Best Week Says Mississippi’s Coast is Now a Wind vs. Flood Battleground

Early December in Biloxi, Mississippi, finds John Lennon’s bittersweet “Happy Christmas” playing on the car radio amid a devastated landscape left by Hurricane Katrina just months earlier.

A State Farm public affairs specialist, touring the area with a BestWeek reporter, points out the tarp-shrouded shell of Beauvoir, the retirement home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Like so much else along Mississippi’s coast, Beauvoir–once a stately mansion within sight of the Gulf–is in ruins.

Many didn’t have flood coverage because it wasn’t required by their mortgage company; because they weren’t in a federally designated flood zone; or because their property withstood 1969’s Hurricane Camille, according to the Jan. 2, 2006 BestWeek story.

“The mentality of southern Mississippi before Katrina was this: I don’t need flood insurance because, one, the mortgage company doesn’t require it, and Camille. Well, Camille doesn’t mean anything anymore,” said State Farm agent Vernon McHan Sr., who’s based in Biloxi.

Topics Flood Mississippi