Contributed by: filbert Wednesday, August 31 2005 @ 08:30 AM CST
After sharing what he witnessed, he teared up. “It’s hard,” (Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour) said, “but I promise you Mississippi and the rest of the Gulf Coast will recover. It will cost a lot, but we’ll rebuild, and the Coast will be bigger and better than ever.”
Mississippi utilities struggle to restore power.
Utility companies were still scrambling this afternoon to assess damage to power lines, generators and other essential pieces of the state’s electrical grid. Officials from Mississippi Power, which serves nearly 60,000 homes and businesses in the Pine Belt area, said all of its 195,000 customers around the state were without electricity after the storm.
. . .
Other utilities were hit hard as well. By late afternoon, Entergy had nearly 270,000 customers in Mississippi without power — almost 88,000 in the southern part of the state.
Reporters from the Biloxi paper (which is relocating operations to Columbus, GA) are continuing to work via this blog[*2] .