Hurricane business coverage

The Mobile Register has had some excellent coverage of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the business world in the area.

In today’s paper, the top business stories were on how the hurricane could spur a demand for construction workers in the area and potentially hurt home building in the Southeast as the workers move to the areas stricken by the hurricane. In addition, there was a nice story about how hotels in south Alabama were now glutted with people from Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as insurance adjusters and other workers coming into the area to help with the recovery effort.

On Wednesday, the paper had a nice story on how the business at the Alabama state docks would be affected by the damage, as well as the obvious story about the dollar impact on insurance companies.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune’s business staff has been helping tell the massive story in that city as well. One of the stories today was on how there were not enough electrical workers in the area to help restore power to those who had outages. Another story pointed out that the east New Orleans plant where the fuel tanks are built for the space shuttle had survived without serious demage.

A story in the Times-Pic on Tuesday examined the impact to the oil companies. Many of them have drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast.

K.A. Turner, the business editor in Mobile, and Charles Crumpley, the business editor in New Orleans, are both excellent journalists who are likely under a lot of stress right now. That makes the performance of their staffs even more impressive.

If you’ve got other examples of good hurricane coverage that you’ve seen in papers, please forward them along and we’ll post them.