My mind has been elsewhere lately but like a squirel collecting pecans I’ve been saving links as there seems a good bit of news is coming from the west side of the coast.
First off the the grand re opening of the Bay-Waveland Yacht Club. JR Welsh has the report:
“We’re coming back. Bay St. Louis is coming back. Let’s do it together,” Commodore Judy Reeves told the crowd.
The new 10,500-square-foot building is made of concrete and steel. It has a dining room that will seat 200, a bar, boardroom, offices and locker rooms.
After Katrina wiped out the old clubhouse, a temporary club with trailers and a deck was back in place by January 2006. Ground was broken for the new clubhouse in September 2007.
The yacht club has a long history that has experienced bad luck on more than one occasion. The original building was located at the foot of Washington Street. It was completed in 1897 at a cost of $2,500 and was destroyed by a hurricane in 1915.
The club itself fell on hard times during the Depression and World War II, but was reorganized in 1949. The last clubhouse and yacht harbor were then built on North Beach Boulevard, where the latest version was opened Tuesday.
A number of senior club members who had attended the 1949 ribbon cutting were on hand again this time.
Club member Corky Hadden, who was also representing the Hancock County Chamber of Commerce at the ribbon-cutting, praised the organization for “taking the bold step to rebuild this building when nobody else was doing anything in this city.”
BWYC celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1996. Club sailors have a long list of achievements in winning local, regional, national and international sailing events.
Next up is Stennis Space Center and two big announcements that will help keep in place good paying jobs. JR Welsh and Lisa Monti filed these reports:
For a decade the Stennis-based Joint Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Technical Center of Expertise – JALBTCX, in government speak – has been conducting worldwide airborne surveys to gather information that guides navigators as they approach far-flung shores.
The center is a joint venture between the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Naval Oceanographic Office and the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. It was formed under a 1998 partnership that was officially renewed Tuesday morning.
“I’m a believer in what you’re doing, and I’m here to congratulate you for your successes,” U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran said at a ceremony marking the occasion. Cochran attended along with U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor and other military and civilian officials.
The Department of Defense’s Major Shared Resource Center located at the Naval Oceanographic Office is getting a new supercomputer that will be able to perform 80 trillion calculations per second – approximately four times the computational capability of the largest computer system now in use at the NAVO MSRC.
The new IBM system, which will be put to work by the end of October, will have more than 4,700 processors that can each perform roughly 19 billion calculations per second, more than twice as fast as processors in the existing systems.
“It will provide a significant increase in the Center’s overall computational capacity for use by DoD researchers and will enhance
NAVOCEANO’s ability to provide tailored ocean model products to the Fleet,” said Dave Cole, associate director of the NAVO MSRC.
The $12,650,000 supercomputer, a Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, will be one of the most powerful systems in the Department of Defense.
Researchers will use it to make models of the world’s oceans and forecast wave heights and other features so the naval fleet can navigate safely.
Finally Sarah Cure and Dewayne Bremer report on some of the projects recently funded from storm recovery funding:
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development agency has answered the ongoing outcries of residents, local housing authorities, city and county officials and non-profit organizations for the urgent need for affordable housing in Hancock County.
According to a statement issued this week, HUD secretary Steve Preston accepted a $350 million plan proposed by Mississippi to produce thousands of affordable housing units for working families who continue to experience a chronic housing shortage due to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Monday formally approved the “Ground Zero Action Plan” which will direct nearly $200 million of Community Development Grants to Hancock County, Bay St. Louis, and Waveland.
“When Sen. Roger Wicker and Congressman Gene Taylor joined me in March to announce our intentions to implement a place specifically for Katrina’s ‘ground zero’ damage area, the state had no doubt about the tremendous recovery needs in Hancock County,” Gov. Haley Barbour said Monday. “We appreciate HUD officials understanding the plight of Hancock County’s people and supporting the action plan.”
The funding is part of a $5.4 billion package of Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) which Congress appropriated for Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina.
The action plan was sent to HUD as a request to direct $200 million for the needs of Hancock County. Now that the plan has been approved, the Mississippi Development Authority will administer the money.
Lee Youngblood of MDA said Monday the approval of the plan can be credited to a lot of hard work and lobbying on the part of local, state, and federal leaders.
Have you been to see the new club? It has to have a positive impact on the community to see a little bit of “normal” back in place.