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AMILLE: 20 Years Later
Page 11
PHOTOS BY BOB HUBBARD OF WAVELAND
Camille wrecked the gazebo in Bay St. Louis, top. Even the concrete steps were destroyed, below.
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onhnuea from Page Page 8
■ed the hardest blow to the com-unities of Bay St. Louis, aveland and Pass Christian. People and places were smashed ’ a 25-foot storm surge and an iprecedented barometric low essure of 26.61 inches. Waveland Mayor John Longo Jr. id hurricane force winds pounded
5	city for 12 hours, from 6 p.m. inday, Aug. 17 until 6 a.m. onday.
“I wondered if we would ever cover,” he said.
“There just wasn’t any business this city after the storm. Three ars later we went to LiT Ray’s i celebrated with Dixie Beer and id chicken when we first topped $100-a-month return from the ite on our share of the sales tax, ” said.
Hiat year — 1971 — Waveland it only $12,000 in sales taxes to : state. In 1989, Waveland sent lost $700,000.
‘It’s hard to believe, but out on t highway (U.S. 90) nearly ev-’ piece of ground is being used
I	have had inquiries from al-st every large national chain king to locate in Waveland, ” said igo who was serving as mayor tem in 1969 and who now is in 15th year as mayor.
It took until 1979 for the com-nity just to stand up on its feet, the shock to wear off. The mup was over, and we went x commercial development,” igo said.
shoes sold here
Tie mayor said there was only supermarket in the Bay-reland area in 1979. There was •lace to go out and eat, he said, you couldn’t buy a pair of
iS.
if you had $10,000 in your cet, you would have to go out of county to buy a pair of shoes. v in Bay St. Louis and eland we must have a half-doz-ihoe stores,” Longo said. Ve’ve come from nothing to a perous community with an un-ed future.” Longo feels, s said 50,000 to 60,000 homes for sale in the Greater New ans area, many by people try-to leave the area. “If we’re y, we’ll get our share of those le as soon as they sell their es.”
ith no opportunity for employ-: 10 years ago, the area now s “a wide open field from A, the Navy and Army at lis Space Center; fast food outlets; Port Bienville, t one time every teen-ager
o	leave home. Now they can here and go to school. They eek a way of life, there is tunity here now,” Longo
laying bill
pon W. Webre of Bay St.
, retired executive director of ancock County Port and Har-ommission who was serving commissioner in 1969, said le “left all of us in a state of
shock.”
“With government help, we pretty much regained what we had, but the net result is still a loss. Some of that debt is still outstanding,” Webre said.
“What I’m trying to say is our economy would have been better if we hadn’t had Camille, in spite of all the government money which came with it,” Webre said.
“It’s hard to express how we feel about that storm,” Webre said, “but I know this — we went through pure hell.”
Paulette Fernandez, who has served as secretary to the Port Commission since the early 70s, said first signs of progress beyond recovery of loss began as early as 1972 when new companies began to locate in the county’s Port Bienville Industrial Park in Ansley.
The railroad operation at Port Bienville began that same year, she recalls.
“But during the last ten years we have experienced constant progress,” Fernandez said. She listed 15 companies as current tenants at the park, with nine commercial and institutional tenants at the county’s Stennis Airpark adjacent to the airport off Mississippi 603.
McDonald, who also is a longtime member of the port commission, which serves as the county’s economic development agency, said he saw hope of economic progress in 1974 when Borg Warner took its first option on land at Port Bienville. The company’s plant did not come on line until
1980,	he noted.
. “We really did not begin to have any real activity in that park until the late 70s,” McDonald said.
McDonald confirmed that as late as ten years after Camille, Scafidi’s Wheel Inn and a Frostop in Bay St.
Louis and LiT Ray’s in Waveland were the only eating places on U. S. 90 in the two cities.
Today, 22 eating places are listed in the Yellow Pages along U.S. 90 in Bay St. Louis and Waveland.
“Communities like our’s would never, never be able to recover from a storm like Camille without massive federal aid,” McDonald said.
“The tax base just couldn’t do it, not in 30 or 40 years,” he said.
He noted that Coast Electric took from 1939 to 1969 to build its electrical power distribution system that was destroyed in a matter of hours by Camille .
“Crews came in here from Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and elsewhere and rebuilt that system in 30 or 40 days,” he said.
It took two years to rebuild the city, he said. More than 2,000 homes needed roof repairs all at the same time. “The local work force simply couldn’t handle it, so we were at the mercy of fly-by-nighters who did shoddy work, but we were desperate.”
Investment was slow in coming to the area after the storm, McDonald said. “Everybody was kind of gun-shy. The memories of what happened were too fresh,” he said. In 1971, Pass Christian Isles
homes were selling for 30 to 40 cents on the dollar. Many Bay St. Louis homes were not yet repaired as late as four and five years after the storm.
“It takes many years for real estate investment to come back to normal after an experience like that,” McDonald said.
“But one of the few benefits that comes out of a disaster like this is the demonstration of human resilience and resourcefulness,” McDonald said.
“Nothing builds camaraderie like common suffering,” he said. “The storm hits everybody the same way,” he said.