From the Front Lines on the Gulf Coast

Mississippi Chapter Chair Rose Johnson, right with fellow Sierra Club volunteer Lark Mason, has 14 relatives staying at her tarp-covered home since Hurricane Katrina.

She's spent the past three weeks volunteering in North Gulfport providing meals and other relief supplies. But the damage to homes in the low-income minority neighborhoods of North Gulfport didn't prepare her for the scene south of the tracks in Gulfport. The neighborhood was surrounded by razor wire to keep people out, and mounds of debris stood eight to ten feet tall, like broken shipping containers with pork and chicken products. "The stench was so bad you could taste it on your tongue," she said.

Paul Stewart, who's now living in Maryland because his home was destroyed, used to live across the bay from DuPont's DeLisle titanium dioxide plant and its waste pits containing dioxin and heavy metals. He doesn't believe DuPont's insistence that everything is safe. "Katrina did not pollute our land," he says. "DuPont did. By locating that plant directly on the bay in a hurricane prone area, DuPont played Russian roulette and lost, and our land is now toxic."

And Becky Gillette, from Ocean Springs, reports on how the Bush administration, using the hurricane and its aftermath as cover, is working on a bill to give the EPA broad powers to declare an emergency and suspend the Clean Air Act without notice or public comment.

Read more reports from the front. And learn how you can help by contributing to our Gulf Coast Environmental Restoration Project.