While much attention has been focused on the damage to New Orleans, the meetings and tourism infrastructure of the Mississippi Gulf Coast region took a much harder hit from Hurricane Katrina. “It's worse here,” says Stephen Richer, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau. “There wasn't as much wind and water damage in the French Quarter or the Garden District, which is pretty much the tourism product. Ours is devastated.”

One-third of the homes and businesses in the area were severely damaged, including many hotels and the 13 floating casinos on the waterfront. More than half of the barges broke loose and traveled, some as far as a mile, says Richer. The President Casino traveled half a mile before landing on top of the Holiday Inn, crushing it. The 3,600-square-foot CVB offices were also wiped out.

Of the region's 18,000 hotel rooms, about 2,000 are functioning. The casino hotels, which are on land, all sustained damage and are closed except for two, the Isle of Capri and the Imperial Palace, which are housing emergency workers and are not open to the public. Inland, dozens of smaller hotels that were not casino-related are gone.

At press time, Gov. Haley Barbour had just signed a bill allowing all 13 casinos to rebuild on land. Gambling was legalized in the state in 1990, but the casinos were restricted to barges in Mississippi waters; now they will be able to build up to 800 feet inland, and many observers say this could lead to major changes in the state's tourism industry.

The Mississippi Coast Coliseum and Convention Center was filled with 51 inches of water and sustained damage estimated at $20 million. Officials had been expected to break ground on an expansion in early 2006, but that has been put on hold. The plan is to rebuild the convention center, but funding is a major issue, as insurance covers only $12 million, and additional funding that would come from the room tax is not there.

“Right now the biggest issue is that our tax base has eroded temporarily,” says Richer. The casinos alone generated $500,000 in state taxes per day; without that, no money is coming in to pay for government services, including the CVB. A bill before Congress would provide operating expenses for cities and counties in the area.

Meetings will be out of commission for at least six months, says Richer. After that, he expects some venues will be able to support meetings, and a year from now, even more. Eighty percent of the golf courses in the area will be ready to play in January 2006, so he hopes that golf will begin attracting visitors to the area. “We're not sitting here pulling our hair out. We're strategizing and working every day to make things better,” he says.

If there is a silver lining to this tragedy, it's that local officials have an opportunity to rebuild the destination for both residents and visitors. Gov. Barbour has appointed a commission to redevelop the area. “We're beginning to talk about things like hotels, retail, and entertainment clusters around attractions, particularly hotel clusters, which we wouldn't have had an opportunity to do under the previous product,” explains Richer. “We'd like to make it a more user-friendly convention environment.”

But right now, the job is cleanup and repair. Millions of cubic yards of debris were created by the storm; as of press time in late October, about 14 percent had been cleaned up. “We've got a lot of rebuilding to do, but thankfully we've got a lot really wonderful help coming from around America. We'll be back — sooner rather than later, and better.”