Storm May Be Port Town’s Coup de Grace

Ted Morgan, a lifetime resident of this one-road harbor community remembers when it took two school buses to ferry the children off to classes nearby. And a dozen tugboat companies were among the businesses that supported the area’s oil, fishing and shrimp industries. Helicopter bases, shrimp-boat docking facilities and dry docks were among the town’s offerings.

But that was 30 years ago.

By the 1990s, just one bus was needed to take the town’s two students to school, Morgan recalled. And only two tugboat businesses, including one owned by his family, remain today.

Now, many residents fear that Hurricane Rita might have delivered the final blow to what remains of Intracoastal City. The tightknit port community hugs the west bank of southwestern Louisiana’s Vermilion Bay, which runs into the Gulf of Mexico.

The storm ripped through houses, battered and beached boats, tore up shrimp houses, freezing facilities and the harbor.

“It’s going to really hurt us, drastically,” said Morgan, 42, as he wiped his hand across his mud-splattered face and stared at his family’s now-uninhabitable brick home just yards from the bay. He and his parents have moved onto their tugboat.

Vermilion Parish officials are still calculating the extent of Intracoastal City’s economic loss, but many locals are focused on the potential human exodus from this town where many families have lived for generations.

“There’s a lot of people who will leave now,” said Morgan, explaining that a large percentage of Intracoastal City’s residents were senior citizens. “They can’t fight this. They’re going to move up to higher ground.”

There are no official population statistics for Intracoastal City -- it is primarily a port facility. Longtime residents estimate that 20 to 30 families formed the core of the 300 to 500 people who lived here. But 5,000 to 10,000 people -- offshore oil workers, helicopter pilots, plant and dock hands -- use the town as a transit point, Morgan said.

The oldest establishment in Intracoastal is Shell Morgan Landing, which operates the dock facilities. A small bayside hotel provided accommodations for workers in transit.

It took Rita just hours to wash away a lifetime of commercial ventures and personal connections.

Eddie Lege, a construction company owner whose family has lived in Intracoastal City for three generations, assessed the situation with regret.

“All of our offices, shops, fuel stores, all of our facilities are gone,” said Lege, whose company helps build subdivisions for oil industry workers. His 88-year-old mother’s house, not far from the border of the neighboring community of Esther, was also destroyed -- swamped in 8 feet of water at the height of the storm.

Although Lege intended to continue business out of a branch of his company in Lafayette to the north, he acknowledged that the storm was going to sever many personal and family ties to the already dwindling port community. His mother has no plans to return.

“I’m going to build her a house in Lafayette,” said Lege, the descendant of local rice farmers.

Wearing rubber hip boots and armed with a pistol, Brock Dore straddled an all-terrain vehicle as he told of the destruction of his home on the border of Intracoastal City and Esther.

“There ain’t no words to explain it,” said Dore, 28, a fuel-dock worker who was able to salvage only a few pictures from his flooded three-bedroom home. He said he wanted to stay in the area, where his family put down roots decades ago, but only if the port jobs came back.

Thinh Pham was not wholly optimistic as he viewed the destruction on his way earlier this week to check on his vessel, the Papa T, which was docked in Intracoastal City.

Along the Vermilion River, shrimp boats, with names such as Mariasandi, Capt. Tommy, and Miss Paulina II, lay beached on their side. Some had been propelled miles from their moorings and onto land. The bloated carcass of a cow rested next to the Miss Lorie.

A mixture of oil and water formed dull rainbows in the river flanked by drooping pines and weeping willows. At a four-mile channel marker, four pelicans sat like sentries guarding the crushed landscape.

It would typically take Pham 15 minutes to drive from his house in nearby Abbeville, the seat of Vermilion Parish, to his 103-foot long trawler at the port facility.

This day, the trip took him more than an hour.

“Right now, I have 65,000 pounds of shrimp on my boat,” said Pham, the father of seven whose freezer boat was spared major damage by the storm. “But I can’t unload it.”

Such a haul of brown and white shrimp would normally fetch around $100,000 -- money Pham said he was in jeopardy of forfeiting.

If he is able to keep it properly frozen, he said the shrimp could be preserved for about six months.

But few are confident that southwestern Louisiana’s fishing industry, including earnings from shrimpers who dock in Intracoastal City, would be able to bounce back to life any time soon.

“The fishing industry has taken it in the heart,” said A.J. Fabre, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Assn., based in Grand Isle. He estimated that at least 80% of the shrimp industry, amounting to about $3 billion, would be lost.

“We have been totally annihilated,” said Fabre, adding: “The boats that did survive can’t go out to catch any shrimp, because there are no docks where the boats can unload, and even if there were docks, there are no processing plants.”

Pham and other fishermen said they were worried about their ability to pay their monthly boat notes. Papa T cost him $1.3 million and his payment and insurance costs top $12,000 each month.

“We wait for the water to go down,” said Pham. “We get divers to look at the bottom [of the boat]. If everything is OK, I will try to go out and make the money.”