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Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.
DELCAMBRE - This world of vast green nets,
plump pink prawns and long days and nights spent in the Vermilion
Bay is the only one Ray Billiot has ever known.
Aboard the 52-foot Miss Jeannie - his leathery tanned skin masked
only by Hawaiian-print shorts and white shrimp boots dotted with mud
- the 44-year-old is immersed in the trade he first learned at the
age of 12.
He empties a plastic laundry basket heaping with jumbo shrimp onto a
wooden counter. He digs in his thumbnail just above the abdomens and
pinches off the heads. He dumps the tails into a tank for rinsing.
He scoops them out with a strainer and packs them into blue mesh
sacks ready for market. Thirty-five hundred pounds in all.
But today - roughly 72 hours after Hurricane Rita roared ashore - is
different. Today there is no market.
Today might very well may be his last catch.
"This is going to be the last of them for a while," said Billiot, a
Bay St. Louis, Miss., resident who's lost everything he owns but his
shrimp boat to hurricanes. "We're trying to save what we can, but I
don't know why. There's nowhere to drag our nets and nowhere to
sell."
Two hurricanes in one month have hammered Louisiana's coastline,
plunging into peril one of its most celebrated icons and critical
industries: Seafood.
Receding floodwaters carried buildings, tree limbs and other debris
into the bay, where they threaten to rip nets and sink boats.
Contamination left mats of dead fish floating in the water and
endangered habitats - completely shutting down oyster beds. Recent
testing shows the oxygen level in the Vermilion River - a home to
catfish and gaspergoo - to be zero.
A half-dozen 100-foot shrimping vessels in Intracoastal City sit in
parking lots; two are under water in Delcambre. Crab traps are flung
far and wide. Flooding and blackouts shut down coastal processing
plants. Ice and diesel fuel and other mainstay supplies for
commercial fishermen are pricey and scarce.
And last week, no one on the northern Gulf of Mexico from Galveston,
Texas, to Bayou La Batre, Ala., was buying any seafood - prompting
many shrimpers to fling their spoiled harvests back into the waters.
"There are just bags and bags and bags of the stuff floating in
canals in Intracoastal City," said Thomas Hymel of the LSU Sea Grant
Program, who is a water quality specialist for south-central
Louisiana. "The boats had to dump it because they couldn't sell it.
It is really, really smelly right now."
The same is being said of Louisiana's post-hurricane commercial
fishing industry as a whole.
Katrina - with its 145-mph winds and 15-foot storm surge - submerged
and laid waste to fishing docks in St. Bernard, Plaquemines and
other parishes in southeast Louisiana, but spared those in the
southwest part of the state. Resilient and hopeful shrimpers and
fishermen moved to the new hunting grounds.
Then came Rita.
Louisiana as a whole harvested $366 million worth of crawfish,
oysters, crabs, catfish, turtles, shrimp, alligator and finfish in
2003 - the latest year for which statistics are available. More than
five-sixths of it came from the 13 parishes hit hardest by the two
storms.
To put that in perspective, the state produces just under half of
the nation's shrimp and 35 percent of its oysters. Last year was the
fourth-highest shrimp harvest on record: 83.5 million pounds,
without the heads.
And several of Louisiana's fishing ports - Cameron, Dulac and Venice
- routinely are valued among the top 10 nationwide.
"The commercial fishing industry is very important," said Martin
Bourgeois, director of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife &
Fisheries Shellfish Management Program, who still is calculating the
economic loss. "It accounts for a whole lot of tax revenue to the
state, and the economic effect is tremendous. We can't afford to
lose it."
'Go down with my ship'
Overlooking the Intracoastal Canal, there's a sign above A- Seafood
Express that proclaims, "Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez en la Bayou."
But owner Preston Dore is convinced there are no more good times to
be had in Delcambre.
There was a time when this town on La. 14 about halfway between New
Iberia and Abbeville was Louisiana's major shrimp port. The third
weekend of every August is reserved for the Delcambre Shrimp
Festival, which includes a blessing of the fleet.
In the past five years, though, inland shrimpers once able to earn a
respectable living in the bay now struggle to make ends meet with
rising fuel costs, falling shrimp prices and competition from bigger
commercial enterprises and foreign imports.
During that time, commercial fishing licenses issued by the
Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries have dropped from
14,000 to about 9,000.
"Shrimping has been on the verge of collapse for several years now,"
LSU's Hymel said. "They've been exiting from the business because
the profit margin just isn't there for them anymore. When you throw
in something like this, it's devastating."
Still, there are those like Billiot and Dore who have defied those
trials - men and women who, as Hymel characterizes them, have
shrimping "in their blood. If you've ever been out on a shrimp boat
with these guys, you see why they still do it. It's a hell of a
lifestyle."
But last week, even they were declaring Hurricane Rita the end of a
passionate pursuit passed down for generations. The storm brought so
much water that dozens of shrimp boats moored here were floating
above the docks. Six feet of it went rushing into A-Seafood Express.
The company was insured for $50,000; the damage is estimated at
$200,000. One of Dore's more hopeful employees hosed off the patio
and stacked chairs as his boss gazed at the beckoning channel from
his boat, the Sea Express.
"If I didn't have so much invested, I would have gotten out a long
time ago. The shrimping industry is gone for us. It's history," said
the 46-year-old Dore, a New Iberia native who's been shrimping for
two decades. "But when you have $300,000 invested in a boat, it's
hard to pull out. So I've got to stay with my ship and go down with
my ship. A lot of people are going down."
One thing about being a shrimper, though, Dore notes: "You have to
know a lot of stuff." He's considering getting what's known among
his kind as a "land job" - in the oil field, or perhaps something in
the electrical or mechanical industries.
Shrimping has been in Maury Sekul's family for over a century.
But the 55-year-old Croatian from Biloxi who once built submarines
for Litton Industries is convinced all that history - all that
tradition - ends now.
"It's all over," said Sekul, standing on the stern of his boat - his
only remaining possession. "With all the trash and junk in the
water, you can't drag the nets. You'll be tearing everything up. The
damage you can do will cost more than what I make."
His plans now? "To be honest with you, I don't know," he said,
looking down at his feet. "I'm going to apply for a job with the
clean-up. I've heard they're looking for monitors."
Standing on Our Gang - the boat his father built with his own hands
- Rodney Cheramie, 37, of Cut Off said simply of the life he's known
since the age of 12: "It's finished."
Signs of life
In the middle of the night, three tractor trailers left Ocean
Harvest Wholesale, just off the canal in Delcambre.
Their freight: 35,000 pounds of shrimp each, still frozen.
Three more were on their way.
Workers were forced to flee to higher ground. Water was lapping six
inches away from the warehouse door. The electricity had been out
for days.
Still, 65-year-old Ruth Pitre - known simply as Miss Ruth, who's
worked at this processing plant since the age of 17 - was able to
salvage Ocean Harvest's latest harvest by keeping the freezer doors
shut. Inside, it was as cold as Chicago in January.
"This is the worst I've ever seen," she said, directing a truck from
Cajun Brothers Seafood in Monroe to the loading dock. "(Hurricane)
Audrey didn't even have this. These people - it's their life. What
else are they gonna do?"
But moments later she was off - back into the office to see about
getting forklifts repaired, contracts filled and electricity
restored.
By Friday, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries was
getting reports of crabbers setting out traps, shrimp being "landed"
and a few processing plants gearing up again.
While there are no predictions for how long it might take for the
shrimping and fishing industry to bounce back - or whether it will
ever thrive at pre-hurricane levels - Bourgeois thinks recovery will
come sooner than most people think.
"I'm optimistic," he said. "You can look at the slab and pilings
that are all that remain in St. Bernard and say, 'Gee whiz, where do
you start?' But I think that within a matter of weeks, somebody's
going to have rebuilt that dock, put a fuel tank there, parked a
refrigerated truck, and they'll be landing product there in no
time."
Mark Feltman of Houma wandered the docks of Delcambre one day last
week, looking for the one thing that will keep a fisherman going:
Fuel.
With 2,000 pounds of red snapper on his boat after Hurricane
Katrina, he headed for Cameron Parish. With Hurricane Rita on the
way, he stopped in Delcambre instead. Last week, he was trying to
get to Crystal Beach north of Galveston.
"We're down to very few places to sell," the 43-year-old said. "The
further you have to go, the more it cuts right into your profits.
But there's still money to be made."
Standing next to him - foul-smelling mud splattered on his jeans,
his shirt and his face from cleaning Ocean Pride processing plant
where he works - Morris Hebert waved his arm out over the shrimp
boats parked side by side along the canal.
He's seen many a hurricane come through the Intracoastal Waterway
where he was born and raised. He won't argue that this one was by
far the worst.
Still, Hebert isn't worried about the livelihood of those who call
Delcambre home.
"It's gonna bounce back," he said with a deep Cajun accent. "It
might take two months or three months or a few years. But if you're
a survivor, you can survive anything. I've survived all kinda mess,
and by God I'll survive this."
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