Debris and Despair Plague Backwater Bayou

Dwayne Palmisano is losing patience with the U.S. Coast Guard, which can’t tell him when a crane will arrive to yank his 42-foot shrimp boat from the muck where Hurricane Katrina dumped it in August.

Mitch Jurisich, a beefy oysterman, is piqued at the Army Corps of Engineers, which shut down a local floodgate for repairs, cutting him off from his oyster beds after he spent $100,000 to replace his ruined dock operation.

And Benny Rousselle, the peripatetic Plaquemines Parish president, is fed up with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which won’t give residents mobile homes and has delivered only a fraction of the smaller travel trailers the parish has requested.

These are days of angst and frustration in this mosquito-infested ribbon of bayou that stretches for 100 miles south of New Orleans. Katrina flattened the lower half of the remote parish, obliterating a string of towns and leaving 16,000 homeless -- half the parish population.

From the ruins of Port Sulphur at the parish midpoint, past what used to be Homeplace and Triumph, to the end of the bayou in flattened Venice, Plaquemines remains a wasteland. The flat, sodden landscape does not look much different now from when 30-foot tidal surges crashed down six months ago from the Mississippi River to the east and the Gulf of Mexico marshes to the west.

Despair is literally written on wrecked homes. “Please Finish Bulldozing,” says a message on one crumpled house. Others read, “Push Down,” “Destroy” or, simply, “Doze.” A few residents have scrawled words of hope: “Don’t Touch House!” and “Bulldoze -- But We’ll Be Back!”

Mangled boats and cars litter the marshes. More than 6,000 homes and stores remain where they came to rest after being splintered. Thousands of dead trees are strung with debris, including the rotting carcass of a horse dangling from a limb in the town of Boothville.

Highway 23 is now open all the way to its southernmost end at Venice. But whole orange groves are dead, and the parish’s commercial fishing fleet is a wreck. Entire villages are ghost towns, their populations scattered to all 50 states, according to Rousselle. Only a handful of residents have come back, setting up trailers on debris-clogged plots, sustained by Red Cross handouts.

“It’s disheartening -- it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble,” said Alan Vaughn, an agriculture agent who lost his home and research station. “You work like a beaver for months, but you look up and you can’t tell any difference.”

Some residents blame the slow pace of recovery on the federal government. Plaquemines has nursed a grudge against outside authority since 1927, when the power elite of New Orleans conspired to dynamite a levee, drowning Plaquemines in an attempt to spare the city from rising Mississippi floodwaters. New Orleans flooded anyway.

Even the fiercest critics acknowledge that recovery would be impossible without the millions of dollars in federal resources and manpower flowing into Plaquemines. But many people expected to be further along by now.

Rousselle said FEMA bungling had interfered with parish recovery efforts. “From Day One, dealing with FEMA has been a headache,” he said in Belle Chasse in northern Plaquemines, where hurricane damage was modest. “Their flow of information is poor, and so is their decision-making.”

FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews, said her agency had had “an unexpectedly difficult time” with some aspects of recovery in Plaquemines. FEMA is working hard to assist parish authorities, she said, including meeting residents’ demands for travel trailers.

The agency cannot provide mobile homes because federal law prohibits them in floodplains, Andrews said -- and low-lying Plaquemines is mostly floodplain. But more travel trailers, which can be towed to safety, are on the way, she said.

Gwen Loga, a fisherman’s wife, recently managed to get a FEMA trailer after a three-month wait. But workers have yet to hook up electricity on the plot in Boothville where her previous residence -- a mobile home -- was flattened by Katrina.

Loga and her husband, Darrell, rely on water, ice and other supplies handed out by the Red Cross. “With hurricane season coming in June, we’re not planning too far ahead,” she said.

There are some signs of progress. The Army Corps of Engineers is repairing 162 miles of river and marsh levees, racing against the start of hurricane season. Utility crews are restoring power. Backhoes are chipping away at mountains of debris. Police officers have moved into “Cop Land,” a cluster of FEMA trailers.

But the task is monumental.

The seafood and citrus industries, which help drive the local economy, are reeling.

The storm damaged or destroyed up to 85% of shrimp boats, according to a state survey. Oyster beds suffered a 50% to 75% mortality rate. Loading docks and processing operations were destroyed.

Half the local orange trees were killed, and 70% of those that remain suffered serious damage. Half the 200 growers in the parish -- where oranges have been grown since 1727 -- are out of business, with little chance of coming back, Vaughn said.

Even large-scale growers who are staying in business, like Ben Becnel, 63, have been devastated. Becnel said he lost 400 trees, 75% of his fruit and $350,000 in sales. Katrina not only killed citrus trees, it also took away growers’ tractors, sorting operations and workers.

“My concern is, How are these people going to live, much less figure out how to start growing citrus again?” Vaughn said. He stomped through a grove in Port Sulphur, past a few surviving trees where plump oranges drooped from the branches. The grove owner, 72, has given up after losing 500 trees, a $200,000 packing shed and a $100,000 freeze-protection pumping system. “There’s no way he can afford to start all over again,” Vaughn said.

In Empire, Palmisano was eager to get back on his shrimp boat right after Katrina struck. But the storm surge dumped the vessel into a tangle of other ships in the marsh -- among them the Lady Grace, his father’s shrimper, and the Natalie Nicole, owned by Palmisano’s brother, Daniel.

All three are on a list of boat owners registered with the Coast Guard, waiting for an agency-paid crane to lift their vessels out of the muck.

A Coast Guard spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Yuri Graves, said the agency could not provide timetables to each boat owner as it worked to clear waterways of boats and debris in the most efficient way. Graves said 433 vessels had been removed in Plaquemines, with more than 800 still mired in waterways.

Palmisano said he didn’t have $10,000 to hire a crane on his own. He and his brother spend their time repairing and rebuilding their stranded boats, chafing as each day slips by.

Shrimpers can earn $1,000 a week trawling for “brownies,” or brown shrimp, whose season begins in May. Palmisano would normally be crabbing full time now, he said, but he’s still replacing -- at $20 apiece -- 300 crab traps blown away by Katrina.

His home north of the parish survived the storm, “but I’d rather lose my house than my boat,” he said. “My boat is my livelihood.”

Disaster and dislocation have been facts of life for generations in Plaquemines. The Mississippi River flooded the parish in 1922. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Hurricane Camille in 1969 caused more flooding. Katrina was the most devastating hurricane -- although only three people died in Plaquemines, thanks to a mandatory evacuation.

Then there was the deliberate flooding of Plaquemines in 1927. More than 10,000 people were evacuated from the parish -- populated by muskrat trappers and bootleggers -- and from neighboring St. Bernard Parish before the dynamiting, according to the book “Rising Tide.” New Orleans promised reparations as a “moral obligation”; residents who actually got payments averaged $284 each for the loss of homes and livelihoods.

Today, no one is asking for reparations. But residents like Jurisich, whose Croatian grandparents started the family oyster operation in 1915, would like a little consideration.

Jurisich said he spent weeks rebuilding his oyster dock and processing operation so that his four boats could get back to work. But just as he finished up last month, the Army Corps of Engineers shut down the floodgate at Empire for repairs, blocking direct access to his 13,000 acres of leased oyster beds.

“This is not a minor inconvenience -- it’s a major setback,” he said, swatting gnats at his rebuilt dock. “I spent all my savings on my dock. I’m tapped out.”

A corps spokeswoman, Rashida Banks, said the repairs were delayed by local budget problems and should be completed by May 1 -- well into the March-to-November oyster season.

For now, Jurisich said, he will have to reach his oyster beds via the public dock in Empire and pay for generators, coolers and conveyors. Several other oystermen are in the same predicament, he said.

Jurisich also is paying to rebuild his brick home in nearby Nairn, which was under 12 feet of water after Katrina hit. Too impatient to wait for a FEMA trailer, he put up his own mobile home in the front yard.

The oysterman choked back tears as he described all that the storm had cost him, right down to a cherished photo of his grandmother he had retrieved, only to lose it again in the post-storm chaos. “I never thought a grown man could shed as many tears as I have over this,” he said.

Jurisich said he intends to move his wife and children -- now living in Baton Rouge, La. -- back to Plaquemines Parish once their home is rebuilt.

“But I’ve had to warn them: Life as you knew it is gone,” he said. “Your past has been washed away.”