Hanh Luong has no home and no cash. The only thing he has left, and his only hope for the future, is the Santa Maria, a battered 98-foot fishing boat he worked years to buy. But two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, his boat remains tethered to what's left of Biloxi's piers.
BILOXI, Miss. — Hanh Luong has no home and no cash. The only thing he has left, and his only hope for the future, is the Santa Maria, a battered 98-foot fishing boat he worked years to buy.
But two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, his boat remains tethered to what's left of Biloxi's piers. The polluted Gulf of Mexico is off-limits to shrimping and all the major processing plants between Alabama and Louisiana have been pulverized by Hurricane Katrina.
"I need to fish," the 52-year-old Vietnamese immigrant says. "I need shrimp."
These are desperate times for southern shrimpers. Much of the fleet is on land, in the trees, or splintered by the storm.
"Boats are at the bottom of the water. People are dead inside," says Dung Nguyen. Many of his fellow shrimpers stayed aboard their boats during the storm in a futile attempt to save them, he says.
Those who survived, like Luong and Nguyen, can do little but wait.
"This year, no more work. No jobs," said Nguyen, a shrimper for the past 10 years. "They say shrimp is poison."
Katrina could not have come at a worse time for the $2.5 billion American shrimping industry, which has been buffeted for years by high gas prices and cheap imports from Asia.
The once-dominant Gulf Coast shrimping business now supplies about 10 percent of the shrimp sold in the U.S., with Louisiana and Texas responsible for the biggest hauls. Most of the remainder is imported.
Texas shrimpers escaped unscathed, but Hurricane Katrina threatens to wipe out many other Gulf Coast shrimpers.
"It's the straw that broke the camel's back for some of them," said Alabama shrimper Joey Rodriguez, who learned the trade on his grandfather's boat and whose elderly father still fixes nets in the family shop. "If you're somebody who was already down to the last thread of survival, just trying to keep the bills paid, this will leave you flat out."
For shrimpers like Rodriguez, the millions of dollars being lost each day along the Gulf Coast is only part of the tragedy. Shrimping is part of southern culture, a trade that is passed on and binds generations and families. For Nguyen and the many other Vietnamese immigrants, many now subsisting on donated food, shrimping was their American dream.
The son of a fisherman, Luong came to Biloxi from Vietnam in 1980 and found a job shucking oysters.
"I get some money, I buy a little boat and go to work," he says. "I get some more money, I got a bigger boat."
Before the hurricane, he loaded thousands of pounds of shrimp into the freezer. Now he borrows $200 a day in gas to keep the generator running, hoping a processing plant will open soon. Other shrimpers just gave up, giving away thousands of pounds of raw shrimp or leaving it to rot in the sun.
Luong can't afford to give up. He borrowed nearly $700,000 to buy the Santa Maria. Though he's paid off the loan, insurance won't buy him a new home and the shrimping industry is so bad now, he couldn't get $200,000 for his boat.
"You've got families displaced out of heritages and livelihoods," Rodriguez said. "It's the only thing they've known. How each individual story plays out, God only knows."
Rodriguez works in Bayou La Batre, Ala., the setting for the shrimping scenes in the movie "Forrest Gump." The situation is even worse in Mississippi and Louisiana, where processing plants were reduced to scrap metal and valuable equipment was thrown into the water. The only shrimp processing plant operating on the gulf is in western Texas.
"In the past 10 years, we've lost half the commercial fleet," said Rex Caffey, an agriculture professor at Louisiana State University's Sea Grant program. "My guess is the next half will be, well, this could be the death knell."
Some in the industry refuse to give in. Wild American Shrimp, the trade group that is trying to cast gulf shrimp as a niche commodity like Maine lobster, called an emergency meeting Monday to discuss the hurricane.
Also this week, American shrimpers are scheduled to testify in Washington before the International Trade Commission, which is considering removing tariffs on shrimp imported from India and Thailand.
Foreign shrimpers say they need the tariffs removed to help them recover from the tsunami that devastated southeast Asia.
"We hope they'll take into consideration our situation," said Rodriguez, the president of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. "We've had our own tsunami."
American shrimpers say they can't compete with inexpensive foreign shrimp, especially with gas prices so high. A shrimp boat can burn about 100 gallons of fuel an hour and boats typically run around the clock.
"The hurricane just added misery on top of misery," said Tommy Schultz, 73, a retired fisherman from Pascagoula, Miss. "At the end of town, where the seafood families live, it's completely gone. There ain't five structures down there."
Like many other retirees, Schultz has found it hard to walk away from the job he held since he was a boy.
"I can wake up in the morning and know when a weather change is coming. I can smell that water and the air and tell you what the water is like, where the best place is to shrimp that day," he said.
Before the storm, Schultz used to join his friends on the docks in the evening, swapping stories and jokes as people fixed their boats. There's nobody left on the docks and Schultz said some won't return. Others -- the ones with insurance -- will return to fish out their days, he said. But after Katrina, some will likely decide not to pass the trade on to their children.
"It's the end of the line," he said.
Source: Associated Press
