The Clarion-Ledger

After almost five years of hurricane fatigue in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing nightmare of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Mississippi Gulf Coast has been due a little good news.

Northrop Grumman confirmed last week that it will close down its Avondale, La., shipyard and is considering closing its entire division that makes warships as the Navy changes its shipbuilding priorities. The company will close its 5,000-employee Avondale facility by 2013 as it consolidates its shipyards to Pascagoula. The moves come as the shipyard winds down construction of Navy amphibious assault ships.

Northrop is the largest private employer in Mississippi with more than 10,000 workers. Obviously, the decision could have gone the other way and the loss of the Pascagoula shipyard would have been devastating to Mississippi.

At the same time, Gulf Coast residents learned that the $570 million expansion of the Port of Gulfport to better withstand hurricanes and accommodate larger ships is slated. The state has spent $27 million in the design and environmental review phase of the project, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The project is estimated to expand the port from its current footprint of about 220 acres to near 300 acres, Port Director Don Allee said.

The project will elevate the port to 25 feet above sea level to protect it from storm surge. Overall the project is expected to take six years to complete and to create more than 150 jobs.

The Port of Gulfport is the third busiest container port in the Gulf of Mexico, trailing only Houston and New Orleans.

Opponents of HUD's approval of Mississippi's diversion of $570 million from the hurricane housing program to a port expansion have fought the project in the federal courts, including the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, the Gulf Coast Fair Housing Center and individual opponents.

Yet without the port expansion, as the head of the Gulf Coast longshoreman's union has noted, current and future jobs are lost. What good is building housing if the jobs are gone? Put another way, why object to jobs creation that will put paychecks in people's pockets, especially during a recession, and allow them to afford housing?

The recession and the oil spill have exacerbated an already tough situation on the Gulf Coast. The consolidation of the Pascagoula shipyard and the expansion of the Port of Gulfport are two pieces of badly needed good news in a region that's been knocked to its knees in recent years.