Psychological Impact/Massive Seawall Construction

[CFL]

I spent most of my life in Pensacola and would regularly visit other spots on the northern Gulf Coast. What I find most painful is the lost of historical structures and antebellum type homes. Mississippi had some of the best, IMO. Places can be rebuilt, but it hurts when you lose a visible part of your history.

[Dr. Jonah Rainwater]

Well, maybe other folks have a different outlook on rebuilding, but I saw something pretty cool when my family went down to Galveston this past July.

We ate at some pier-based seafood restaurant. I wish I remembered the name. I mean everyone who's been to Galveston has seen these magnificent structures. The piers are 15 feet above the ocean, extending out from the promenade along Seawall Boulevard. One pier even has an entire resort hotel built on top of it, jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico. Obviously, they're either laughing in the face of danger, or too stupid to realize the danger is there.

Well, inside the restaurant was a series of photographs and captions, including images of the restaurant when it first opened as a souvenier shop in the early 1900s, and pictures of parades and parties filling the streets and shores of Galveston in the 1920s. A hurricane destroyed the store in the 30s or 40s and it was rebuilt right next door, with the restaurant opening up on the former wreckage. In 1961, Hurricane Carla made landfall down in Corpus Christi with a 22-foot storm surge. Galveston didn't see a high enough surge to top the seawall, thankfully, but all the pier buildings were obliterated. A photograph of this blasted wreckage smashed up against the seawall proudly displayed a caption, that 3 pilings were all that remained of the entire restaurant. And yet, here the same restaurant, with the same owners and the same food and the same fun atmosphere, returned to the same location again. Nobody moved inland, nobody cemented a some sort of underground bunker along the seawall, nothing like that. They bought a good insurance policy and rebuilt their lives just as they had been before. And they knew, just as had happened twice before, that someday another hurricane will demolish their lives again. And they'll rebuild again. In Galveston, at least, hurricanes are just a part of the natural cycle. Every once in a while Mother Nature gives everyone in the city a fresh start, and those who choose to live there choose to deal with that fact of seaside life. Someday, I'll be watching the news, seeing terrible images of splintered wood and debris smashed into the seawall, and I'll be able to say to myself that I was there once, that I ate there, and they had some really good shrimp.

I probably just went off on some sentimental tangent, but my basic point is: if we're going to live by the ocean, we're going to need to adopt the mentality of the Galvestonians.

[caribepr]

Ultimately, that is what most of us are about who love where we live. For me, the problem is people who BUY a place to be two weeks a year, have the bucks to do it and really don't have a passion for the place or the people. Those of us who live on coasts, no matter what the story (generational, way of making a living having to do with the sea/ocean, etc) know the difference. Nothing to be done about it...money walks. But memories are powerful things, they give us strength and motivation - it's good to be human, sometimes!