On Feb. 22, 2020, a breach in a carbon pipeline owned by Denbury Inc. left 49 people near Satartia, Miss. hospitalized, and about 300 residents were forced to evacuate.
A Huffington Post story last year shed light on the chaos and its aftermath. The pipeline burst unleashed a cloud of green fog, along with an odor like “rotten eggs.” People nearby struggled to breath, with some collapsing in their homes, the article reported.
In May, over two years since the incident, the federal agency in charge of pipeline safety — the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA — released its findings from an investigation.
Confirming Denbury’s account of the event, PHMSA found that the pipeline broke from heavy pressure caused by movement in the soil after persisting heavy rain.
But PHMSA also found that Denbury had, among other errors, failed to prepare for such natural hazards, failed to alert local emergency officials about the incident, and failed to educate nearby residents about the pipeline before the breach.
In its report, the agency proposed a civil penalty of $3.9 million against Denbury, which the company can either accept or contest.
As a result of the pipeline failure, PHMSA also announced it would begin a new rulemaking to update safety standards.
“I recently visited with the first responders in Satartia to hear firsthand of the pipeline failure so that we can improve safety and environmental protections for CO2 pipelines and work to protect communities from experiences like this,” PHMSA Deputy Administrator Tristan Brown said in the May 26 release. “The safety of the American people is paramount and we’re taking action to strengthen CO2 pipeline safety standards to better protect communities, our first responders, and our environment.”
Specifically, PHMSA said it will update standards for emergency preparedness and response, as well as alerting pipeline operators to better anticipate hazards from natural causes like what happened in Satartia.
A new program intended to graduate more nurses in Mississippi will create more student debt and do little to fix Mississippi’s mounting nursing shortage this year, financial aid experts say. It would also put the state on the hook for tracking down nurses who default on the loans they’ve borrowed.
The state is lacking about 3,000 nurses, about one-fifth of Mississippi’s entire nursing workforce, according to a recent survey by the Mississippi Hospital Association.
The Nursing and Respiratory Therapy Education Incentive Program, proposed by Speaker Pro-tem Jason White, R-West, was one of a slew of programs lawmakers created this session to address the nursing shortage. It’s a forgivable loan program through which nursing students can get loans they won’t have to pay back if they work in Mississippi for five years after graduation.Nursing students who don’t hold up their side of the deal will have to pay the loans back with interest.
Lawmakers allocated $6 million in American Rescue Plan funds to the program. The bill doesn’t spell out how many nurses can get a loan each year, or the amount of loans an individual nursing student will be able to receive.
Hospital officials say they desperately need more nurses now, but this program won’t put new nurses at patients’ bedsides for years – they’ll have to graduate first. And even though the program was supposed to take effect July 1, the state agency tasked with implementing it says it won’t be able to dole out loans until next year due to the complexity of administering forgivable loans.
“We have a lot of questions about the program, how it should work, how it can work,” Jennifer Rogers, the director of the Office of Student Financial Aid, said at a recent Post-Secondary Board meeting.
The new program is similar to ones Mississippi already has on the books for nurses but that lawmakers haven’t funded for years. All five of thoseprograms have better terms for student borrowers, typically requiring nurses to work in the state for one or two years after graduation to get their loans forgiven, instead of five years.
Lawmakers, flush with stimulus dollars this session, funded those programs for the first time since 2015. Rogers told the Post-Secondary Board she is concerned about offering the new loan program to students considering it has worse terms.
“If it’s only one-time money, and we made one-year awards this year and then these students are on the hook for five years of service to the state, is that ethical, when we’ve got these other programs?” She asked. “There’s just lots of questions.”
OSFA wanted lawmakers to pass a different program, the Hospital Nurses and Respiratory Therapist Retention Loan Repayment Program, that was proposed in the Senate. That program, which was written in consultation with Rogers’ office, would have actually erased student debt in Mississippi by repaying existing loans on behalf of nursing students already working in the field. It was also intended to fix the nursing shortage. But House lawmakers refused to negotiate in the final weeks of the legislative session; the bill died in conference.
White, the sponsor of the House bill, did not return Mississippi Today’s request for comment. On the House floor in early February, Rep. Sam Mims, R-McComb, who chairs the House public health committee, called White’s program a “long-term solution” to the nursing shortage in Mississippi.
“Our goal is to create more nurses, and that’s what this legislation does,” Mims said. “This could be a long-term fix to get more nurses in our state, because we do know without the nurses … that’s why you’re seeing no beds available at our hospitals.”
OSFA will likely propose rules for the program in September. The Institutions of Higher Learning is also checking if this program is an allowable use of ARPA dollars, which need to be spent by the end of 2026.
Mississippi has used various loan programs since the 1940s to encourage people to go into teaching and nursing and other lower-paid health care professions. These programs, in theory, can fix labor shortages by using student debt as a tool to herd borrowers into the field that needs college-educated workers.
Through forgivable loan programs, states aim to accomplish that by making loans that students can repay by working in a particular industry for a period of time. These types of programs are essentially grants that convert to loans if a student doesn’t fulfill their service obligation, which is why researchers sometimes call them “groans,” said Mark Wiederspan, the director of a state financial aid office in Iowa.
To administer “groans,” the state essentially has to become a bank. Students sign a promissory note and, if they’re unable to pay the loans back, the state sends them to collections. Even though Mississippi hasn’t awarded new forgivable loans since 2015, OSFA is still collecting about $12 million in debt from 1,500 borrowers who’ve defaulted, according to its recent annual report.
With loan repayment programs – the program OSFA preferred – the state doesn’t make new loans but tries to attract workers to an industry by promising to forgive their existing student debt. These programs aim to achieve a similar goal but don’t create new opportunities for students to take on state-sponsored debt, which is one reason why states increasingly prefer this type of program.
“If you think student loans are a problem for students at all, then giving them an additional loan they might not be able to pay off doesn’t seem like a solution,” said Sandy Baum, who studies higher education finance for the Urban Institute. “The solution should be targeted at the loans they’re already taking.”
The Senate bill would have paid up to $15,000 of student debt – up to $3,000 a year for up to five years – for nurses who work in Mississippi. The bill would have awarded loans to 150 new registered nurse applicants, 50 new practical nurse applicants, and 25 respiratory therapists each year, Sen. Rita Potts-Parks, R-Corinth, explained at a committee hearing in early January.
“It’sto attempt to address the health care professional shortage, particularly the nurses, LPN, RN, respiratory therapists,” she said. “I think all of us get emails on a weekly or daily basis concerning the need from our hospitals and our universities as well.”
Another important difference between the two types of programs, Wiederspan said, is that loan forgiveness programs put more money in the pockets of colleges and universities, because students get the loans to pay for school. Loan repayment programs, on the other hand, are essentially a “bonus” for graduates.
Both types of loan programs have an effect on labor shortages, Wiederspan said, but more research is needed to determine how and why. As a professor at Arizona State University in 2018, Wiederspan reviewed studies of these programs and found that there is “no strong evidence to suggest individuals are enticed into choosing a particular occupation or college major because of the financial support.”
“The idea that you could go be a nurse someplace where you’re gonna make three times as much money, or you can go to Mississippi and they’re gonna help you pay off your loans? That may influence some people, but it doesn’t seem like a miracle cure to the nursing shortage,” she said.
A 2018 report from the Congressional Research Service backs up Baum’s point – it found that “despite these programs’ providing a financial inducement for individuals to enter a specific field that is relatively lower paying … the amount received is generally far less than the overall lifetime earnings gap.”
The report recommends policymakers ask three questions before implementing these types of loan programs: Will people go into a field or industry without the incentive of a loan program? Is student debt “the only or most substantial impediment” to going into that industry? Do these programs encourage students to take on more student debt than they otherwise would have?
“You’re asking people to make different life choices because of this and making it a little bit easier to go the way you want them to,” Baum said. “But it just seems so obvious that as long as wages are low, it’s gonna have a limited impact than something that’s like this little bandaid.”
In lieu of forgivable loan programs, states are increasingly moving to loan repayment programs. Before this session, Mississippi seemed to be doing the same.
In 2014, Wiederspan found the state had the most forgivable loan programs of any in the country.But last year, the state made the switch for teaching, another understaffed industry. Many teacher loan forgiveness programs were disbanded and replaced with the William Winter Teacher Loan Repayment Program.
These programs also do not address the growing cost of higher education in Mississippi, said Tom Harnisch, the vice president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. He said lawmakers should look at policies that make it easier for students to afford college and don’t create more student debt.
“Not to say that these programs don’t have benefits to participants, I’m sure they do, but there are more systemic issues that lawmakers need to look at,” he said. “We need to get back to funding higher education as a public good.”
Mississippi Today’s Adam Ganucheau and Bobby Harrison break down the 3rd Congressional District runoff between incumbent Rep. Michael Guest and challenger Michael Cassidy, as well as the 4th Congressional District runoff between incumbent Rep. Steven Palazzo and challenger Mike Ezell.
HATTIESBURG — Mike Bianco and a couple of his star players were holding court Sunday in the postgame press conference after Ole Miss finished its 10-0, 5-0 blitzkrieg of Southern Miss in the Hattiesburg Super Regional.
Most questions were directed to Bianco, the 22-year Rebel head coach, and most questions were about what the team’s resurgence has meant to him in a season when he faced unprecedented criticism from his own fans.
Rick Cleveland
At one point, Bianco clearly wanted the line of questioning to go another direction.
“It’s not about me, I mean that,” Bianco said. “I didn’t throw, catch or hit a ball out there. It’s about these guys …”
He’s right. This is college baseball. It should be about the players. It should be all about the spectacular Sunday pitching performance of 19-year-old Tupelo left-hander Hunter Elliott, who pitched like a 29-year-old Major League veteran. It should be about Tim Elko, the still-playing Ole Miss baseball legend, who came back for his senior year because he wanted to go to Omaha — and now he will. It should be about Justin Bench, another senior and the Rebels’ best defender at any number of positions who pounded out three hits against superb Southern Miss pitching.
But today, especially today, the story is Bianco, the winningest coach in Ole Miss history — and a class act — who was roundly criticized on social media, fan websites and from the grandstands. This wasn’t a vocal minority. This was the majority of a fan base.
Bianco says he doesn’t read what he calls “the noise.”
“I’ve learned a long time ago I can’t live in that world,” Bianco said. “I know it’s out there but I try to stay away from it, and I think I do a good job of it.”
Most everybody else reads it and hears it. And all that negativism filtered all the way down to Hattiesburg where Scott Berry, the Southern Miss coach, heard it and was dumbfounded by it.
“Whenever (Bianco) decides it’s time to go, they ought to build a statue at that stadium for all he has achieved,” Berry said. “He’s one of the best around, and he always does it with class.”
This was a bitter defeat for Berry, mind you. His team won 47 games, set attendance records, hosted a regional and then a super regional. But still, he was genuinely happy for Bianco.
“Obviously, we wanted to be the ones going to Omaha,” said Berry, another coach who oozes class. “But if it couldn’t be us, I’m glad it is them. That’s a classy program. I’ll be pulling for them to win the whole thing.”
Bianco and his staff do deserve much of the credit for keeping the Ole Miss ship afloat when a team ranked No. 1 in the nation early in the season fell to 7-14 in the SEC at one point. The question wasn’t whether Ole Miss would make the NCAA Tournament. That seemed utterly impossible. The question was whether they could even win enough games to make the SEC Tournament field and whether they would even finish with a winning record.
Bianco deflected any praise for the turn-around to his senior leaders, to his staff, to the starting pitching prowess of the one-two punch of Dylan Delucia and Elliott and to his coaching staff. He even mentioned a talk former Rebel and Major Leaguer Chris Coughlan gave to his team prior to the Missouri series in May.
Coughlan’s message, said Bianco: “He challenged the guys not to listen to the noise. He said don’t you dare let what people are saying on social media take your mind off your goals. Your job is to win the national championship.”
That remains a distinct possibility, truly incredible when you think back to May 1 when the Rebels had dropped to 24-19 overall and 7-14 in the league.
Here’s the deal: College baseball, as has been written countless times, is all about getting hot at the right time. That time is now, and Ole Miss is a red-hot team. The Rebels have won five straight games against top-shelf opposition. They beat two future professional pitchers here, two guys who have been invited to try out for the U.S. National collegiate team Bianco will coach later this summer.
The Rebels are hitting well, pitching well, fielding well. They appear to have genuinely good team chemistry. Now that Tennessee has been vanquished, the College World Series is wide open.
Stranger things have happened. Heck, stranger things already have. Maybe they’ll start on that Bianco statue later this summer.
If the state chapter of the NAACP and U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson had gotten their way, little known Naval pilot Michael Cassidy of Meridian could be the Republican nominee for the 3rd District U.S. House seat right now — or at least much closer to being the nominee.
Cassidy won more votes in the three-candidate field during last week’s Republican primary election than did incumbent 3rd District U.S. Rep. Michael Guest, but did not garner the majority of the vote needed to avoid a runoff. The runoff will be June 28.
While Cassidy won the most votes districtwide, Guest, a resident of Rankin County, defeated Cassidy in the metro Jackson counties of Hinds, Madison and Rankin. During congressional redistricting earlier this year, Thompson, the lone Democratic member of the state’s congressional delegation, and the state chapter of the NAACP proposed the portion of Hinds County in the 3rd District and some of south Madison County in the 3rd District be moved to Thompson’s 2nd District.
The Legislature must redraw congressional districts every 10 years based on the U.S. Census to ensure the population of each district is evenly distributed. If state lawmakers had accepted the proposal of Thompson and the NAACP, it would have placed Guest perilously close to losing outright to Cassidy in last week’s Republican primary.
Of course, if Hinds and a portion of Madison County had been removed from the 3rd District, additional people would have had to be added from other areas to make up for the population loss. So it is difficult to say with certainty what the final impact on the election results would have been if all of Hinds and a portion of Madison had been moved from the 3rd District to the 2nd District.
Most likely, the reconfiguration of the 3rd District under the NAACP/Thompson plan still would have resulted in a runoff, but Cassidy would have been closer to avoiding a runoff and would have made life even more uncomfortable for Guest.
At any rate, Guest finds himself in the unenviable position of being an incumbent facing a runoff election. Conventional wisdom is that if an incumbent cannot capture a majority vote in the first election, it will be difficult to do so in a runoff. But the 2014 Senate election in Mississippi proves that it is not an impossible task for an incumbent.
In the 2014 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat in Mississippi, little known state Sen. Chris McDaniel garnered 49.5% of the vote and was less than 3,500 votes short of capturing a majority and upending longtime incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran in the Republican primary.
After that near upset, much of the Republican establishment went to work in support of Cochran, who was considered an icon in Mississippi politics. In addition, many believed Cochran’s seniority in Washington was too valuable for the state to lose.
Normally in runoff elections, the total number of people voting is significantly less than in the first election. But in the Cochran/McDaniel runoff, almost 65,000 more people voted than in the first election. With the large number of additional people coming to the polls, Cochran retained the seat with 51% of the vote.
At the time, McDaniel complained and even filed a lawsuit, claiming people who normally vote Democratic came to the polls to cast a ballot for Cochran in the runoff. Many of these people, he said, were from the city of Jackson or most likely African Americans who normally vote Democratic.
Indeed, anecdotal evidence did indicate that many Black Mississippians, who normally do vote Democratic, weighed all options and decided that they would prefer Cochran over McDaniel, a conservative firebrand, so they went to the polls to vote for the incumbent in the runoff.
McDaniel complained that such a practice is not fair. But in reality, under Mississippi law, people who did not vote in the first primary election can cast a ballot in the runoff.
This past Tuesday, about 50,000 people voted in the 3rd District Republican primary. In the 2018 Republican primary when Guest first was elected, 65,207 people voted.
For the June 28 runoff, Guest and much of the Republican establishment will be looking to find some of those people who voted in 2018 but did not in 2022 to come out and vote for Guest.
In the 2014 Senate runoff, Cochran and his forces found many of those new voters for the runoff in metro Jackson. More than likely, Guest also will be looking hard in metro Jackson for new voters.
But if Thompson and the NAACP had prevailed with their redistricting plan, there would be fewer votes for Guest to pick up in metro Jackson.
HATTIESBURG — The Ole Miss Rebels won only seven of their first 21 SEC games. They were one and done in the SEC Tournament. They dropped from No. 1 in the nation early in the season to far out of the various college baseball polls.
Many Ole Miss fans were openly calling for Coach Mike Bianco’s dismissal, saying the game had passed him by. Most bracket experts thought the Rebels had little hope, if any, of receiving an at large bid to the NCAA Tournament.
Rick Cleveland
And now, Bianco’s Rebels stand one victory away from the College World Series at Omaha, and that victory could come Sunday.
The Bible had Lazarus. College baseball has Ole Miss.
The Rebels dispatched the Southern Miss Golden Eagles, the No. 11 seed in the tournament and winners of 47 games, 10-0 on Saturday to win the first game of the Hattiesburg Super Regional. The two teams square off again today in the oven Pete Taylor Park becomes this time of the year. Simply put, if Ole Miss wins, Ole Miss goes to Omaha. If Southern Miss wins, they’ll play again Monday at a time to be determined.
The announced attendance was 5,474, of which more than 4,500 were Southern Miss fans. Those gold-clad fans, loud to begin with, were drowned out in the end by the Ole Miss cheering section down the first baseline. The Hotty Toddies had plenty to cheer.
Ole Miss had only one anxious moment. The Rebels led 3-0 when Southern Miss loaded the bases with two outs in the bottom of the fifth. Reece Ewing yanked a Dylan DeLucia pitch down the right field line that cleared the fence right at the foul pole. Foul or fair? Grand slam or loud foul?
Ewing clearly thought it was fair. DeLucia? “Honestly, I didn’t know if it was foul or fair,” DeLucia said. “Sure am glad it was foul.”
It was so close plate umpire Linus Baker called for a video review. After a long delay, the call on the field was upheld. DeLucia, who was only splendid for the Rebels, fanned Ewing with a wicked slider on the next pitch — by far the biggest pitch of the game.
And then Ole Miss scored seven runs in the sixth, and what what looked for a moment like it might be a 4-3 game with Southern Miss leading became a 10-0 Rebel runaway.
Best evidence that the umpires got it right? This: There wasn’t a full-scale riot in the Right Field Roost where hundreds of the most rabid of Southern Miss fans sit, cheer, eat barbecue and have been known to consume more than a few adult beverages.
Your dutiful reporter went right to the source for conclusive evidence. Said a gold-clad fan, between gulps of a Miller Lite, “It was a foul ball — dammit.”
Ole Miss proceeded to do what LSU couldn’t do last weekend. The Rebels beat Southern Miss right-hander Hurston Waldrep, who Bianco said “is going to be a Big Leaguer. He’s terrific.”
Waldrep struck out 12 Rebels in just five innings. But Ole Miss was patient enough at the plate to draw four walks and opportunistic enough to touch Waldrep up for six hits. The Ole Miss legend, also known as Tim Elko, produced two of the hits and knocked in three of the runs.
Meanwhile, DeLucia did what he has been doing since mid-April, which is string zeroes across the scoreboard. Said Bianco of DeLucia, “He not only gives a good chance to win, he gives us a great chance to win. He has pretty much saved our season.”
Said Southern Miss coach Scott Berry, “We had our chances, but that young man really stepped up for them. He pitched really well.”
DeLucia went 5.2 innings, throwing 108 pitches and allowing only four hits. Jack Dougherty then pitched 3.1 innings of hitless relief. This was a Super Regional billed by many as Ole Miss’ superb hitting against Southern Miss’ exceptional pitching. DeLucia and Dougherty, at least for one game, have rewritten that script. Ole Miss can pitch it, too.
We’ve come to expect such heroics from the likes of Elko and DeLucia. But to win at this time of the year in college baseball, a team needs help from where you don’t necessarily expect it. Enter little-used third baseman Garrett Wood, who hit a run-scoring double, scored a run himself and walked three times. Not bad for a guy known as a defensive replacement.
Of Wood, Bianco said, “It’s really cool. … Good things happen to good people and that is certainly the case here. He’s one of the most popular guys on our team. Everybody loves him. He’s always upbeat, always a smile on his face.”
Anybody who believes this Super Regional is a done deal now hasn’t been paying attention. Southern Miss was in a worse situation last weekend in the Hattiesburg Regional when, after a Saturday night loss to LSU, the Golden Eagles had to come back and win three games in two days and beat LSU twice in the process.
“We’ve had our backs against the wall before,” Berry said. ”We’re not ready to be done with this season. We have the pitching to still win this thing. We’ve just got to start hitting.”
Somebody asked Bianco if his Rebels might be looking ahead to Omaha. Bianco smiled as if break into laughter.
“Really,” he answered. “I don’t think they are looking ahead to anything. They know what they are playing for. You don’t have to remind them.”
A telehealth company focused on providing affordable access to birth control is expanding into Mississippi next week.
Twentyeight Health is based in New York and currently works in 33 states. Mississippi will bring that number to 34.
According to co-founder Amy Fan, over 200,000 women in Mississippi are living in contraceptive deserts, or counties where the number of health care providers offering the full range of birth control methods is not enough to meet the needs of the women eligible for publicly funded contraception.
To use Twentyeight Health, patients first fill out a medical questionnaire online that recommends birth control options. They are then connected with an out-of-state physician who is licensed to practice in Mississippi. The physician writes the prescription, and their birth control is then mailed to them discreetly.
The patient can message the physician who wrote their prescription or schedule a phone consultation at any point at no additional cost to answer any questions they might have.
“That’s actually something really important to our users, whether they’re living with roommates, or live in a multi-generational household, that they’re still able to engage with clinicians remotely, but in a way that feels private and discreet for them,” said Fan.
Fan said it’s important for women to have access to doctors who look like them. All of Twentyeight’s doctors are women, and 75% are women of color. Nearly half speak Spanish.
The company charges an annual $20 doctor evaluation fee to use its service. The birth control itself typically costs nothing if the patient has insurance, including Medicaid, but there is a low-cost out-of-pocket option for uninsured patients.
In Mississippi, Twentyeight’s services will only be available to patients ages 18 and up.
Fan said that they’ve wanted to bring the company to Mississippi for awhile, but it has taken time to get the licenses needed to operate in the state.
Mississippi law requires all health insurance and employee benefit plans to cover telemedicine services to the same extent they would an in-person visit.
Fan said Mississippi has the potential to be a high-impact service area for the company due to the lack of health care access, including sexual and reproductive health care.
“Unfortunately, Mississippi has one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancies,” Fan said. “And if we’re able to provide birth control more in a more readily accessible way, hopefully individuals who do not want to either start or grow their family at this moment are able to have control over their own timelines.”
