The Mailman Delivers! (In Hurricane Stricken Mississippi)

[Nbadan]

Karl "The Mailman" Malone is still delivering, no matter what the weather.

The former NBA all-star and a crew from his logging company in Arkansas spent two weeks in Pascagoula, Miss., hauling away debris left by Hurricane Katrina.

"Everything about this just felt right," Malone says. "My mom died two years ago, and in our last conversation, she told me that one day I would have to step up on a grand scale and help people. I knew this was it."

Malone, whose team cleared 114 lots, said he brought 18 vehicles to Pascagoula, including a backhoe, three bulldozers and several RVs for him and his crew.

Malone, 42, an experienced truck driver and logger who was born in Bernice, La., spent 12 hours a day behind the wheel of his heavy machinery.

"We started every day at seven in the morning and didn't quit until we got it done," he says. When Malone arrived, he says he ran into resistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Army Corps of Engineers officials who said he wasn't authorized to bring his machinery into the area to clear private property.

"There was a lot of red tape, and I ain't got time for that," he says. "I found out that if you're going to do something good, just go ahead and do it." Bob Anderson, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, says FEMA and the corps by law could only allow approved contractors to clear debris and that only government agencies could work on "public rights of way."

Malone says landowners were told that debris had to be moved out to the street before it could be hauled away. "How is a landowner who just lost everything going to pay $15,000 or $20,000 to have a lot cleared? I mean, there were two or three houses on top of one another in some places."

This put Malone in the middle of territorial disputes with private contractors.

"We had one guy come up to us and tell us to go to another neighborhood and that these people could afford to pay," Malone says. "I told him, 'Why should they pay? They just lost everything.' "

Yahoo News

Look at Karl Malone battling FEMA. Maybe Malone deserves another chance at a ring after all.

[Hook Dem]

He is doing penance for all of his bad deeds Dan! You could learn from this!