to fall apart down here. Subordinates got their butts kicked, I\'ve decided simply not to work with the FEMA bitch and everything seems to be running much smoother.\r\n\r\nSince I started writing this my new team has arrived and we\'ve fed them and regaled/indoctrinated them with stories of life in The Mess and the usual warnings, e.g., don\'t ever open a refrigerator with which you do not have a preexisting relationship (There are still refrigerators here that haven\'t been opened since before the storm. Open one of those and you will be very, very sorry.). We\'re off to Ocean Springs in the morning and will be there for two days evaluating buildings then they\'ll come back to Bay St. Louis to continue identifying Register eligible buildings in what\'s left of Pass Christian. I need to grab a few hours of sleep before I get up and shower and cook breakfast for them and then drive the 50 miles to Ocean Springs. So be well.\r\n\r\n73\r\n\r\nL.\r\n\r\nP.S. For weeks I\'ve been trying to take a picture that adequately portrays the casino barges that came ashore. Driving down Beach Blvd. in Biloxi Friday before last I snapped this photo which comes closest to that goal so far. What you see is a casino barge that crushed the Holiday Inn. The hotel is the four story structure on the left.