GCRL Post-Katrina
GCRL Status Report
Nov. 7, 2005
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
On behalf of Jay Grimes, Director, and our faculty and staff, here is an update on the status of the Gulf Coast Research Lab of the University of Southern Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina. First, we’d like to say that the outpouring of concern and offers of aid from our sister marine laboratories and other institutions across the country has been overwhelming. Further, we are grateful for utility companies, National Guard units, Coast Guard, EPA, non-profit relief organizations, church groups and individuals that have come from across the country to assist in the cleanup. Although many of our facilities are in shambles, none of our staff or faculty were physically injured. Unfortunately, around 30 of our approximately 200 employees lost their homes completely or have homes rendered unlivable due to flooding. Still, nearly 100% of our employees reported to work on Monday, September 12, two weeks after the storm to help with the cleanup.
With respect to specific facilities, the J.L. Scott Marine Education Center and Aquarium was a total loss as were almost all structures in that part of Biloxi. The marine education center operation has been moved into a temporary facility on the GCRL campus in Ocean Springs. The GCRL campus sustained a 20- plus- foot storm surge that devastated all the buildings near the water and several at higher elevations. Our striped bass facilities, aquatic toxicology lab, marine aquaculture operations and native saltmarsh plant greenhouse, and our herbarium collection took hits ranging from serious damage to total loss. All of our other structures, except for the Howse Oceanography building, are still standing but experienced water from the storm surge. In the Caylor Building, the Gunter Library sustained about 1.5 feet of water, and the computer and IVN lab was totally destroyed. Most of our fisheries scientists have been displaced from their offices and laboratories by about two feet of muddy storm surge. Our dorm is providing temporary housing for offices and for some of our employees who lost their homes. Mobile classrooms and office units are on the way. Electricity has been restored to most buildings with intermittent outages as replacement of downed power poles continues and as troubleshooting is required for individual buildings. We have local and long distance phone service, intermittent e-mail, and sometimes our cell phones even work. For photos, please go to our website at www.usm.edu/gcrl/katrina, ‘GCRL after Katrina.’
Marine aquaculture programs at the Cedar Point site are still in operation. Marine fish project and shrimp farming experiments continue. We lost the cover to our commercial-scale shrimp farming facility and the shrimp in several raceways, but we have enough raceways with unaffected shrimp that the experiments in progress were not compromised. Other buildings at Cedar Point will require mostly minor repairs. Our research vessels were moved to safe harbor according to our hurricane protocol and fared well.
With assistance from outside contractors and volunteers along with our staff and faculty pulling together, we expect to have researchers back on the water and investigations underway within six weeks of Katrina. Graduate classes resumed Monday, September 19. The recovery, however, is far from over. We were dealing with cubic yards up until now. That stage of large-scale debris removal will continue for facilities at the east end of the property. Now the hard work also begins of cleaning mud off vials, attempting to recover data from inundated hard drives and assembling the equipment and facilities to restart our research.
We will be posting more information and photos shortly. Thank you again for your concern for the Lab.
Best regards,
William E. Hawkins
Executive Director
