University of Idaho College of Law Public Interest Law Group

FEMA Trailer_________MCJ Office__________ Closed Store_________ Housing

After spending the first two nights in New Orleans, we arrived in Biloxi at 8:30 this morning. From what I have seen of the city thus far, it is basically a few large casinos surrounded by severely run down neighborhoods. Most of the trees appear dead and have no leaves. The area looks thoroughly depressed.

We spent most of the day learning about the situation here in Biloxi and getting an overview of what we will be doing for the rest of the week. I wasn’t aware of the details of the storm before today. The eye of Katrina came directly over this area, causing a 30 foot high storm “surge” to crash into the Gulf shore. This surge flooded houses over 12 miles inland. As one of our supervising attorney’s put it today – “New Orleans was a bad situation because the faulty leaves failed. In Biloxi, the storm surged caused most of the damage, and many homes outside the “flood plain” were totally flooded.”

We also received a history of Mississippi Center for Justice and a description of current activities from attorneys John Jopling, Reilly Morse, and Crystal Utley. We had a great lunch with the students from Roger Williams, about 20 of us in total, at a nice Vietnamese restaurant – Long Kim’s. After lunch, we received more in depth instruction on the projects we were going to be working on.

The staff at Mississippi Center for Justice is very professional and passionate at the same time. I think the students here are going to be in for a real treat seeing these lawyers at work. It is also refreshing to see “big” firms like DLA Piper and O’Melveny & Meyers are partnering with MCJ and providing many pro bono hours.

We are working with two other schools – Roger Williams School of Law and Duke University School of Law.

Idaho students are participating in three different projects:

Track I – SURVEY FOR NORTH GULFPORT COMMUNITY LAND TRUST

Track II – CONTRACTOR FRAUD CASE PROCESSING

Track III – HOME GRANT OUTREACH

We will have details on each soon.

In solidarity,

Jordan