As a teenager, I spent a whole lot of time. most of my summers trawling and wing netting and every other chance I could at our camp right out of Buras by Bay Adams.
If we were not shrimping, we would be fishing or working as fishing guides.
Made tons of cash for a high school kid. there were times we were on that skiff for 36 hours straight.
At some point we learned that people would pay us money to stay at the camp and we would take them fishing and shrimping and we could ever get them to pick through the shrimp.
Katrina took the camp, all of it, the marsh underneath and most of the pilings. At that point the storm surge had to have been 40 feet. That camp survived Betsy, Camille, other storms, generations of cousins, squatting by Plaquemines underclass, and some of the most insane coon asses that have every been born. Katrina took her in seconds.
I still have dreams, not nightmares, of being at the camp with a broken down skiff and no communication with anyone and no hope to survive.
In real life, my family and that camp survived everything. In the dream, we all survive.
I never got down to Buras when I visited Louisiana so all I know of it is family stories and what I see in photos.
Apparently there was a large home still in the family that probably dated to the early 1900s. Maybe a lot earlier. Built on pilings, had survived all those previous storms you mentioned. But not Katrina.
My mother’s relatives all had homes up in New Orleans. They lost at least three homes among them in the flooding. The home my mother had lived in as a small child, over on Desire Street, appears not to have been damaged at all.