Gene Taylor: “let me being by thanking my colleagues in the Mississippi and Louisiana delegations for cosponsoring this. Mr. Speaker…”

“let me being by thanking my colleagues in the Mississippi and Louisiana delegations for cosponsoring this. Mr. Speaker, I could spend the remainder of this year's session naming south Mississippians who on an individual basis rose to the occasion and performed heroic deeds. Tonight we want to thank the employees of the Stennis Space Center for the phenomenal job they did in Hancock County, a county that 90 percent of the homes were either destroyed outright or severely damaged, a county where the vast majority of it was underwater for at least a substantial portion of the day. Mr. Speaker, one of the interesting sidelights, my colleague and friend, Congressman Hall mentioned, the Stennis Space Center runway, a 10,000 runway that was open the next day after the storm in order to bring in vital supplies. What the Congressman probably would never guess is that the person who opened that runway was the 13-year-old son of the airport manager, a young man by the name of Billy Cotter. His family had lost their home in Bay St. Louis. Knowing that the home was gone, they had gone out to the Stennis Space Center, moved into the dad's office. The dad's office had taken about waist-deep water, had about 6 inches of mud on the floor.”