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THE LAST WORD:

Chances are excellent nobody you know can point to Pascagoula, Miss., on a map.

More than 92% of the shipbuilding town of nearly 30,000 was flooded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina two years ago.

It was another televised disaster witnessed from a distance. We wondered vaguely what $81 billion in damage looks like and what it feels like to lose 1,836 people in your region.

If cameras were there, they’d illuminate the thousands still living in trailers while volunteers work to help repair their homes.

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Many of the affected are too old, ill or poor to do much of anything to fix their lives.

It takes a different kind of resolve to pitch in outside your own backyard.

But that’s just what members of the Palm Harvest Church in Costa Mesa are doing, led by Pastor Mike Decker.

Part of a 67-member group from Orange County, they’ve been working long shifts hanging dry wall and doing electrical work over the last several days.

It’s Decker’s third trip.

“We’re going to let them know we haven’t forgotten,” he said.


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