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Baricev’s Seafood Harbor, which overlooks the Mississippi Sound on Biloxi’s central beach, was rebuilt, above, after being washed away by Hurricane Betsy in 1965. When Camille destroyed the new building, below, the owners rebuilt again.
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CAMILLE: 20 Years Later
Codes
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vulnerable marginal low land which could prove costly and tragic, ” the study warned. “Hurricanes Camille and Betsy have made their emphatic point that new settlement must be planned to be sympathetic with natural patterns and forces.”
But little occurred in line with advice offered in the study.
“The area did not really take advantage of the opportunity to redevelop areas,” Boudreaux said. “When you have wholesale wipeout, you have the opportunity to package pieces of property together and develop something on a grander scale. Instead everyone just took his own piece of property and rebuilt it as it was.”
Local governments were too busy patching streets and repairing sewer systems damaged by the storm to bother coordinating a large-scale development. And residents eager to rebuild their homes and businesses didn’t consider their options.
“Instead of going to new land uses, we just came back and built it stronger,” Boudreaux said.
Seafood
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plant and a cat food plant.” The hurricane also destroyed the company’s ice plant and shipyard.
Two weeks after the storm, a federal agency estimated that about 20 seafood processing plants were destroyed with damage estimated at $8 million.
About a month after the storm, it was estimated that $75 million would be needed to restore Mississippi’s seafood industry. An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people were left unemployed in the wake of the storm.
The struggle to rebuild the Coast’s premier industry took years, Mavar said.
“We were back in production in November on pet food,” Mavar said. “But we never did really get back to where we were.”
The seafood packing plants along U.S. 90 were the hardest hit, but even the ones off the beach were hurt, Mavar added.
“Those on the Back Bay had some damage, but not nearly as much as the ones on U.S. 90. There were some of them who never did come back into operation. ”
Several of the older seafood packing operations did not attempt to rebuild. Nevertheless, the Coast’s seafood industry did make a comeback.
“I don’t think it wiped it out,” Mavar said. “Some of those didn’t come back into play, but others did come in and opened.”
Very few local fishermen lost their boats during the storm. Shrimpers pulled their boats upriver, away from the storm surge, and tied to trees while they rode out the wind. Coast fishermen are familiar with this routine.
“We went through that almost every time there was a storm,” said longtime Biloxi fisherman Walter E. “Eley” Ross.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of local boats that were lost because they went back in the rivers and bays.
“Some out-of-state boats got lost.”
Although the shrimp boats were undamaged and shrimp were plentiful, a lack of ice kept shrimpers in port.
“It was two weeks or better before we could get any ice,” Ross said.
To get back in business faster, shrimpers helped seafood packers restore their businesses, picking up shrimp conveyers and putting them back on the wharves.
“After Camille there was plenty, plenty shrimp,” Ross said. “But there was so much, debris.
“There was everything from dead animals to toys and butane tanks floating in the water.” Even as far as 25 miles out in the Gulf,
shrimp nets became tangled in debris from the storm.
“After every drag, you had to cut holes in your nets” to pull out the debris, Ross said.
Mangrove trees from Louisiana had blown down in the storm. Their thick branches were difficult to remove from the trawls. Shrimpers hauled much of the debris ashore, so it would not continue to clog their nets.
For more than a month, shrimpers battled to clean their shrimping grounds. The mangrove trees, piled high on the decks, gave shrimp boats a strange appearance.
“The boats looked like big, old, giant bushes floating in the water,” Ross said.
Oyster reefs in the western area of the state were most heavily damaged by Camille. The floods contaminated the waters and delayed the Sept. 1 opening date.
Although the damage to the oyster reefs was estimated at $50,000, this figure was less than the damage caused by the 1947 hurricane. And despite the flood-waters that damaged oyster reefs, a heavy set of young oysters occurred after the storm, which encouraged biologists that the industry would soon recover.
Economy
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tian where one of his gas stations was located. He decided not to rebuild the station there because the money could be spent better elsewhere. He had plans to rebuild there eventually, but the plans changed recently. He will sell the property.
Swetman said that some areas of the Coast, particularly Pass Christian, have been slow to rebuild because of the federal flood insurance.
All structures that sit below certain elevations are required to have federal flood insurance before they can be financed or used for equity loans. Low-lying areas are defined on flood insurance maps with two different flood zones. Most of Pass Christian is in one of the zones. The required insurance premiums and the difficulty obtaining financing have kept out development.
Swetman said that many of the people who lost their homes decided not to go back.
“It was just too traumatic personally, ” he said. “People are saying that if it happened once, it can happen again.”
For instance, a project to devel-
THE DAILY HERALD/1969
Thousands of cans of cat food were scattered around Gulfp^t.
op Deer Island with homes, resorts and golf courses died because of the storm. The design was finished and waiting on funding. But in the section of the study that discussed hurricanes, the plan considered tides of 8.8 feet. With Camiliesiv-eraging 20-foot tides across the Coast the development was no longer deemed feasible.