Camps
Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler was upset in his September 6th post about Senator Mary Landrieu referring to her family’s waterfront home as a “camp”. Bob feels that she should have talked about a million dollar home on the water.
The problem for Bob, and other people who are not native to the Gulf coast region, is that they think in terms of what is being built by the newcomers, and not what the old-timers build.
Those of us who grew up down here, like Ms. Landrieu, expect that anything built near the water will be wiped out by a hurricane. You built “fish camps” down by the water to go fishing, not to live in permanently, and many were built from the debris after a storm.
When people started moving down, they were amazed at the amount of vacant land by the water, with even fisherman living well back from the water. Locals did not build anything permanent on the barrier islands or on the coast of the Gulf: they knew better.
The increase in deaths and destruction are a result of people building on land that locals knew would flood in a hurricane. When Ramada Inn put a sunken bar in their hotel on the local barrier island, most of the locals thought they were going to have an indoor swimming pool, which it became after the first hurricane.
