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Powerful stuff from Biloxi, Miss.

A lot of good journalism has taken place in the week and a half since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. Much of it is being done by the papers in the cities hardest hit by the storm.

The Biloxi (Miss.) Sun Herald, a Knight Ridder newspaper, needed a lot of help from sister Knight Ridder papers throughout the country. Belleville News-Democrat Assistant City Editor Brad Weisenstein and reporter George Pawlaczyk heeded the call.

It's been nearly 25 years since I first met Brad when we were attending journalism classes at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Brad has remained one of my closest friends from that experience. While in Biloxi, Brad has edited copy and moved copy onto the Sun Herald's Web site.

Brad is sharing some of his experiences in Biloxi on a blog that's appearing on the Belleville News-Democrat's Web site. Here's some snippets from the accounts he's written so far:

• 'Words don't cut it': Hit Biloxi about 4:30 a.m. Thursday and find out the directions are wrong, or we got them wrong. Drive around, worried about martial law, but National Guardsmen were kids from Alabama who were just bored. No one hardly on the roads as we drive through city that should be renamed Bosnia. Get to the casino district, where we suspect the paper is, and they look like the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City after the bombing. Other casinos the same. Cathedral across the street virtually untouched.

  Only light is from the hospital, where thrum of generators is heard. Driving past twisted metal, brush and limbs, swerving around downed traffic lights and power lines dangling in the middle of the road. Along the coast road, sand has been scraped away like snow, as early light comes up. Talk about being on the line between heaven and hell. Beautiful Gulf with sun coming up on one side while city's been turned into a huge landfill on the other. Lots of pines down, but live oaks survived and some streets still look like the drive into Tara. (Just don't look at the plantation house.)

• Feds aren't getting it done, but the regular folks are: Sunday was about as strange and diverse a day as I've had.

  It began in the office with a call from a helicopter pilot who was here with six others from Texas and Florida, plus four choppers. They were mad at the relief folks and National Guard for wasting their time Saturday by letting them sit. They called the newspaper to find out where the need was so they could help someone. I sent them to western Hancock County, a rural area past the devastated Bay St. Louis area. People are living in the woods out there and have next to nothing.

  Also got a call from a nurse with a big U-Haul she filled with food, water, clothes and personal hygiene items. She couldn't get anyone to tell her where it should go, so she too called the newspaper. Again, I sent her to the west and gave her a backup spot at the hospital out there. Others called and I told them to contact their churches and have them contact churches here. The feds aren't getting it done, but the regular folks are.

• So much hope and hopelessness all mixed together here: We asked everyone we met whether they needed anything. One guy took a box of MREs, but his neighbors were fussing at him, saying he didn't really need it. Military trucks and kids with M-16s all over the place, and lots of supplies evident. Went through Waveland and saw a television crew from SIUC (Southern Illinois University Carbondale). They said Oprah Winfrey hired them through a service and had filmed her show in front of a house that still had some of its second story supported on beams, but the first floor was gone.

  We found people with lots of items and a stockpile of water in front of one house. We stopped and did a story about a woman named Patricia Green, who has 24 people living on her home lot, but not in the flood-damaged, moldy house. They've gathered the necessities and are making survival an art. They can't go in the house for long because of the mold. They cook on a gas burner used for shrimp boils, but I left my Coleman stove and three canisters of propane when Patricia talked about really wishing she had a two-burner stove. Their home was a tarp and a porch, but they had their sense of humor. They refuse to leave, not being able to see a life outside their home, even though they are outside their home.

  On the way back we saw a sport biker on the side of the road, about halfway in from his commute to NASA's Stennis Space Center. He's a SeaBee who drives and is a mechanic for boats that deliver Navy Seals to shore. His 1991 Suzuki had a tank full of what looked like Italian salad dressing, so I suspect some son of a gun sold him watered down gas. We siphoned out the old gas, gave him some new and followed him back home to Gulfport.

Brad called me Wednesday morning to ask me a favor. One of the Sun Herald's sports columnists, Jim Mashek, is a Three Stooges nut. Kind of like me. Brad thought it might be a good idea for me to send him a T-shirt from the Tour de Stooges if we had one available. Jim wanted a 2XL, but we only had an XL and a L left. Although the shirts were sold out, the man who wanted the shirts never sent the money, so I figured the shirts were fair game.

I went over to the Gateway Council of Hostelling International's office in St. Louis to pick up the XL shirt and sent it FedEx to Jim in Gulfport, Miss.

I suppose in the big scheme of things, a Tour de Stooges T-shirt doesn't mean much when people need food, water, gasoline, medicine and a place to stay. But I'm hoping Jim will get some joy from the shirt. Even in the bleakest times, joy is needed to keep hope alive.

Meanwhile, on the home page of this Web site, I've posted links and listed phone numbers for the American Red Cross, Catholic Charities USA and The Salvation Army. If you haven't done so already, please make a donation.

Roger 0 comments 1:17 AM