Katrina Humanitarian Response Continues Growing

Sitting at home this morning, I was flipping through the channels and came across the Ellen Show. Whatever you might think of her, it is a pretty decent show from what I can tell, and this is the first episode of the new season. Ellen had family in LA, and some lost everything. She's very visibly affected by this hurricane, and she's now interviewing someone from the American Red Cross. Warner Brothers is doing a match for everyone who donates to the ARC through the Warner Brothers website. Good on them.

Jeff Gordon is donating a racing uniform to be auctioned off for charity. Good on him.

Two cruise ships are being used as shelters for storm victims in Galveston, Texas.

A group of Indiana relief workers are going to operate out of Slidell, LA.

New Jersey residents continue their relief efforts. New Jersey law enforcement officials are headed to the region as well.

Pensacola residents affected by last year's Hurricane Ivan are reaching out to help Katrina victims.

A reporter's tale of heading back home to Slidell after the hurricane.

The price of a barrel of oil has dropped back to $64.85 as Gulf Coast refineries assess the damage. It's a mixed bag as foreign nations and the US release oil from strategic reserves:

Hurricane Katrina pinched U.S. fuel supply, causing spot shortages and price spikes throughout the country. The storm shut eight major refineries and caused 12 others to run at reduced rates when their crude-oil supplies were cut.

Refineries in Louisiana expect to be back running within the week. Motiva Enterprises, a joint venture of Royal Dutch Shell PLC and state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., has begun to restart its 235,000 barrel a day refinery.

That's the second refinery to restart after Hurricane Katrina. Marathon Oil Corp. restarted its 245,000 barrel a day refinery last week and expects the facility to be operating at full capacity Monday.

The prospects for four other refineries that shut down ahead of the storm are more dire. The plants, in hard-hit areas southeast of New Orleans and in Mississippi, can process some 880,000 barrels a day of crude, more than 5 percent of total U.S. capacity.

Chevron Corp.'s 325,000 barrel a day Pascagoula, Mississippi, facility and ConocoPhillips' 255,000 barrel a day Alliance refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, have suffered "major damage," the Energy Department said.

Also improving crude-oil supply, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the key facility for offloading and distributing imported crude oil on the U.S. Gulf Coast, said Saturday it is able to operate at about 75 percent capacity after power was restored at its Clovelly, Louisiana, storage facility. Deliveries of crude oil to the Capline Pipeline supplying refineries in the Midwest should begin Sunday.

The massive amount of rebuilding necessary along the Gulf Coast will impact the prices of building supplies around the country. A construction worker crunch could take hold as skilled workers are needed to rebuild housing stocks.

Meanwhile, here's a haunting tale of survival up and down the Gulf Coast, which was hit by a massive storm surge when Katrina made landfall. The entire police force of Waveland, Mississippi, located in their offices more than 2 miles from Mississippi Sound were momentarily trapped in their building as rising floodwaters rushed through. They swam for their lives.

The storm surge in Gulfport and Biloxi reaches an estimated 28 feet.

The water is as high as 3 feet in the Hancock County Emergency Operations Center in Bay St. Louis, a building that’s 27 feet above sea level. That's a 30 foot storm surge.

UPDATE:
Chrenkoff suggests looking at the difference between the LA and MS responses. Mississippi handled the crisis with a firm hand from the outset. Louisiana did not. And that is while the entire Mississippi coast was visited by the hand of God, wiping out everything as far as the eye could see. That's precisely because the eye of the hurricane passed over the LA/MS border and the strongest winds and highest storm surge was to the east of the eye's landfall. Mississippi was the scene of the worst damage from the entire storm, and yet there's little of the political opportunism that we're seeing in Louisiana. Mississippi isn't in the news because they're dealing with the situation as best as they could and the media is much rather intent upon blovating on New Orleans and the botched response from, in order of real culpability - the local government, the state government, and the feds.