Cleaning Up After Katrina
Law students, faculty, alumni do their part to help
by Natashia Gregoire

When Hurricane Katrina ravaged coastal Mississippi and Louisiana, UM law school faculty, staff and students quickly found ways to help.

Some loaded their trucks and headed south to do whatever they could. Others gathered boxes of supplies for those who had lost everything, and several opened their homes and offices to people displaced by the storm.

“Immediately after Katrina hit, I called the [Mississippi Emergency Management Agency], the Red Cross and the [Federal Emergency Management Agency], asking how we could help,” said second-year student Stewart Rutledge of Brandon. “For two days, everyone I spoke to told us that we should definitely not go down there … that we wouldn’t be allowed down there, that it would be dangerous and that there is nothing we could do.”

But Rutledge headed south anyway with a group of five buddies, including classmates Parker Green of Birmingham, Ala., and Drew Vann of Madison. “We decided to stop sympathizing from the couch,” Rutledge said. “We got up and left.”

When the group got to Gulfport, MEMA officials told them they were the first civilian volunteers from Mississippi to arrive.

“The damage was surreal,” Rutledge said. “The smell of death sat stale in the air, and there was no law. We actually arrived before the Red Cross, and we were specifically told that we could do whatever we needed to protect ourselves.”

The group spent four days giving out food and water, cutting trees and patching roofs.

“Most of the houses did not have anyone home, so those people probably got a very welcome present upon their return,” Rutledge said.

Like Rutledge, Ann Heidke of Madison, who graduated in December, said that she “jumped at the chance” to help.

“I was feeling sad and frustrated at what I saw on the news, so going to the coast to do hard, physical labor by picking up debris helped resolve those feelings,” Heidke said. “Those three days were probably the most rewarding of my life because the homeowners were so grateful for what we did.

“But I think that just listening to the victims talk about their experiences and feelings was very therapeutic for them, too—knowing that someone cared and they were not going to have to deal with this themselves.”

Heidke was amazed by the resilience and determination of the Gulf Coast residents she met.

“When disaster strikes, the human spirit’s resilience and hopefulness can be astonishing and inspiring,” she said. “Sometimes the most horrible events can bring out the best in people, and that is what I witnessed.”

A case in point is a conversation she had with “Harold” while eating lunch at the Waveland Café, then serving hot meals three times a day under a large red-and-white tent in the Wal-Mart parking lot. The meals were free to victims and volunteers.

“I sat by a stranger, a single, salty 70-year-old man, probably well-off, who was living in a tent on the concrete slab that used to be his home,” Heidke said. “In the 30 minutes during lunch, Harold and I conversed about his numerous ex-wives, his love of sailing, his philosophy on life and his absolute belief in God—not in spite of, but because of, this disaster.

“When I told him I was in law school, he chuckled and said I could represent him in his next divorce. That was priceless. Harold is making plans for his future.”

All who went to the coast to help were struck by the amount of devastation Katrina left in her wake. Among them was Rebecca Gurney, a third-year student living in Water Valley.

“We came up a hill to a railroad crossing and looked down the line at the rails,” Gurney said. “They were twisted as far as you could see, like a giant ribbon strewn across the ground. Far down the tracks, an entire house sat squarely in the middle of the railroad, like something from ‘The Wizard of Oz.’

“Actually being on the coast and seeing the devastation with my own eyes gave me a sense of the scope of the destruction that I couldn’t get watching news reports. When you look down a shoreline, and all you see for miles is sand and pylons sticking out of the surf, you realize everything is just gone. It made me really grateful for what I have.”

Just as inescapable as the destruction was the specter of death.

“I kept seeing spray-painted symbols on what was left of the houses we passed,” Gurney said. “Someone explained to me that when the military checked a house for survivors, they marked it that way. Once I could read the code, I realized we were passing homes where they had found the dead. It was upsetting to realize just how many there were.”

For students such as Kelly White, a first-year student from Long Beach, the death and destruction was worse.

“The loss is so personal and so deep that everyone I know from the area describes it as feeling similar to the sudden and tragic death of a loved one,” White said. “We have lost our histories, our landmarks and the familiar comfort of going home.

“The hurricane has affected every aspect of my life. I’ve had difficulty in school, been plagued by nightmares, lost contact with countless people and felt frustrated by my inability to do more to help.

“The grief is powerful and isolating, however, I’ve also met and quickly bonded with several people who are also from the coast. I’m more appreciative of basic luxuries like hot water and working phones. I’m less attached to material possessions that could be lost at any moment, and I have a renewed hope for humanity after witnessing the selfless acts of compassion by so many.”

Helping with the cleanup forced White to deal with a mixture of emotions. On one hand, she is grateful for the assistance of volunteers. “I saw people pulling together, forming bonds and exhibiting the most inspiring generosity.”

On the other, it left her feeling overwhelmed, powerless, lost and grief-stricken, White said. “The images on television and in print are shocking, but they do not fully prepare you for the bewilderment of personally witnessing and experiencing the extent of the devastation. When you see it, you abandon any lingering delusions of a timely recovery process.”

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First Responders

As the students mobilized, so did law faculty and staff. 

“We were really anxious to get down there,” said Joyce Whittington, the school’s career services director, who has been a part of several disaster-response groups organized by Oxford-University United Methodist Church. “I plan to go back at least once a month.”

On the first of her five trips to the coast, Whittington headed to Gulfport to find the Ferry family. Three law students joined Whittington and a group from OU Methodist on this mission. But when they arrived, even Whittington, who grew up in nearby Long Beach, was lost.

“You have no point of reference when you’re standing on someone’s roof where there used to be a street,” she said. “It was like a ghost town. It was eerie because you didn’t hear any birds; you didn’t see any dogs.”

At the time, more than three weeks after the storm, residents still had not seen any organized relief efforts, Whittington said.

“When we got there, no one had been in yet. We saw police cars and power people, not the effort you’d expect. People would stop and slow down and look at us. People were asking, ‘Where did they come from?’”

On this trip, the group stayed three days. Once they found the Ferry family, they used a small bulldozer to haul trees and debris from the family property. The family home, where most of the 11 Ferry siblings and three elderly neighbors had sought refuge, had taken water up to the roof.

“It impacted our group so greatly because all of us saw what just showing up with a Bobcat and picking up trees and grass can do,” Whittington said. “It had a profound effect.”

All the volunteers quickly learned the perils of working in a disaster area. One law student almost suffered a heat stroke, and another stepped on a rusty nail.

As for Rutledge and his group, armed with four chain saws, it wasn’t long before they had an accident. Rutledge “got lazy with a chain saw and let it fall” on his leg. He suffered a cut that was several inches deep and wide.

“It just missed the femoral artery, so I made it out fine,” Rutledge said. “I’ve now got a huge scar to tell the story.”

Other examples of the law school’s involvement in disaster-relief efforts include the efforts of law professor emeritus Guff Abbot, who traveled to the coast to offer assistance with the cleanup; registrar Conny Parham, who organized students, faculty and staff in preparing hundreds of bags of toiletries for hurricane victims; and professor Farish Percy, who volunteered at FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers on the coast.

After the damage had been assessed and it was clear that dozens of law alumni practicing in the storm-damaged areas had been displaced, Dean Samuel Davis sent a personal letter inviting them home to the law school. He offered them use of the school’s research materials and work stations in the law library, and offered to deliver documents free of charge to those affected by the storm.

The law school also assembled a group of student volunteers to provide research assistance for affected attorneys.

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Loss of a Family Hero

Judge Michael P. Mills of Oxford (JD 80), a former lecturer at the UM law school who serves the United States District Court of Northern Mississippi, will never forget what he saw upon arriving on the coast with his first load of supplies for Katrina victims.

“The coast, from the railroad to the beach, looked as though it had been stomped by an angry giant,” Mills said. “Pass Christian, Waveland and DeLisle were totally destroyed. Hundreds of young National Guard troops were working along with the Red Cross to meet immediate needs. Roads were filled with power company trucks from around the nation, crawling like ants among the debris, racing to restore power.”

Mills’ relief efforts were sparked, in part, by his friend Warner McBride of Courtland, a state legislator. McBride’s wife,

Phyllis, is from DeLisle, a small community north of Pass Christian. Tuesday, the morning after Katrina hit, Phyllis learned her father, Horace Necaise Jr., died while helping other family members climb from his house into a live oak to escape the storm’s surge. The house collapsed on him after he made sure his last child and the family dog were safely in the tree, Mills said.

“They found his body the next morning, sitting against the trunk of the tree, as though he were sleeping,” he said. “Warner, Phyllis and their sons headed to the coast with a bulldozer to help their family members and other residents begin cleanup efforts.”

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‘Court Family’ Special Delivery

Upon learning that Phyllis, many of her relatives and other people were camping at the home of Billy and Lorraine Cuevas, Mills decided to help. On Monday, Sept. 5, he had his secretary, Lisa Martin, notify the “court family” that he would be taking provisions to the coast. Court personnel and other friends quickly responded, and a pickup and trailer loaded with fuel, water, bleach, rice and canned goods were delivered with the help of Kelly York and Jeff Davis of the U.S. Marshals Service.

“Their help was essential, since we encountered more than one motorist headed north who insisted that we allow them to ‘buy’ our gasoline,” Mills said. “We made our delivery Wednesday and returned the same night.”

On Friday, Mills made another delivery with the help of Don Morgan and Bill Barrett of Batesville, Baker Martin and “Big Show” Johnson of Aberdeen, and Mills’s son Penn and Becky Morton of Oxford.

“We delivered several hundred gallons of diesel fuel and gasoline, a generator, dozens of cases of bleach, water, canned goods, dried foods and other essentials,” Mills said. “All were contributed by members of the Aberdeen and Oxford court families, including the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and other friends and associates. And Batesville attorney Richard “Flip” Phillips (JD 72) raised $1,000 from the Panola County Bar Association.”

By his second trip, electricity had been restored north of the railroad, Mills said, but at the “Cuevas Camp,” a couple dozen people were living without power, preparing food on one butane cooker in the carport.

“When Mrs. Cuevas began serving her wonderful rice and beans each evening,” Mills said, “figures would appear out of the darkness to share in her generosity.” Among them were Polly and Mike Cuevas, and Kenneth, Jesus, Juan and Joel, Warner’s friends from the Texas-Mexico border who drove up the day after the hurricane to help begin rebuilding. There was also Pierre, a Canadian, and others from New Orleans, Mills said. “All were surviving with good humor, sharing the grief and the joy of service.”

Necaise’s funeral was held two weeks after his death. “Warner described the funeral service as ‘forlorn,’” Mills said, because tombstones were toppled, and debris in the cemetery included a barge and a Volvo scattered among the graves.

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Tackling a Massive Job

Recovery cannot begin until the barge, Volvo and other rubble strewn across the coast is removed and gutted buildings are demolished.

“It’s a massive undertaking that will not happen nearly as quickly as many of the people who haven’t yet been there seem to assume,” said White. “You feel so small and inadequate when faced with such extensive damage. Progress is slow and subtle, so it can be frustrating to work so hard just to see you have barely made a dent in your task.”

It’s the prospect of a long and painful recovery that prompts the law student to plead for more help.

“So many people still believe there is nothing they can do that already isn’t being done, but that’s just not true,” White said. “Anyone can help.

“Volunteers can cook, serve food, provide child care, organize children’s activities, sort and distribute supplies, do clerical work, answer phones, respond to e-mails, clean homes, salvage victims’ belongings, tarp roofs, care for rescued animals, sit with terminally ill patients and solicit volunteers.

“Besides, most volunteers are only there for a short period, so a constant supply of replacements is needed.”

Perhaps Mills put it best: “Recovery for the coast will be a long time coming, and these good people will need our unselfish help and giving for a long, long time.”

—Contributors: Judge Michael P. Mills, Kara Givens, Natashia Gregoire and Barbara Lago

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Picking up the Pieces
‘Transient’ students find refuge, chance to resume studies at UM
by Deidra Jackson

As Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast, Nathan Yow (BBA 03) and his father hunkered down inside their Bay St. Louis home and prepared for the worst.

“In a matter of three hours, my life was completely turned around,” said Yow, a second-year student who had expected to attend Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans. “My father and I watched the wind beat down upon our house and the rain and storm surge destroy our home. In the process, I lost everything I owned, other than the clothes I was wearing.”

Before the devastating storm, Quin Breland had anticipated returning to Tulane University School of Law, where she is a second-year student. Instead, she focused her attention on her native Columbia, a Mississippi town that suffered heavy damage, and where a tree had toppled onto her family home. Meanwhile, her own apartment in New Orleans was uninhabitable for months.

In addition to confronting heavily damaged or destroyed family homes, relocating scattered relatives and friends, and accepting the loss of material objects and mementos, thousands of displaced law school students, including many whose studies were abruptly interrupted after the hurricane devastated their schools, are contending with an equally daunting reality: uncertainty about their futures.

“One of the most stressful parts about life after Katrina was that I had always planned on practicing in New Orleans,” said Darcy Decker, a native of Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish and a third-year student from Loyola University. “I worked for a great firm down there this past summer, but I don’t know what their plans are for me now. I’ve talked to friends who worked for other firms down in New Orleans, who were supposed to let people know who they would be hiring, and friends are hearing that they aren’t hiring anyone.”

As “transient” students enrolled at the UM School of Law, Decker, Breland and Yow are among an estimated 18,000 displaced New Orleans students to be taken in by other colleges around the country. In fall 2005, the UM law school accepted 12 such students, six from Loyola and six from Tulane.

“All we required was that they be in good standing,” said Samuel M. Davis, UM dean of law and holder of the Jamie Whitten Chair of Law and Government. “We then accepted all who applied here as transient students.”

As these displaced students settle into familiar academic routines at host schools, many simply want to stay where they are instead of returning to their home schools when classes are expected to resume in January. But under an agreement arranged by law deans around the country, it was made clear that law students would be admitted on a “transient” or temporary basis during the fall semester only and would not be considered transfer students, Davis said.

“I don’t want to go back at all,” said Conrad Lucas, a first-year transient law student from Berkeley Springs, W.Va. “In all fairness, Tulane and New Orleans were dealt a very difficult blow, and it will take a long time to recover. However, I don’t feel the city is safe now, and I don’t think the situation will change by January.

“Furthermore, it is apparent to me the city will not be able to support a university the size of Tulane for some time to come,” Lucas added. “I chose Tulane based on location and all the wonderful things about New Orleans that will exist again but will take time.”

In one instance, a transient freshman Tulane student who has become ensconced at the University of Virginia organized a 600-signature petition in an attempt to prevent administrators from forcing her to return to New Orleans. Despite her efforts, Virginia officials are abiding by their agreement that transient students attend host schools for the fall semester only.

But Chastity Davis, a transient second-year law student at UM from Pontotoc and Ellensburg, Wash., anticipates resuming her studies at Loyola University in the spring.

“I am looking forward to and excited about returning to Loyola,” she said.

Likewise, Breland said she is “very excited to get back to New Orleans and help rebuild the city and the school [Tulane].”

Both Tulane and Loyola are set to reopen their doors in January. Like other law schools, the UM School of Law isn’t permitting transient students to attend classes in the spring. The only exception is a first-year law student whose daily commute from his home in Mississippi to Tulane was made impossible due to downed bridges along his route, Davis said.

“The reason all the deans agreed to this arrangement is that since these are private schools that are pretty much tuition-driven, we did not want to be draining the life’s blood out of them during this time of tragedy by accepting students for any longer than necessary, and we certainly did not want to be harming them financially by taking their students as transfer students,” he added.

Decker, who attended UM as an undergraduate student, says she expects her return to Loyola to be bittersweet: “The only reason I’m ‘looking forward’ to going back is to see my friends again and to be at home. I know many seniors are especially stressed because we are going back to school so late, which means we are graduating late, and [don’t know] just how that is going to work for bar prep classes and the bar itself.”

With their futures in doubt and their stories marked by angst and uncertainty, the UM law school’s transient students seemed to have found a silver lining amid their trauma. They say they’re encouraged by helpful UM law professors and students and are appreciative of assistance extended to them by the law admissions office, which they say helped smooth their transition and “cut through all the red tape.” The aid was helpful as several expressed frustration at the lack of information they received from their home schools.

“I cannot stress enough how great my experience here has been,” said Lucas, who hopes to work in higher education and serve in an elected position in his home state of West Virginia. “The students were quick to include me, and the faculty worked with me individually to make sure that I didn’t miss out on any important principles.”

Decker, who described her transition to the UM law school as “a difficult adjustment,” lauded the concerted efforts to provide financial relief for students.

“I really appreciate everything Ole Miss has done for me,” she said. “They didn’t have to give me a scholarship to cover my out-of-state tuition, they didn’t need to raise money and give me $500 on my Express Account, but they did. I can honestly say that this is the only university I will be donating to in the future.”

Tuition was waived for Mississippi residents if they already had paid tuition to Tulane and Loyola, Davis said. Nonresidents only had to pay the in-state tuition rate.

Nathan Yow, whose brother Charles is a third-year UM law student, said faculty and students have “been more than willing to help in any way that they can.”

“On the first day of my civil procedure class, Professor [Michael] Hoffheimer introduced me to the class and asked students to help me in any way that I needed,” he said. “Dean Davis has made numerous offers to help me in any way he can. The staff here has been wonderful and has helped make my transition a lot less difficult.”

—Diedra Jackson is a UM journalism instructor.

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They Wrote the Book
Law students, faculty help update disaster legal assistance manual
by Ann Shelton and Natashia Gregoire

After Hurricane Katrina left them with little or nothing, thousands of Mississippians found themselves struggling to find basic necessities of life. At the same time, many discovered they needed law degrees to understand the legal quandaries that came with the storm.

To help hurricane victims with their legal needs, about 60 student and faculty volunteers from the UM School of Law worked with the Mississippi Bar’s Young Lawyers Division to update the Mississippi Disaster Legal Assistance Reference Manual. The manual is being used at Federal Emergency Management Agency Disaster Recovery Centers in Mississippi.

“The lawyers working at the FEMA sites have reported that the manual has been extremely helpful,” said law professor Debbie Bell, who led the task force.

More than 50 Ole Miss student volunteers, supervised by six law professors, addressed issues concerning the rights of landlords to terminate leases, what victims need to do about lost documents or records, and how to determine if insurance policies cover particular claims, Bell said.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency worked with other state agencies and FEMA to open and operate DRCs in affected areas. According to MEMA, more than 50 centers in 46 counties assisted more than 287,000 hurricane victims.

Disaster victims go to recovery centers to apply for federal assistance, check on the status of these applications or ask questions of other state agencies and volunteer organizations that may be offering some type of assistance. To help victims with legal questions, the Young Lawyers Division agreed to help get information into the centers.

Attorneys working at the centers are helping address issues such as legal guardianship of displaced children and bankruptcy protection. The comprehensive manual also deals with a wide range of legal issues concerning housing, workers’ benefits, consumer law, employment, education and other topics.

“I knew Professor Bell would be an invaluable resource to this program as volunteer lawyers handled legal questions arising out of the disaster,” said Amanda Jones (JD 96), president of the Young Lawyers Division. “I immediately accepted her offer [to help], and we explored ways to utilize her expertise and law students in the program.”

Less than a week after the hurricane, law students participating in the law school’s Civil Legal Clinic began updating and adding new material to the manual.

“[UM] law students and professors played a critical role in the delivery of free legal services to disaster victims through the Disaster Legal Assistance Program,” Jones said. 

The manual is being used only in Mississippi disaster-recovery sites because it is in accordance with Mississippi law, not Louisiana law.

“There are so many legal issues in a disaster like this that we are planning to update the manual,” Bell said. The group found that the devastation caused by Katrina created legal issues that had not been present in previous large-scale disaster situations.

“Never in the history of our state have we managed a disaster where nearly 300,000 people visited Disaster Recovery Centers for assistance,” said MEMA Executive Director Robert Latham. “To help meet the variety of needs these victims had, it took not only state and federal employees, but volunteers from allareas. The law students who helped get information to these victims are playing a vital role in all of Mississippi’s recovery efforts.”

The UM Civil Legal Clinic’s Hurricane Task Force collaborated with the Clinical Section of the American Association of Law Schools and the Clinical Legal Education Association to help in the revision of the manual.

Clinical law professors across the country were asked to participate in the project. The AALS and CLEA approved the creation of a national clinical Hurricane Task Force.

Law students and professors from Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, Yale and the universities of Georgia and New Mexico worked with the Ole Miss law school and the Mississippi Bar to fill legal gaps and to suggest new topics for the manual. In just over a week, the group produced the 150-page manual to provide answers to difficult legal questions concerning hurricane victims’ needs.

“All the volunteers put in a couple hundred hours, a substantial amount of time in just a few weeks,” Bell said.

Professors, practicing lawyers and mostly third-year law students involved in the project looked through manuals from outside sources, researched related legal issues and gathered forms to add to the manual.

“I worked with four other student volunteers to read through manuals from Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and a few other states to see what issues those states had addressed,” said Demeka Barefield, a third-year student from Bruce. “We looked to see if we had missed addressing issues in our manual, or if we could improve upon anything the other states had in their manuals to use in ours.”

The group worked collectively through a Web site designed by an Ole Miss student that allowed them to work simultaneously on documents. The manuals are available in print and online at www.law.olemiss.edu or at www.msbar.org.

In addition, the law school sponsored a Disaster Legal Assistance Training program to prepare volunteer lawyers and law students on landlord-tenant, deed of trust and insurance issues. 

Professors Bell and Farish Percy also coordinated several trips to the coast, where they and UM law students worked at recovery centers providing free legal assistance to disaster victims. 

“The students and the bar association may never know the exact number of people they’ve been able to help,” said MEMA’s Latham, “but we all know the victims they have helped are extremely grateful for their dedication.”

—Ann Shelton is a junior journalism major from Tullahoma, Tenn. She is a member of the Ole Miss women’s soccer team.

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Duty Calls
Student deployed to Meridian after Katrina happily serves
community despite disruption of his law studies
by Kara Givens

When Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the Gulf Coast Aug. 29, Tom Bittick put his third year of law school on hold to aid those in need.

As a member of the Mississippi Air National Guard, Bittick received a call to go to Meridian to help run a temporary hospital.

His semester quickly turned from concentrating on criminal procedures and corporation law classes to setting up and running food service and morale, welfare and recreation programs for the expected 750 Gulf Coast evacuees who would stay in a airplane-hangar-turned-hospital.

For the morale, welfare and recreation program, Bittick asked the Ole Miss community to help gather toiletries for evacuees. After a week in Meridian, Bittick returned to the law school to collect the shampoos, soaps, lotions, razors and other supplies collected. He was amazed to find enough to make 500 care bags.

“I’ve been very impressed with how responsive the community has been,” Bittick said. “Everybody wants to do something, and they just need a direction to row the boat.”

Law school registrar Conny Parham headed the effort to gather supplies and said the  community response was astonishing.

“The drive went great,” Parham said. “We were very pleased. People were very generous.”

After two weeks in Meridian, no evacuees had come to the hospital, so the care bags were turned over to the American Red Cross in Meridian and were shipped south to aid hurricane victims.

Having no evacuees come to the hospital was anticlimactic for Bittick, but he said he was relieved to miss only two weeks of school. By the end of the semester, Bittick had made up the 40 hours he missed at his internship with the U.S. attorney general’s office in Oxford.

Hurricane Katrina is not the first time Bittick has had to be away from friends and family to serve his country. A former Marine, he served seven active years and participated in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He enlisted in the Mississippi Air National Guard in 1997 and is a first lieutenant. More recently, he was a detective with the Meridian Police Department.

Bittick had no reservations about serving his country after Katrina, even though he had no idea how long he would be away from his three sons.

“I love serving the community,” Bittick said. “I’m a public service kind of guy. I like to help people.”

—Kara Givens is a senior journalism major and an intern in UM’s Office of Media and Public Relations.

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Space Law in Action
Nations come together to provide satellite information in wake of disasters
by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz

Hurricane Katrina raised the decadeslong attempts to integrate Earth observations operations on a global scale to a new, historic level. Earth observations refers to collecting data about the Earth by monitoring it from space by satellites. This data is combined with data gathered by aircraft, balloons and other platforms to provide as complete a survey as possible.

Earth observations history was made when, for the first time, the United States activated on its own behalf the Charter on Cooperation to Achieve the Coordinated Use of Space in the Event of Natural or Technological Disasters, also referred to as the Disasters Charter. Its purpose is to provide a unified space-data acquisition and delivery system to those affected by natural or human-made disasters. It was declared operational in 2000, and the space, weather or disaster response agencies in the satellite operating nations of Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Europe, France, India, Japan, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States are members. Each member has committed resources to support the charter, which allows a participant’s civil protection authority to call a single number and request mobilization of space and related ground resources to obtain data and information for a disaster. The charter is substantially moving the world closer to a more coordinated, systematic monitoring of the Earth.

The idea behind the charter is not new. The value of consistent, worldwide monitoring was recognized as far back as the 1970s and ’80s, when the science and space communities first envisioned a coordinated, integrated, long-term, global system of satellites and sensor-carrying platforms to observe the Earth as a whole. Such a system could routinely acquire data that could be changed into information used to address environmental and global habitability issues. The old idea obtained new life in the 1999 Vienna Declaration produced by the U.N. conference UNISPACE III. In it, the international community again recommended the development of a comprehensive worldwide environmental monitoring strategy. This recommendation catalyzed the charter.

In 2003, leaders of the Group of Eight (seven of the world’s largest industrialized democracies plus Russia) agreed on an action plan designed to care for the environment while growing national economies. Earth Observation Summits were held in Washington, D.C., in 2003, in Tokyo in 2004 and in Brussels in 2005. The purpose was to promote and adopt a 10-year implementation plan to develop one or more comprehensive, coordinated and sustained Earth observation systems.

As with many ideas that require the leadership of nations, there are competing models of how the system, or systems, ought to develop. Three overlapping models are emerging: the initially U.S.-led Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the European-led Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) and the work of the U.N. Space Technology Disaster Management (STDM). For now, it has been accepted that GMES is the European contribution to GEO, which transitioned from an ad hoc to a permanent body in 2005 and adopted an implementation plan. The U.N. General Assembly has adopted a resolution that a study should be conducted by an ad hoc group of experts on the possibility of creating an international space coordination entity to support disaster management. All three groups acknowledge the importance of and the intent to build upon the Disasters Charter.

Details of these efforts are complex and far-reaching. There is a lot to be worked out, and questions remain:
• How will these efforts be funded and by whom?
• What data policies ought to prevail?
• What long-term governance structures are appropriate?
• Should a security component be included, and, if so, how is “security” defined?
• How does a security function interact with an environmental function?
• Does “security” and “environment” mean “environmental security” or should an environmental mission stand apart from security?

Despite these questions, the trend is clear. In the era of globalization, Earth observation systems operations are transitioning from cooperation to integration, albeit slowly and with difficulty. A prime example, in addition to the efforts of GEO, GMES and STDM, is the move by Europe and the United States from their Initial Joint Polar System to their International Joint Polar System. Recent activation of the Disasters Charter by the U.S is another major step in that direction.

However, as the politics and economics of these efforts evolve, particular note should be taken of the Disasters Charter in action. The fact is that since 2000,

satellite-operating nations have changed their satellite-tasking priorities 84 times to provide timely, critical data at no cost to nations suffering a wide variety of disasters, including hurricanes, floods, oil spills, earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions.

Activation of the Disasters Charter by the United States benefited it and significantly advanced the charter’s evolution. By activating the charter for Katrina, the U.S. received 47 free satellite images from a French satellite company that would have otherwise had to be purchased, free Canadian data in excess of the contracted amount and data from India that were unavailable except by activating the charter. Due to the landfall overlap by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, data from Katrina was already available for use in Rita, creating double utility and value. By activating the charter on its own behalf, the U.S. joins Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and other industrialized nations that also have activated it. Together, they have demonstrated that in the face of nature’s worst, well-organized technical assets create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Developing long-term integrated Earth observation operations is an expensive, lengthy process. The Disasters Charter has irrevocably moved that process along in a historic way. Here in Mississippi, we are learning that recovery from Katrina is also an expensive, lengthy process. Activating the charter on behalf of the United States—and therefore, the people of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas—is an important step for both processes.

—Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Space Law and director of the National Remote Sensing and Space Law Center. She has been teaching space law since 1987 and is a member of the faculty at The University of Mississippi School of Law. This article first appeared in the international space newspaper Space News.

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