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Phase I (continued)
The Pascagoula trip was the first systematic assessment of hurricane damages to child care facilities. High winds had blown away so many landmarks and road signs that street maps were useless, so Amy Brandenstein of Chevron served as navigator while ECI staffers in the car tried to contact child care directors by cellular telephones. With each director they reached, the ECI team asked whether the child care center building was undamaged or partially or completely damaged, making notations on the lists. For providers they could not reach by telephone, the assessment team drove door-to-door, detouring around fallen trees and power lines, to make visual inspections. They covered the communities of Pascagoula, Moss Point, Ocean Springs, Gautier, Vancleave and Hurley, finding some buildings completely destroyed and many others where providers were struggling to reopen in spite of flooding or structural damage to their facilities. At the conclusion of the Pascagoula assessment, the assessment team telephoned the Atlas team with a damage report, characterizing child care centers as green (little or no damage), yellow (significant damage), red (unable to reopen), or black (could not be located or contacted). The atlas team transferred the assessment information to its spatially enabled database and produced the first damage assessment map, showing the location and status of centers in Jackson County with color-coded dots and calculating the numbers of at-risk and lost licensed child care slots. The initial assessment found that one-fourth of the county’s licensed centers were damaged beyond repair, representing 11 percent of the county’s licensed child care capacity, and another 39 percent of centers needed repairs. ECI sent more assessment teams to Harrison and Hancock Counties in Mississippi, sometimes relying on the hospitality of Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi for overnight lodging. Their findings were not good. The combination of wind and surging Gulf waters had caused far greater devastation than either weather force alone. Some centers were nothing but rubble. In others, a thick black mold covered what was left of the floors. The teams photographed individual facilities and relayed damage reports to the Atlas team. NACCRRA, the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, provided staff support from Washington, D.C., for the assessments, making repeated attempts to telephone child care facilities in its database and providing the telephone survey results to ECI. The team produced updated county maps and reported on October 6 that from 62% to 94% of the licensed slots in the three coastal counties were lost or potentially lost. By October, the Mississippi Department of Health resumed its licensing operation and was systematically assessing damages in the inland counties of the disaster area. Its licensing office relayed its damage reports to the Atlas team, which incorporated the information into its database and continued to produce maps and reports upon request.1 (See map, “Harrison County, MS, Licensed Child Care Centers Post-Hurricane Katrina.”) 1 When Hurricane Rita hit the Louisiana-Texas coast on Sept. 23, the Atlas team reported within three days that up to 457 licensed facilities with slots for almost 35,000 children were in the disaster area.
46 Blackjack Rd. / P.O. Box 6013
/ Mississippi State, MS / 39762 / tel. 662-325-4836 / fax 662-325-5436 Updated
11/30/2007
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