Rita dealt crippling blow to Louisiana fishermen

08:13 AM CDT on Wednesday, September 28, 2005

By LEE HANCOCK
The Dallas Morning News

DELCAMBRE, La. – Shrimp boats bob in the sun-dappled canal, pretty as a tourist postcard, but the quaint scene is all that looks remotely normal in this Cajun fishing village sometimes billed as the "shrimp capital of Louisiana."

ERICH SCHLEGEL/DMN Dieu Ha Loung gathered a friend's toolbox last week near a harbor in Empire, La.

Every buyer and icehouse, boatyard and fuel vendor is covered with 4 feet of oil-slicked swamp water. Tons of seafood rot in dockside brokerages, and nearby homes of captains and crew alike are awash in a storm surge that Hurricane Rita sent farther inland than any that people here can remember.

"The loss is in the millions, just in this little canal," said Preston Dore, a shrimper who shepherded his 70-foot trawler through Rita, only to watch helplessly as his dockside restaurant and seafood brokerage were inundated by the storm surge.

"I've got more than $100,000 in product spoiled in that market," he said, nodding toward his waterlogged business, A-Seafood Express. "I'd say the industry is ruined in this state right now."

Fishermen and state officials fear that last weekend's storm may have dealt a mortal blow to Louisiana's $2.6 billion-a-year seafood industry, which had already been reeling from Hurricane Katrina. Losses from both storms could reach more than $2 billion.

That has heightened uncertainty about the future of an industry that provides nearly 30,000 jobs and lands almost half of the shrimp, 26 percent of the crabs and 37 percent of the oysters caught in the United States.

Katrina slammed into southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi on Aug. 29, smothering oyster beds, scuttling fishing fleets and wrecking vibrant melting-pot communities where coaxing a living from the sea has long been part of the culture. Then Rita swamped coastal areas of southwestern Louisiana that had escaped Katrina.

"Rita took that one little last place you could actually still work if your boat survived," said George Barasich, a Chalmette shrimper and oysterman who has organized a fisherman's relief group to lobby for federal aid.

A long slump

Second only to Alaskan waters in profitability, Louisiana's coastal estuaries are the nation's most productive source of seafood. But many fishermen were struggling before the two hurricanes.

The shrimping fleet has dropped off by half over the last decade, pummeled by competition from imported shrimp and declining catches that shrimpers blame on turtle-excluder devices, or TEDs, which are mandated by federal law in order to protect endangered sea turtles.

Oystering – an industry built on leasing reefs on which oysters are planted and harvested like land crops – had already been hurt by saltwater intrusion from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a controversial 76-mile canal constructed in 1968. The channel was designed to shorten the distance that deep-water transport ships had to travel to reach New Orleans from the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

It also may have provided a devastatingly efficient pathway for Katrina's enormous storm surge.

St. Bernard Parish and much of Plaquemines Parish, the state's two biggest seafood producers, were covered in 12 to 14 feet of water, and much of both parishes' fishing fleets were pushed onto nearby roads, bridges and levees. The storm smothered oyster beds in huge amounts of mud and debris, damage that experts say will take two years or more even to begin to undo.

Shrimping grounds were littered with debris. Boats reported seeing animal carcasses and shredded bits of buildings as much as 100 miles into the gulf.

The U.S. Geological Survey says that before Katrina, Louisiana was losing almost 44 acres a day of the marshlands that serve not only as coastal buffers but also as nurseries for the state's fisheries. The USGS now estimates that the hurricane obliterated nearly 1 ½ times the amount of Louisiana marshlands eroded into the sea over the previous 48 years.

State fishery officials believe that Hurricane Rita's rampage across the southwestern coastal parishes wreaked similar havoc on Louisiana's remaining oyster beds and shrimping grounds.

Nowhere to go

Fishermen like Mr. Barasich whose boats survived say they've been largely landlocked by storm debris and sunken boats in waterways. The few who can leave have nowhere to buy ice to preserve catches, fuel their boats or sell what they bring ashore.

"I don't have a dock for 90 miles east or 90 miles west, so where am I gonna take it if I catch it?" said Mr. Barasich, a second-generation Croatian fisherman who captains his late father's trawler, the F.G.J.

A short drive around St. Bernard Parish offers a stark picture of what the state's fishermen face after the storms.

Narrow canals in Ycloskey where he and many other St. Bernard fishermen moored their boats are choked with wreckage. Cinder-block buildings that once housed stores, fishing docks and icehouses were swept away.

A cheerfully profane man in a T-shirt that declares "Friends don't let friends eat imported shrimp," Mr. Barasich raised a grease-stained finger towards a submerged dock with the twisted remnants of a conveyor belt.

"That's where I loaded shrimp from. It's gone," he said, adding that the celebrated Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme bought his last 1,200-pound catch two days before Katrina hit.

Stopping at his ruined brick home, Mr. Barasich said he stashed electronic navigational gear in his attic, hoping to keep it safe and dry. But Katrina's storm surge swamped the house to the roofline, and the sodden equipment is somewhere in its muddy, moldy, reeking interior.

"That's $4,000 gone," he said.

Easing his faded pickup past a shredded processing plant that canned shrimp, crab and smoked oysters – delicacies that fishermen now scavenge from the wreckage to feed to newly homeless dogs – Mr. Barasich braked to greet a big, red-faced man in an American flag T-shirt. The man, Buddy Collins, recounted taking refuge with his family on his oyster boat, the Miss Carolyn, when their nearby home was flooded.

"All we know is fishing. We got our food stamps. We got our little FEMA checks," Mr. Collins added with a sigh. "We're trying to get enough money to make it. If they don't help us out, it's over with."

Mr. Barasich shook his head as Mr. Collins headed up the levee.

"They gonna drown on dry land," he said. "That's not where fishermen are supposed to be."

If anything, the situation is worse in neighboring Plaquemines Parish, where much of the state's most productive fishing fleet took refuge in the Empire Canal just before Katrina made a direct hit there.

Boats lay smashed, four and five deep in some places, along the levee banks, and the air was thick with the stench of rotting seafood. The road to Delta Marina and several big processors was blocked by one boat's deck and another's busted hull. A half-mile from the docks, shrimp boats named the Mayflower and the Fellowship lay side by side at the edge of Louisiana Highway 23.

'Everything gone'

"I see nothing," Tri Huynh said, staring at the wreckage-littered bayou, hoping to spot her family's missing shrimp boat. "I stay here for long time. Now my trailers, my boat, everything gone."

The Vietnamese immigrant said she and her husband had come back from a relative's house in Panama City, Fla., in hopes of finding something left. She asked a reporter to follow her to a curve in the highway where greenish-brown water lapped on both sides of the pavement.

There was no recognizable structure in sight, nothing but debris, water and her foundered family van in the place several hundred feet off the highway where she, her husband and their six children had shared two house trailers.

John Tesvich, a descendant of Croatian oystermen, said he'd managed to salvage one boat out of five his family ran to fish their 4,000 acres of oyster leases.

His company had employed 60 people and trucked oysters as far away as Los Angeles and Boston. After Katrina, the family had hoped to keep limping along with its plant in southwest Louisiana, but Rita made people wonder if there will be enough oysters anywhere to make a decent gumbo.

"Lord knows it won't ever be the same," he said. "I think a lot of people will just quit."

Speculation about the future of such fishing towns prompts rueful jokes from Mr. Tesvich's companions, irreverent men used to finding ways to laugh at the ravages of man and nature.

"You want to buy land? It goes for very cheap," cracked a passing oysterman, Pasco Piacun, a tanned man with a thick Croatian accent. "Boat stuck there goes for gift."

Louisiana fishery officials asked for nearly a half-billion dollars in aid just for the section of the state ravaged by Katrina. Officials say they'll now have to raise that figure because of Rita.

Fishermen like Mr. Dore in Delcambre worry that many of the families that have passed down the trade for generations won't be able to keep going.

"We've lost half of the fleet right here in the last two years," Mr. Dore said. "In the next two years, we'll lose half of that half, between this, the fuel prices and everything else. There's no way a shrimper can make it. We're getting the same prices we got 20 years ago.

"This boat right here, I got over $300,000 tied up in it," he said, sweeping his hand over the deck of his trawler, the Sea Express. "You get dug in so far, you can't get out. You got to go down with the ship."

E-mail: lhancock@dallasnews.com