We still say, "I live in the footprint of Katrina."
But it was as if that wasn't enough to bring us to our knees. The insurance companies let untold thousands of homeowners up and down the coast hang in the wind after the storm, including myself. Because the drain at the end of the street backed up and flooded the neighborhood with three inches of water, they wrote my home off as flood damage even though it was plain to any that my home was destroyed when its roof was ripped off. I went into bankruptcy after losing the home and not getting a payout. This, on top of the fact that thousands of people died and were never recorded.
Then, the economy crashed after the storm because of those bogus securities the big banks sold on Wall Street in the housing market. Because casinos and local tourism represent a gigantic underpinning of the coast economy, this was like getting kicked in the face while you're still on the ground after the first hit. Apparently, Florida had one of the biggest housing bubbles, and when it popped, people who borrowed a little cash to come to my neck of the woods stopped coming, and they once represented a fairly big source of revenue for the coast. I'm guessing many of them either lost their jobs or their homes or both in the Panic of 2008.
And then, BP happened, and everybody took a third hit economically. Then those oil-soaked bastards called the mess cleaned up by dumping 2,000,000 gallons of dispersants on the oil to drive it to the bottom where the shrimp and fish live. These dispersants are so toxic that they are banned in the European Union for causing cancer. The authorities in the state government had the gall to say that the entire coast is now safe to fish, despite all the tar balls and sludge still washing up on the barrier islands. In ten to twenty years, the rates of cancer here on the Mississippi coast will double or triple. Exxon only cleaned up 40% of the oil before they pulled out. We would be so lucky if it was that much with the Deepwater Horizon spill.
When you say they've written off the entire Gulf of Mexico, I believe it. I can see it happen in real-time. This coast was beautiful once, one of the best week-end getaways in the nation if small and medium-sized casinos were your hobby. Now, it's all trashed, and the state squandered hundreds of millions in home reconstruction funds. Yet, for some reason, we still hobble onward.
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If we won't do it willingly, nature will take care of the problem for us & it will be so much harsher than if we would address the issue ourselves.
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