Katrina: Six Months Later
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SLOW RECOVERY AND LOST JOBS
Recovery efforts are slow in the rural parts of Louisiana, which the residents call the forgotten area.
Recovery has barely started in parts of rural Louisiana. Five months after Katrina, some people in St. Bernard Parish still had no drinking water or electricity. With night came utter darkness; with the day came swarms of gnats hanging over the sticky mud that surrounded the tents and crowded trailers that served as homes.
“This is the forgotten area,” said Wayne Melerine, standing near the smoke of a small fire lit to keep the gnats away. His house was one of the few left standing in Delacroix. A sea of destruction stretched around him—wrecked cars, remnants of foundations, splintered wood. Marsh grass, yanked from its roots, lay in a thick blanket across every surface.
It’s not just the deplorable condition of their neighborhoods that is weighing on some Louisianans, but the unsettling question of what comes next for rural folks dependent on the land or the sea for their livings.
The back-to-back hurricanes dealt a heavy blow to Louisiana’s shrimp fishing industry. Ice houses, processing plants, middlemen along the wharfs—all of them took hits, which in turn makes it hard for the fishermen to do their jobs. They need easy access to ice, for example, to keep their catches cool, or they’ll spoil.
“Without ice, you’re out of circulation,” said one shrimper. “It’s like not having fuel.”
And if the shrimpers are out of circulation, so is Carol Schieffler, a Lafitte net maker. Normally in late January, Schieffler would be so busy getting ready for the launch of the next shrimping season that he wouldn’t be able to take any new orders. But this year, fishermen have placed only four or five requests for nets by May.
“My business is going,” said Schieffler. “Who’s going to hire me?”
That’s what Al Lee may well be wondering, too. A fifth generation farmer in Esther, his job is now gone—swept away when Rita soaked his fields with corrosive salt, scattered his cattle, and wrecked just about every piece of equipment he owned.
“As of right now, I consider myself unemployed,” said Lee in mid-January.
Vermilion Parish farmers like Lee face a host of unanswered questions. How long will it take them to get their fences back up? Is the soil too salty to support a new crop of rice? Will it rain enough to wash the salt away?
Farmers, fishermen, newly homeless people--all of them have pressing questions about their futures that have yet to be addressed. As the battered Gulf Coast limps toward a new hurricane season in a few short months, Oxfam America will be working to help the region’s poorest residents get the answers they need.
