Thank you to those of you who understand our position. For the others - what the media isn’t going to show you are the majority of us residents hustling everyday as we rebuild our homes and this community. I believe there is a misconception from some who have not yet visited this area. We are educated, work 40+ hours per week, and pay our mortgage, taxes, and insurance. We personally paid insurance premiums for many years with no claims until Katrina. We aren’t asking for a bigger, fancier home. We merely want the modest one our family lived in the day before Katrina hit. (My parents are in their late 70’s, paid insurance premiums since 1960 with no claims. Their insurance company is telling them they will get zero. They are more-than-willing to downsize from their five-bedroom home to a one-bedroom home. Where do they begin?) We faithfully paid our premiums so we would be protected. Without our due from the insurance company, we are trying to rebuild on our own. To cover the inflated cost of labor and materials, we have had to wipe out our savings and retirement accounts. Add to the financial woes facts such as finding an available friend with a pickup truck to transport supplies and material from 30+ miles away. This is at the end of a workday AND weekends. In between, we are on the cell phone (without a house, we don’t have a land line) trying to contact a contractor with expertise on those things we cannot do ourselves. IF we’re lucky, our call will get returned or one may show up – of course, with an inflated price quote. By the time we get a 2nd or 3rd quote, the price has risen. Our children aren’t sitting around playing videos. They are on the floor doing homework, or in the yard helping out. With children helping out, we have to be extra careful. In addition to the anticipated rusty nails, there is an increase in black widow and brown recluse spiders. The new guests such as hermit crabs aren’t such a bother. By nightfall, we are all exhausted. But not too tired to comfort and rub the back of our child who is crying herself to sleep because she wants to “go home.” Unfortunately, my husband’s day isn’t over. His job is law enforcement and he is on call. Just as he lays his head down, the phone rings and he is gone. By the time he returns, he has only a few hours of sleep remaining (if he doesn’t get another call) before a new day begins. In addition to ourselves, we are trying to help my parents. At their age, and with their failing health, they cannot handle the stress of rebuilding. Most of my siblings cannot help because they too, have lost their home and some, their jobs. I’m not whining. We are so grateful for the important things – our faith and our family. We are overwhelmed and deeply appreciate the outpour of support from volunteer groups coming to this area. We don’t want your sympathy but a little empathy for what we’re going through would be nice.

Where will it end? If we the people (government) are responsible for taking down the trees because they pose a potential threat of becomming a missle during the next storm, shouldn't we also be responsible to remove all threats? What about the shingles on the roofs? They can be stripped during high winds causing injury. Why not the siding on the walls, the sutds in the buildings, and those nasty utility poles that harbor those dangerous wires. If we adopt a policy of removing the potential threats where would it end? We should level everything within 20 miles of the potential landfall areas and turn them into wastelands, post no trespassing signs and let anyone who enters those areas know they do so at their own risk. Oh wait, that is how it is now!
When did we transform from a nation of independence to a nation of dependance? When did we forget the spirit of personal ownership and trangress to the spirit of reliance? When did we embrace the attitudes of weakness and entitlement over strength and the right to self determination?
People, please wake up and if you are a man, reach over and grab the zipper that is on the side of you pants and slide it back to the front where it belongs. If you are a man with a zipper on the front, help a woman. If you are neither, crawl back into your hole!

most of these post's do apply but where are the anti-price gouging people?? To sum it all up..SUCK IT UP..and remember The LORD helps those that help themselves,Tho not to others belongings...

It's funny/sad to read the commits on these situations going on in the areas most hit. Everybody must think that nothing/nobody from these areas are doing anything to get there lives back. Just like the reports from the dome and convention center, you get one person who says one thing then it get's turned into something else. Let the truth be known, the majority of the people are doing everything they can to do that very thing, while living somewhere else. These people are tring to pay for two places at one time. Just because traffic stalls doesn't mean the engines aren't running. People everywhere else complain about the price of fuel that you waste because you won't walk two blocks to get something. Try paying three times the price for somewhere to live so you people can complain that we're not helping you live your life. Take one month of bills and food, double that, add on the payments we still pay back home, plus the fuel (3000 miles a month extra), to get there and back to do the things you SAY we're not doing for ourselves. If we just stop to do everything down here, the rest of you everywhere else wouldn't know what to do, or how to do it.

There is never really going to be a Katrina recovery. Global warming will allow the oceans to reclaim low lands. This is a fact. Every penny that you spend there is ultimately a waste of money. Your grandchildren will never see this land as an inheritance. What are you going to leave them? Maybe a half acre of the Gulf of Mexico.

The citizens need to concede defeat. You cannot beat back the water forever. People need to just move away and start over on higher ground. It will not make a lesser person of you to admit and accept reality.

I have an Elm in my back yard that died two years ago. When can I expect FEMA to remove it at no cost to me? After all, it is susceptible to insects, a hazard in a windstorm and generally doesn't look good. Because I live in Ohio, can I expect a Government handout as well? The answer is "no". I will do what 99% of the rest of the country has to do. I will either hire someone to remove it, at my cost, or pull out my little Poulan and cut it down myself. I am just as sympathetic to Katrina victims as the next guy, but, as a taxpayer, I have paid for trailers, hotels, cars, homes, boats, etc. Now I have to pay for dead pine trees to be removed because it may or may not have been killed by the storm?

Tree removal on private property is not an entitlement. There is some risk involved in home ownership...particularly along the Gulf Coast!

A question: is there anyone down South who has homeowners' insurance?

let the locals cut the trees. must be some wood cutters around there.no big deal good for the econamy

I own about an acre in South Florida on which I built a house a few years ago. About a third of the pines scattered through our back yard have succumbed to that beetle. The needles turn brown and they die in the apparent space of a week or two. Eventually, the bark can fall off.

The eyes of three hurricanes have passed over the top of our five year-old house and the house sustained no damage. HOWEVER, our pool screen enclosure was severely damaged, last season, when a hurricane caused a tree which had clearly died about two weeks earlier, to snap in two about half-way up and crash down on the screen enclosure! Dead pines DO become much more dangerous, susceptible to breaking in half, halfway-up, as anyone near the hurricane-ravaged woods of South Florida will tell you, or FEMA! Get them removed! They are a huge hazard, both for wind and for fire.

I don't know who should clean them up but, as I detailed in my other post, they must be cleaned up. Someone mentioned that a chainsaw only costs around $500. I have never paid even close to that for one that could take down the typical small-to-medium slash pine.

Thank you! to Mike from Indiana!

To so many of the ignorant posters here...why are you so angry? Has your tax bill gone up? Are you happy with the $1 BILLION we spend in Iraq every WEEK? Why not tell them to take care of their own mess?

To the morons who suggest letting the local government deal with this...what local government? When 90 miles is devestated there is no tax base = no money!

Cut down the tree yourself? Do you have any idea what it takes to take down a 50ft pine? Then try it in a yard.

Burn it in your fireplace? Unforgivable ignorace! Burn these trees in your home, and you will burn your home down.

There is not enough people, or money to do this on an idividual basis.

Sell your timber? LMAO!

Before the storm I had 15 acres of mature pines. I was on the waiting list to have them harvested, and in need of the money. At least 50% of my trees are down. This makes for an extremely dangerous situation even for professionals. Now with the drought and the beetles, the loss and danger is compounded.

There should have been a program started to co-ordinate loggers and property owners to remove and make use of these trees.

This is not just a matter of clean up, but one of prevention. My stand of trees is what protected my neighbors rickety trailer from the storm. My neighbors to the north had clear cut, so we had no protection and lost our roof and entire barn.

Fire is a constant fear with these trees. Another storm will make deadly missles of these trees.

To those who keep saying we should just move away from the coast, may I remind you that Katrina took down large numbers of trees as far north as Meridian MS?

If those on the coast did all move away, what would the rest of the country do about the loss of oil and gas that comes from us? Can the nation do without the ports?

I am at the point where I think everyone on the coast, from Mobile to Texas should just leave town for 30 days, close everything and see how the rest of the country likes it!

Remember the old joke about who is more important, the anus or the brain? The rest of the nation may think New Orleans is the anus of the nation, but you will be in trouble if it doesn't work!

Reading these was interesting. People who give realistic, personal accounts of the situation are experienced and articulate. The ones who give the same unrealistic solutions don't seem to be able to read.

Yea I finally see the light. Everybody just needs to move away from the coast. Knowbody needs anything from those areas anyway! Who needs Seafood anyway. We can always get fish from the rivers and lakes. I am sure the U.S.A. really doesn't need to be on the high seas for any reason. I can't believe some of the idiotic things I am reading on this site.

Where do you really think you get most of your gas from? It seems to me that alot of the people posting here probably wouldn't need gas anyway, they already have plenty of hot air, or they could just burn the MS pine in thier fireplaces and not have to worry about it. I just hope they don't need any help when they go to cut down the trees in thier yard after thier houses burn to the ground. They probably won't. Since all it costs is a couple of hundred bucks for a chain saw. If they have a 100ft tall pine tree in thier yard they could always get money from thier neighbor, not to drop the tree on thier neighbors house. Hasn't anybody in MS thought of extorting thier neighbor instead of trying to get something out of the government fund that they been paying into for all these years? Heck, maybe if you did drop your tree on your neighbors house you could get more money out of your homeowners policy. Just a thought. Boy thier really are alot of advantages to moving inland.

Just think of how much more valuable the inland realestate will be worth when everyone from the coast moves inland about what would you say 100 miles or so. Just in the first 3 miles or so in MS there were what over a couple of hundred thousand homes destoryed. I bet real estate values around my small community would probably triple!

What a bunch of IDIOTS! THESE ARE AMERICANS!

FEMA did not plant the trees. My god people, ask what you can do for your country, don't ask what your country can do for you.

All you people who are telling others to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" and other BS: Have you gone down to MS and helped out with rebuilding yet? No, you haven't. So, you really don't know what you are talking about, do you? I went down for 8 days in April and it's not as easy as "go buy a chainsaw and cut them down yourself, just like our forefathers did!". And this is coming from a "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" person, but unless you have gone down and helped someone put their life back together, you are just talking out of your backside.

Whose land are the trees on? Let them take care of their own property. It is not the job of the government to do everything for these people! Free handouts! Take care of evacuating people from place they don't belong! Gimme, gimme, gimme. We do NOT have a communistic state where everyone gets everything free! and we should not. Take responsibility for yourself and your property. Lots of good suggestions in here as to what to do with the wood. Get to it!

How many of you have ever cut down a large tree? A large tree that can only fall one way or it will hit the house on either side. I watched professionals take down a badly damaged tree to the the east of my house and I held my breath. They didn't just chop it down, they had to climb up to the top and take it out in pieces as there was not enough room for it to just fall in one piece. Watched another group take down a tree in the yard of a house behind my place and a good sized part of it fell and just missed their house. These men were also professionals. I get the idea that people who have been saying, "well, just cut it down" think we only grow our trees short. A tree being cut and falling in the wrong direction is just as deadly as if a storm blows it down.

Why do some people want the government to be responsible for everything? Are these the same people who want a handout every time they have a personal problem? If the trees are on government land, the government would be responsible. If the trees are on my land, they are my responsibility. It ought to be that simple!

I am amazed at all the self rightous comments posted here with simple solutions. I took my family to the Mississippi coast to let my children see the magnitude of the destruction. Try to imagine entire neighborhoods of houses with only a few that are inhabitable. Try to imagine the same thing for mile after mile along the coast. For 20 miles? Try to imagine people living in tents....since last August 29th, ten months after Katrina. Think about just trying to live day to day. Think about people living elsewhere, paying rent and all the living expenses...and still paying the mortgage on a house they cannot live in. Pay someone to cut a tree down? Cut it down yourself? Some of you ought to try walking a mile in these people's shoes...and then cut a tree down with a hatchet after work.

Go to New Orleans. Drive along I-10 and I-610. You will see mile after mile after mile of homes, apartments and businesses that will have to be razed. That means bulldozed and hauled off. Take those miles that you can see from the safety and comfort of your car on the interstate and imagine the same types of ruined buildings for blocks going away from the interstate.

Simple statements are easy to make. Simple solutions work for simple problems. The devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita spans from the Texas-Louisiana line to the Mississippi-Alabama line and extends many, many miles inland. A simple solutution will not work.

I don't have the solution. But I know I haven't seen it in previous postings.

I,ve seen a pile of hurricanes while growing up in florida (46years)i've seen just as many creative responses to solving the problems presented by the storms that NEVER DiD involve Uncle Sam. I can honestly say that I feel bad for you'all but it's time to make the dirt fly. Start by making local groups...Neighborhood level ...and get off the damn
cell phone, pull yourself away from you're Blasted
T.V. and FINALLY learn what your neighbor's name is!! tell the damn news people to find another story because you have some work to do....small ,,i mean small neighbor groups, can work fast together ,and for each other..they also can be more organized. The
South is a great place to retire from the freezing north, but there is a flip side to every thing---
beetles in trees are one thing that is the result of coastal storms (hurricanes) ,,surely a small organized group can overcome this problem that has been around since the Spanish and French, settled the dirt you are standing on top of. There was NO FEMA .Remember this. You are Americans and our prayers and endless support are with you...but I'll be willing to bet that if a hard cold winter is blowing down your neck, remember them? no offense but they were the reason alot of ya'll came down . NOT Everybody (of course), I think things would be a
bit different.. people would settle for a little less, get you and your neighbors on your feet, quit
swapping hurricane horror stories and you'd darn sure
be amazed at the work that you got done while some
Gubbment paper folks were doing they're job ,(Keep in mind they've done alot, really, and somebody on the other side of the fence is always ready to criticize you, them ,the Gubbment, who by the way.. Gubbment was certainly at fault for not warning you that the bird was gonna Physiologically
bomb you on the head with poop....("Damn did'nt see that comming")"Impeach the President, "Fire the Mayor
COMM'ON FOLKS!!! ,,This is just trees and Yes I've had to Deal with those sneaky things MYSELF, MYSELF
that's right......MYSELF.. God bless and you really
are in my prayers.
And PLEASE wash your hands before sitting down to eat,because ,we oviously couldn't handle a Typhoid
breakout at this time right now .

Global warming and rising oceans are not going to just magically affect the Gulf of Mexico, w myers of Knoxville. The rise in the oceans will be uniform and worldwide. Using your rationale, we should just abandon miles and miles of coastland as well as all land along rivers and waterways, because when the ocean water starts to rise, it's going to rise on any body of water connected with the oceans. But then, would'nt a massive inundation of that volume of fresh water in such a short period into our oceans drop the ocean salinity so much that all of the marine life, on which the whole world depends for its survival, be unable to itself survive? Thus by extension, if the oceans die would not the entire planet eventually die? If you are going to use the "global warming/ocean rising" science to justify a position that we should not rebuild our homes because they'll eventually be under water, then extend the argument fully- if the scenario you describe happens it's going to affect every human alive everywhere on the planet, and Knoxville Tenn will not be immune to its effects. You are not just going to be able to sit there, immune in the aftermath, and say " too bad for all those people."
Now, can we get back to talking about the subject of this story, pine trees?

One time I lived in the mountains. It rained and stormed, I moved. Bought a house on a lake, it rained and stormed there also. So I moved to the desert, guess what, it rained and stormed there. I moved to the ocean and yes, it rained and stormed there again. Do you think I have figured it out now? It rains and storms EVERYWHERE!

Yeap, belive I'll cut me a few pine trees ....and have firewood for the winter.....LOL!!!!!....but I ain't gonna cut the dead ones, cause the sawmill will buy them!!

Hey Doug in Ohio, of course people in the south have homeowners insurance.....I had four trees go down in Katrina. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, none of the four hit my house. If the trees are not on the house, homeowners doesn't pay for their removal. Homeowners also does not pay for any landscaping you may have lost. I had a root ball from a fallen oak that was the size of pickup truck. Insurance wouldn't pay. Allstate pays a total of $500 for debris removal which includes downed trees, roots, stump grinding and general cleanup. $500 doesn't go far when 4 trees and stumps need to be removed. But you get an "A" for effort as far as trying to make all homeowners in the south look like idiots!!!!

How dare anyone ask the question, "does anyone down south have homeowners insurance"? What a lame, ignorant thing to say. You want to talk insurance on house and property - then get your lazy behind down here and really listen to what people are going through. I won't even tell you what amount of money we were paying on insurance each year AND do you think we are able to rebuld what we had? And yes we did have flood, wind and anything else you can think of. Oh, we didn't have valcano and earthquake. That is what some other states have to have!

Well, I witnessed an elderly homeowner outside of Waveland "taking charge" and having someone "responsible" take down the dead pines in his yard. One large tree fell across the road, hit a transformer and set the dead pine forest across the road on fire, burning a couple of homes already severely damaged by Katrina. It's not as simple many think. You gotta chop for a while with a hatchet to down a pine two foot in diameter. People who have lost everything, especially the elderly have little resources to tackle this kind of job. People who have not seen it, walked it, lived it will never understand. I truly hope they, in their blessed ignorance, never have to.