A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [24]
Dawn on the coast. Shell Beach, in southeast Louisiana, is the end of the road, the edge of the marsh, the beginning of the Gulf. A man is sitting in his car next to a stone memorial engraved with the names of dozens of local Katrina victims. I feel like I’m interrupting a private moment just glancing at him, but he says hello and seems to want to talk. He says he’s not in the seafood business, but he lives here among the fishing families. “The small-timers in the seafood business,” he says, “people make fun of them because they don’t know the answers to intelligent questions. Maybe they don’t know the name of the First Lady of the United States, but that’s not what they care about. What they care about is that their motor starts in the morning and that they go out, and go to work. And out there, they’re professionals that nobody can compete with; they’re scientists at their jobs.”
The oil now raises the question of whether an enduring way of life is truly endangered, or whether an endangered way of life will endure.
The sheriff has already erected a guard post to close the road into Shell Beach because the National Guard is building a dock for ferrying materials. The guy in the booth tells me no cars, but he lets me walk through.
He’s tall, thin, black, talkative, fortyish, worried. “This’ll make Katrina look like a bad day,” he says. “Because Katrina did what it did. Then you picked up and got back to your way of life. But this, I mean—it’s disheartening to say it, but I think the parish has pretty much had it. Once that oil comes in, it won’t leave. There’ll be no people workin’ for a long time. Years. And every time it rains, we’ll get a sheen. And every time we get a sheen, they’ll shut fishin’. These fishermen makin’ money, spendin’ money. That’s gone. There’s nothing that’s gonna replace that income. I mean, you probably had ten, twenty thousand sacks of oysters goin’ outta this place a day. There’s one crab buyer I know, he probably averages thirty, forty thousand pounds a day when the crabs are running good. That’s just one buyer. See what I’m sayin’? The average working fisherman that fishes hard, I’d say they gross at least a hundred thousand dollars a year. Minus expenses, but BP can’t replace their income forever. Not the rest of their lives.”
He tells me to look around at the places that sell bait, fishing gear. “These boats. See what I’m sayin’? That’s all gone. You look around at these weekend fishing houses. This is serious money. The average place back here, they got five hundred thousand dollars invested. There’s people had camps on order; they already canceled. What are you gonna build a fish camp for, if you can’t catch fish? But some’s got hundreds of thousands already invested in a new place they won’t be able to give away.”
He says the parish still runs a tax deficit of $1 million a year. Aftereffects of Katrina. “A lot of people had to leave the parish. Some people say, ‘Oh, try to get a Walmart—.’ You can have all the stores you want. People got the same amount of money to spend no matter how many stores you have. We can’t draw from anywhere anymore. The whole surrounding area was devastated. Before, a lot of the people came from the Ninth Ward to shop. We just don’t have that anymore; it’s depressed all through there. This oil’s gonna cripple us here in St. Bernard Parish. But it goes much farther than St. Bernard. It ain’t gonna be good.”
One week in, the slick already covers 1,800 square miles. Larger than Rhode Island.