Louisiana Fishermen Hit Hard, by Spill and Economics
Grand Isle, Louisiana – A long thin two-lane highway connects central Louisiana with the Gulf. The channels that paralleling the hundred mile drive are filled with fishing boats parked in single file, shrimpers mostly. On my way to the road’s end I stop and visit with men polishing boats and repairing gear. News over the weekend from Terrebone Parish that a first fishermen had returned with oil-tainted shrimp had dampened an already dark mood.
But even before the oil spill these fishermen were growing disillusioned by their chosen profession. “Actually it’s almost not like I chose this life,” John “Winnie” Winsted tells me, sitting in the back of his shrimp boat thirty miles north of the big oil town of Port Fourchon. “I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager. Now, it’s in my blood.”
Pre-spill the fishermen had a handful of complaints: High fuel prices. A dead zone that grows in the Gulf each spring/summer thanks to fertilizers washed down from the north, forcing them to go further out to sea thus costing more to operate. Trade policies which they see as favoring foreign fishermen, allowing foreign companies to “dump” seafood on the U.S. market at below production costs, mostly from Thailand, Indonesia, Ecuador, China, Vietnam, Myanmar and India.
But fishing has never been an easy way to make a living, even without several million gallons of oil mucking up the fishery and a growing public perception that all fish from the Gulf are now polluted. Despite improved technology like sonar and GPS which make finding fish much easier, the markets just get tighter and tighter, and the fish fewer and fewer. For the rest of my dispatch, see takepart.com.
Tags: Louisiana Coastline, Oil Spills
The livelyhood of many are gone for good, but yeh right Bp was doing everything they could. To save their oil they tried with all their might, To stall for time to get more wells in and drilled just right. More must die now it’s a crying shame. For the more they stalled the more oil that came. Who do you call? Who do you blame? So we are calling “Black Magic” to take them down, As the black oil of death is hitting the beaches of our town. For now all we can do is wish a curse upon those involved, As we don’t even need to know if (the who) is solved. Watching all the animals die, All we can do is just sit and cry. This environmental disaster seemed preventable to me! Just don’t put no more offshore oil rigs at sea!