Georges Island's North Plain. A tour of duty at Fort Warren must have been a pretty sweet deal: Annual flooding every winter was eventually addressed by building up the island's coastline with clay, but when the island's military population exploded after the Spanish-American War (1898), a barracks, a hospital and a commissary were built in this dreadfully exposed area. It was rainy and blustery while I was there, but I was there in relatively pleasant May! Fortunately, the unpleasant structures on the North Plain were taken down after the Second World War.