Jolynne Trapani
Where I stand, behind us, is the new Trapani’s Eatery. We were there… open in 1994…. Novemeber 14, 1994, a 76 year old building. We had did three revamps on the building. Katrina… on August 29th, 2005, totally devastated the building. There was nothing left. Actually part of the slab was completely gone. We… you couldn’t find parts of the slab, these were coolers, freezers, restaurant… everything was completely gone. Our road was pretty much taken out so with all of that we lost all of our infrastructure along with our building. From that moment we vowed that we were going to rebuild.
Les Fillingame
Communities don’t have to suffer the same losses over, and over, and over again. I think the best money spent by the federal government in sustaining communities and developing communities, especially the ones that have a big disaster like this, are in those mitigation efforts that truly build communities back that are more resilient and much more resistant to future damages from what they’ve just experienced.
Jolynne Trapani
We started in December of ’10, we opened on February 24th of 2012. We’re really excited to be here. When we opened, now we have a sea wall, and we’re really excited about it because we feel like we’ll never be put into that situation again, because now we have the protection of our infrastructure…  and they’re walking, they’re running, it’s become a bike trail, I mean… it’s really very attractive to the area besides making everybody else feel more safer.
Lisa Cowand
The economic benefit is ten-fold of what this project has cost. You’re looking at one hundred million plus investments that people have made along our gulf coast here in Bay St. Louis. And it’s not just the hardened structures that you’re looking at… the old homes, and the Trapani’s, and the 200 North Beach and the gift shops and all those good things that come with it… but it’s also the festivals and the Crusin’ the Coast, and all the tourism that comes through. People like water, they gravitate to water. So what a better means to put in insurances that will protect all of this economic boost and all of the economic engines that go on…. gotta have this, got to have the protection. It’s another insurance policy for the people to make capital investments in to our county, and that’s what we’ve done. The benefit well outweighs the cost… and it was a great investment.
 Les Fillingame
If we had had the same event that Isaac was 10 years ago… it would have been catastrophic.