Gulf Fishermen Making More Money Off Spill
South of New Orleans, in Venice, Louisiana, locals on the Gulf Coast are saying what no one seems to wants to acknowledge: that they’re thriving thanks to BP’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Fishermen who have signed on to do BP oil spill cleanup work say that their contracts forbid them from speaking to reporters, but off the record, talk about the boon that the Deepwater Horizon incident has left in its wake.
“As a fisherman, I worked twelve hour days – ten to twelve dollars an hour,” says one Venice contractor. “I make much more money now than I did fishing.”
"People are working, are getting paid extremely well through the BP program. The local caterers who got to feed the people, they are doing quite well. Our concern is when BP is gone, how long it will take to recover," says Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser, who runs the Louisiana parish most affected by the oil coming ashore. With some exceptions, he says, those who were doing okay before the spill are doing far better now.
Courtney, a waitress at the CrawGator Bar and Grille -- located right up along the Venice Marina -- said that business has been booming. BP has set up two sites to accommodate 1,800 people, she says, and cabins and hotels have been fully booked since late April. “It’s been real busy,” she says. “BP has benefited businesses and created jobs down here. To be honest, this accident put Venice on the map.”
Venice looked fresh: brand new American-made pickups filled the parking slots at the Marina (I didn’t see any other type of vehicle all day, absent my own dinky Hyundai Accent, a rental), and the side of the road was packed with men casting with simple fishing lines.
Twenty miles north of Venice, however, the Empire Marina stands largely empty. Accessible only by a mud-clogged road off the side of the interstate, a recently demolished four-lane bridge underscores the marina’s declining importance. Even in the middle of the day, the site is haunting.
The marina is one-third a boat graveyard, one-third a place for discarded yellow boom, and one-third a place for actual fishermen.
Here Roland Phillips, a fisherman in his fifties, says that he hasn’t worked for an entire month. He was hired by DRC, a contractor for BP, to use his boat as a supply boat for oil cleanup crews. But red tape lost him his job: DRC mandated that no boats over 30 feet be contracted – Phillips’ boat was 31 feet.
Today is his first day back on the job. Phillips had to scrounge up enough money over the last month to buy a new boat – this time under 30 feet – because he couldn’t continue fishing. The shrimp catch was good, he said, but no one was buying. “Only locals eat gulf shrimp. We eat it,” he says. But on his first day back to supporting BP’s cleanup efforts, bad weather is on its way, and at two o’clock in the afternoon, he’s calling it a day.
Inside the Empire Marina’s convenience store, Leslie Gordon, the cashier, tells a different story: those who have avoided red tape have been flourishing, even in the derelict Empire Marina. “BP cleanup work is replacing commercial fishing,” she says. Her store is doing just fine. But she adds a caveat: “The oil’s not gonna be here forever. What happens when [BP] leaves?”
Much of the eighty mile drive from New Orleans to Venice, Louisiana is nondescript ‘real America’: farms on either side of a two lane highway, battered old gas stations and the occasional diner.
Then you hit the bayou, and you feel like you’ve driven off the side of the earth. On either side of you is vast wetland. The water is maybe a foot below the narrow road on either side, giving you the bizarre feeling of driving on water. No barriers exist to keep you from careening off into this swamp or that swamp. Pelicans glide by every few minutes.
This is the end of Louisiana: the furthest point south you can get without drifting out into the Gulf of Mexico. It is here that you will see signs warning you not to feed the alligators. It is here that you will find oil plants with familiar names, like Halliburton. And it is here that locals are battling with the consequences of the oil spill.
Back in New Orleans, residents view the response to the Gulf spill with cautious optimism. Most of those who I talk to tell me that the BP oil spill has had a negligible effect on their daily lives. Maybe a favorite restaurant was lacking seafood – but that was rare. People who work on oil rigs are from out of state: Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama. And fishermen don’t live in New Orleans.
A local businessman tells me that some of the fishermen on the coast who are suffering are getting what they deserve for cheating. BP payouts are dependent on how much local fishermen claimed in income last year. Those who cheated on their tax returns to avoid taxes are now paying for their dishonesty, he says.
“I’ve seen no effect, personally, in New Orleans,” says Fenn French, a local businessman with deep New Orleans roots. “The impact was largely emotional, in that our city, still suffering from the aftermath of Katrina, was suffering again.”
This is not a message that people want to hear, but it’s an honest one. Louisiana’s coastal towns and New Orleans in particular aren’t hurting as terribly as was originally expected. In fact, some places are downright booming. And the $20 billion that BP is offering up? It may just save the endangered wetlands.
It’s a far cry from a song I heard over a drink in the French Quarter, which exposed how a lot of people in New Orleans feel:
Let all them hounds off of their leashes / Gave all that money to the rich / They're gonna hand you down now that short-handed shovel and direct you directly to the ditch. …
Yes I guess I see / They ain't doin’ nothin’ here but leechin’ off of you and me, well
Yes I guess I know / There ain't no place left on this earth that I can call my own, and
Yes I hope I see/The day we all wake up and stop them ships upon the sea, well
Hallelujah, let it all just burn / ‘Cause they ain't the type for listenin’, and they sure ain't never gonna learn.
This helplessness, this resignation, this anti-corporate attitude is based off of a misunderstanding of what’s happening along the Gulf. New Orleans and its sisters along the gulf are innocent towns wronged – yet again – by circumstances out of their control.
But things are getting better. Fishermen expect to return to shrimping as soon as Americans start buying Gulf shrimp again, and it’s estimated that the oyster and crab fisheries will rebound after a couple of years. If BP stays until the situation returns to normal, as they promise, things will be okay.
So what to do with this present frustration? I guess we’ll have to “let it all just burn” out.
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