Starting Points: Louisiana

Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts

Jun 27, 2010

Vietnamese shrimpers face financial ruin after oil spill

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2010; A01

NEW ORLEANS -- They came here seeking refuge, but the past few years have brought unexpected hardship to the tightly knit Vietnamese fishing community.

They arrived after the fall of Saigon in 1975, lured by the city's tropical climate and strong Catholic heritage. Shrimping and fishing in the Gulf Coast's bountiful bayous was one of the few familiar touchstones for these mostly unskilled laborers with little English.

An estimated 20,000 Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers live along the Gulf Coast -- about half of the total fishing community -- and many more work at the seafood processing plants, wholesalers and po-boy shops found at every traffic light. Now the sanctuary they found and the lives they built -- and rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina -- are threatened by the hemorrhaging oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Many Vietnamese worry they will not have the energy to start over yet again.

"When I came to Louisiana, this was how people here made a living. I had to follow," 50-year-old shrimper Dung Nguyen says in Vietnamese. "I don't know how I'm going to live."

Image by OneEighteen via Flickr

Nguyen says he has no idea whether life is harder for him than for American shrimpers; he doesn't know any to ask. All he knows is that his wife, their five daughters, his mother-in-law and his granddaughter -- all of whom live with him in a modest rented home in the industrial eastern edge of New Orleans -- are counting on him for survival.

That's why he got up before dawn last week to stand in line for a food voucher with dozens of other out-of-work Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers in the concrete alley in front of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church's community office. The wait can last five, six, even seven hours.

Oversleepers are turned away before they even make it inside.

"If you're a little bit late . . . ," Nguyen warns in Vietnamese, shaking his head.

He knows because he showed up after 5 a.m. for two days and missed out on a $100 grocery store gift certificate, 20 of which are handed out every morning. It is 8:30 a.m. and the office has yet to open, but he is hoping the third time is the charm. Besides, he says, he has nothing to do all day but sit around and think -- about having no work, no money and no options.

Normally Nguyen is on a boat this time of year, coming ashore for a home visit about once a month. His wife, Ut, makes shrimp nets, and his oldest daughter, Lisa, 20, fixes trawls and cleans boats. Now they are all unemployed.

"Get in a straight line, please," a woman calls out in English to the group, mostly men, milling about the alley as staffers open the office door.

The Vietnamese quickly flatten themselves along the wall as aid workers hand out numbered tickets for vouchers to the first in line. Dung secures one, as does his wife, even though the vouchers are technically limited to one per family. Because so many Vietnamese share the same last name and the community is so intertwined, the rule is tough to enforce.

"Three days. One hundred," Nguyen says in his broken English.

Another friend overhears him and laughs. It's not in your hand, yet, he cautions.

Strong bonds strained

Nguyen came to this country late, in 1992, and drifted through blue-collar jobs in Arizona and California before he fell into shrimping in Louisiana.

The couple have lived in New Orleans the longest of any place in the United States. The cost of living is cheap, and work seemed plentiful. They rented their first house here and made friends quickly. Nguyen says he recognizes everyone waiting with him in the food voucher line.

More than two months after the oil spill all but shut down the local seafood industry, the bonds that tie the community together are fraying as they face financial ruin.

A fight broke out on a recent morning after aid workers ran out of food vouchers. Now a security officer guards the alley, sweltering in his brown uniform in the soupy heat. A meeting between BP and Vietnamese fishermen dissolved after translators used northern Vietnamese phrases that many here associate with communism.

New interpreters have been installed.

"People are really frustrated," says Tap Bui, a community organizer at the church. "They feel like their sense of life is gone . . . A lot of them feel like they'll never be able to get that back."

Although the Vietnamese community is centered in eastern New Orleans, it stretches from the marshes of Plaquemines Parish through Biloxi, Miss., and Gulf Shores, Ala., and throughout the seafood industry's supply chain. Vinh Tran, 60, began working as a deckhand on shrimp boats when he immigrated 35 years ago and eventually bought his own boats and opened a shrimp dock and wholesale market named St. Vincent's in the one-road bayou town of Leeville, La.

Now his daughter-in-law, Ngoc Nguyen, 27, runs the business and worries that even with aid they will not last through the year. In two months last summer, St. Vincent's took in 2 million pounds of shrimp. This year, they've done less than a third of that. The bait shop next door has already closed.

"This should've been our best season yet," she says.

Ngoc Nguyen, who is not related to Dung, was studying to be a nurse when Katrina hit in 2005 and changed the course of her life. Her now-husband's family needed help with St. Vincent's, so she stepped in. She says they owe $700,000 in loans for the shop and their three boats. Although she and her husband have received some money from BP, Nguyen says it's not enough to cover their expenses, let alone the interest on their loans. The story is the same throughout the Vietnamese community.

"We didn't invest in anything but the seafood business," Ngoc Nguyen says.

To Texas for work

It rains three times before Dung Nguyen's name is called at Mary Queen of Vietnam. He walks into a small room and sits down in front of a large wooden desk while the aid worker reviews his file. He utters no words other than his name and birthdate. The aid worker asks few questions.

After six hours of waiting, Nguyen receives a $100 gift certificate to a local Vietnamese grocery store, Mien Canh. A few minutes later, his wife comes out of a similar meeting with another gift certificate, a canister of rice and two cans of Starkist tuna.

They climb into their minivan and head home, where they get more good news: A shrimp boat captain is looking for deckhands to run out to Texas the next morning. Nguyen has never shrimped that far before, but he says he'll take it.

He makes plans with his neighbor, Trung Le, for the two-hour drive down to the dock to get on the boat. Le will spend the night at Nguyen's house, and by 6 p.m. he's there with his duffel bag, ready to commandeer the couch. They buy spicy boiled crawfish and crack open some Bud Lights. The local news is playing on the TV, and the forecast is gloomy. What if it rains? What if there is a big storm?

"Everything, I don't care," Le says in English. "Go."

But the celebration is cut short when Nguyen gets another call.

The shrimp boat is having mechanical trouble. It will take a day, maybe longer, to fix it. The trip is canceled.

Nguyen hangs up the phone and takes stock of his options. He heard that BP is holding a deckhand training class 20 minutes away in Slidell tomorrow morning, but he's not sure of the address or whether he needs special paperwork to attend. Maybe he can just show up? Or maybe the shrimp boat will get fixed before the morning.

Nguyen doesn't know that he can look up the address of the BP class online. He'd have trouble reading it if he did, not to mention that it will be taught by a white-haired man with a heavy Southern accent who will be talking about subjects like "oil weathering" and "the displacement of vapors heavier than oxygen." He doesn't know yet that the shrimping job will never materialize, and he will be back at square one.

But Nguyen says uncertainty is the nature of his trade. He cannot control when the work comes, how long it will last or even if it will turn up. That's up to the boat captain, to Mother Nature or even BP.

So Nguyen sits on a stool at his coffee table, sips a Bud Light and waits for something to happen.

Jun 18, 2010

The last of Leeville: Chances grow slim for a wide spot in the road in La.

Image via Wikipedia

By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 18, 2010; C01

LEEVILLE, LA. -- Their eyes are bloodshot. Their scraggy skin glows reddish-brown. They clutch cans of beer. On the wooden deck of Griffin's Marina and Ice, they recoil when approached, like a nest of vipers.

"We used to be fishermen," one sneers, drunk, seething with wounded pride. "But now we work for BP."

They won't say more than that. From their perch, they glare across the silent street at the gorgeous marshland now closed to fishing. At dusk they screech away in pickup trucks, barely pausing at the town's one blinking traffic light. They surrender Leeville to shadow, to the mosquitoes, to what used to be and now isn't, to a solemn reality captured in two words that embody the collapse of a way of life.

Ghost town.

This summer may mark the end of Leeville, a town birthed by a hurricane, then destroyed by one, resurrected by oil and now destroyed by oil. It isn't the only dying town outside the levee systems in south Louisiana. Subsidence, the sinking of delta land, has long been the existential enemy down here. Now wild crude has delivered what may be the final blow, choking off commerce. Some residents foresee an abandoned landscape, something right out of a Wild West movie, with empty slips instead of silent saloons, belly-up redfish instead of skittering tumbleweeds.

* * *

At the blinking traffic light, most drivers turn right and glide over the bayou to Port Fourchon, which services 90 percent of deep-water drilling structures in the Gulf of Mexico. Then it's on to Grand Isle, a paradise for sunbathers and beachfront property owners.

Confused drivers proceed through the light, past the sign that says "NO OUTLET," past two gas stations, four RV parks, a half-dozen bait-and-tackle shops, two motels and one bar, then run smack into a "ROAD CLOSED" sign just before pavement halts at the marsh.

That was Leeville. About a mile long, hugged by bayou, full-time home to a handful of people. No more than 60. Maybe not even 30. No one knows. Right now there should be hundreds of visiting fishermen leasing their own heavenly corner of the town's bayou front, but with waters closed by the Deepwater Horizon leak, there's no reason to come, no reason to stay.

For decades, storm surges have swallowed 14 square miles every year in the basins of Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. Last year the state redirected Highway 1 around Leeville to elevate the hurricane evacuation route. The town's only thoroughfare became a dead end. Now residents worry that a hurricane will drench the area with oil this summer, killing the root structure that keeps the very earth together.

Leeville will be gone.

"To me, Leeville was gone 20 years ago," says Windell Curole, general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District, who says the town was 90 percent marsh in the '60s and is now 90 percent underwater. "When we did not take the action to protect the marshes around Leeville, that was the beginning of the end. The communities in southern Louisiana remain here despite floodwaters because this place produces tremendous amounts of biomass. A 7-year-old can go fish in back and catch enough food to feed his family."

Not now.

* * *

Hardly anyone's home. Maybe a half-dozen of 200 RV and camper spots remain occupied. Rusted carnage from Katrina, Rita, Ike and Gustav litters the roadside. Trailers are tacked with cheeky decals saying things like: "If You Don't Fish Then Why Am I Talking to You?"

The heat comes from every direction, even the ground. It's quiet.

Bobby Bryan sits in his motorized wheelchair in his home at the southern tip of town. Lace curtains checker the late-afternoon sunlight. There is nothing to do. Bryan can't operate his fishing guide business. There are no tenants in his 26-slot RV park. He has time to think.

Every Saturday 70 years ago, Bryan's mother would bake biscuits, load her 10 children into the family wagon upstate, get to the bayou and catch fish for lunch. They'd spend the day on the water. The water was life.

Fifty-seven years ago, when Bobby married his wife, Juanita, their marriage vows were: (1) He would always make sure she could go to church; and (2) She'd always leave him alone while he was fishing.

They moved to Leeville in 1990 to open the RV park and Marsh Masters Guide Service. Their son and grandson followed. The Bryans are still paying off the land. Katrina flooded their home, Rita ripped the roof off. A second mortgage was in order. BP cut them a check for June. They're grateful, even though it's not enough to cover insurance, lost revenue, repairs and what they assume is the plummeting value of their property.

"We're too old to start over," Juanita says, sitting under a portrait of a smiling Jesus holding a fishing net.

"I'd compare it to prison," says Bobby, 76.

"All you can do is put your faith in God," Juanita says.

God, right now, is an oil company.

BP "said they're gonna make me whole," Bobby says. "I'm waiting to see what that means."

Their 24-year-old grandson, Matthew, pulls into the RV park around 6 p.m. in a pickup truck.

"I'm more of a realist," says Matthew, who works construction on a new Highway 1 bridge while his father, an out-of-work guide for Marsh Masters, does contract cleanup for BP. "I see this as the beginning of another depression if the rigs and waters don't reopen. We'll lose everything that goes with it: the money, the culture, the traditions that weren't even mine yet."

* * *

In 1893 a hurricane blew its French-speaking survivors 12 miles inland from the coastal settlement of Cheniere Caminada, near modern-day Grand Isle. They bought tracts for $12.50 each and founded Leeville. They farmed, fished, trapped. Oranges hung heavy in verdant groves surrounded by rice fields. The land was three to four feet higher back then. In 1915 a hurricane pulverized all but one of the 100 houses in town. The Cajun families continued their generational march inland, leaving Leeville to languish until 1930, when a forest of derricks sprouted to pump newly discovered oil. When the shallow fields dried up, the fertile bayous continued to support fishermen, oystermen and shrimpers.

For 20 years Leeville has been a bustling outpost for the oil and fishing industries. Ice whooshed from freezers to coolers on sloops and tugboats. Sausage sizzled on the griddles of mom-and-pop eateries. Vacationing retirees gathered for 4 p.m. coffee every day in the Bryans' RV park.

Then the super-hurricanes came. Then the highway was rerouted. Then the waters were closed.

Griffin's Marina and Ice has lost 90 percent of its customers and laid off five employees. The Griffin family, who set up shop in 1977, filed claims with BP but haven't seen any money yet. At Leeville Seafood Restaurant, only three tables are occupied at dinnertime, when normally 75 fishermen would be scarfing stuffed soft-shells with special "Leeville crab sauce."

Owners Sue and Harris Cheramie, whose fathers were both shrimpers, sip Diet Coke. The oil slick is sinking them, they say, but the rigs need to operate. Drilling is a gamble, but it's a gamble that needs to be made again and again.

"This country cannot run without oil," Harris says. "We need it for plastic, fiberglass, that shirt you're wearing, that chair you're sitting on. We'll need oil for the rest of our lives, in some way."

The renters at Leeville RV Park have skipped town, itching to break their year-long leases. Terry Serigny, whose family helped found Leeville and who was raised here on houseboats, turned off the freezers at his bait shop when he closed last month. He hopes to receive a second $5,000 payment from BP soon.

"This is tearing us up," says Serigny, 57. "When everybody looks at each other, you can see it in people's eyes. We've fought recessions, and storm after storm. We can't fight this. . . . I don't have no other place to live. I only went to the sixth grade. It would be hard for me to wear a tie and have a briefcase and look for a job."

Leeville is still a slice of paradise, says Lynn LeBlanc Gros, who co-owns Bobby Lynn's Marina. In the mornings she goes to her dock, sees white egrets flying, hears porpoises surfacing for breath. She daydreams about every Cajun picking up a shovel to build another levee to stop the oil from reaching these marshes.

* * *

At night, the only sound is the buzz of air-conditioning. The last fisherman has fled the deck at Griffin's. It's dark by the water, except for the blue glow of an iPhone aboard the St. Vincent, a docked shrimping boat. Vu Vo, a 24-year-old deckhand, is waiting for his cousins to call about working for BP. He goes into the cabin, where a Jet Li movie dubbed in Vietnamese is paused on a TV, and wonders what he'll do if he can't get a cleanup gig.

"This is like all I know," Vo says of shrimping.

At the outdoor washeteria up the street, security contractors shove quarters into the laundry machines. They're working 14-hour days and staying at the motels across the street. By 10 p.m. some of them wind up at the only bar in town, Pappy's Place, where they throw back shots of Southern Comfort. The jukebox shuffles between Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. A strand of colored Christmas lights dangles over liquor bottles. The owner, Harris Ebanks, immigrated from Honduras in 1974, wound up in Leeville by accident and decided to stay.

He looks at the rowdy young security personnel around the pool table, then at the three regulars sitting at the bar. They're pissed off, drinking Bud Light, narrowing their eyes at the out-of-towners. They say Leeville's dead, that people are starting to starve, that lawlessness is coming, that despondency has already arrived. Townspeople cut the grass over and over to pass time. The natural order is upset. Fishermen aren't meant to be mopping up oil in white hazmat suits.

"That's not these guys," says Wayne Thomas, a welder from Baton Rouge who retired to Leeville with his camper. "These boys are a dying breed. I'm sad to see our culture -- the culture of living off the land -- is gonna die because of a screw-up that could've been fixed before it happened."

The town should be teeming right now, says Geraldine Busey, who works at Tyd's tackle shop up the street. Instead it's a ghost town. Everyone who's left is slowly going crazy.

She feeds $5 bills into a poker video game by the bar, punching DEAL, DRAW and HOLD. Her investment evaporates slowly. GAME OVER flashes on the screen again and again. She puts more bills in.

The only thing you can do, says her husband, William, is hope and wait, here on a bar stool. Hope and wait.

After a couple more rounds of beer, Geraldine screams. "Ah! I got the four deuces!"

The screen flashes WINNER, WINNER. Her pot rockets to $141.25.

Cash out, Geraldine, the men say. Cash out.

"I'm gonna keep playing," she says.

She slips another five into the machine. DEAL. DRAW. HOLD.

GAME OVER.

DEAL. DRAW. HOLD.

GAME OVER.