"Sure, Bubba, how ya want em?"
Posted on 09/09/2005 4:08:42 PM PDT by WestTexasWend
BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. (ABP)—In Forrest Gump, the hero scores an economic coup when his boat is the only one in the Bayou La Batre, Ala., shrimping fleet to survive a hurricane.
Sadly, for the real-life Bayou La Batre, Forrest Gump was fiction.
This blue-collar hamlet south of Mobile, where Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico, may be the place in Alabama hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, at least economically. The destruction is not nearly as dramatic as in New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast. But it may have crippled the entire town’s way of life, which is tied to the sea.
“It’s just unreal. It’s the worst I’ve seen anywhere,” said Joseph Rodriguez, a shrimper and boat builder, who is a native of the area. Katrina’s surging waves lifted one of his two shrimp boats, the Integrity, from the bayou and involuntarily dry-docked her at a shipyard, right below the drawbridge in the town’s center.
Junior Wilkerson, skipper of the Integrity, rode out Katrina on the boat, along with his wife and children. He fought the 100-plus-mph winds and 15-foot storm surge in a vain effort to keep Integrity from breaking loose from its moorings.
Wilkerson said he was never scared during the ordeal. He’s ridden out many hurricanes on his boats, including 1969’s Camille.
“It’s the safest place to be,” he said. “But you might not be on the water” when the storm stops.
Rodriguez, Integrity’s owner, plans to bring in a crane to lift his boat back into the harbor. Other stranded vessels won’t be that easy to rescue. And until they are, many shrimpers won’t have an income.
Rodriguez said he will survive Katrina because of two other businesses his family owns. But many of the town’s other shrimpers won’t.
“I got enough money in my pocket that I’m going to survive. I’m not as bad off as the other people in the area,” he said.
A tour of the area five days after the storm’s passage revealed scores of shrimp boats in situations worse that Rodriguez’s.
“I went up the bayou the other day, and I counted 87 boats” that had been tossed from the port, some deposited hundreds of yards inland, he said. “I know for a fact that there’s about 30 that are in the woods up here.”
The effects on the town’s economy will likely be devastating, said George Myers, director of the faith-based and community resource center for Volunteers of America, based in Mobile. “It was already hanging on by a thread.”
Myers, a retired Baptist pastor, was directing disaster-relief work in Bayou La Batre with a team from First Baptist Church of Pensacola, Fla., distributing donated food and other necessities to area residents on this Saturday.
Volunteers of America—a 100-year-old offshoot of the Salvation Army—is working in Bayou La Batre in partnership with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship organizations of Alabama and Florida.
Myers noted the same dilemma that Rodriguez did. Shrimpers’ cost of doing business is going up, but the wholesale price of shrimp is going way down.
“With fuel costs and everything, the area has been depressed for a couple of years, actually,” he said.
The prices for the fuel to run the boats have been very high in recent years. Nonetheless, Gulf shrimpers must now compete with the cheap frozen shrimp imported from countries with lower labor costs.
Rodriguez showed a reporter the latest wholesale prices for 31-to-35-count Gulf shrimp—$3.40 per lb. He noted that the price five years ago was nearly double that.
“The imported shrimp is killing them,” Myers said.
That situation was made worse when Katrina put much of the town’s fleet out of commission, at least temporarily. Besides the lost profits and wages, many of the shrimpers will have to absorb the losses to their boats because of a lack of insurance.
“A lot of them are small-business owners, so it’s up to them to fix it,” said Michelle Brooks, an administrator at Alma Bryant High School in Bayou La Batre. She was assessing the numbers of her students who have been made homeless and told a reporter that about 1,700 people in the area were left homeless after the storm.
Many of them, of course, are shrimping families. “So these people down here have lost everything,” she said.
Myers backed that up.
“This was a death-blow for many of these people,” he said. “I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but without some sort of government aid, I imagine the fishing industry here is pretty much wiped out.”
Rodriguez noted an additional complicating factor. Not only is Bayou La Batre’s shrimping fleet out of commission, but so are many of the local seafood wholesaling businesses that buy the shrimp.
And it’s not just the boat owners feeling the losses. Shrimp boats typically employ three-member crews. Every day the boats are out of commission is a day crew members don’t work.
Wilkerson, a veteran shrimper and lifelong Bayou La Batre resident, said it would be hard to change professions now.
“It’s in your blood. You don’t want to do nothing else,” he said.
Anyone with an Alabama ping list?
Battered Shrimp . . . mmmmmmm
hah - you beat me to it!
I was wondering, when I saw the title for this thread, if I would see a Forrest Gump reference.
First sentence? Are you kidding me?
nice.
I wonder what battered shrimper tastes like...and what condiments do you use on 'em, anyway? Tabasco? Tartar sauce? Remoulade?
Beer battered is better, but for the Baptists ya gotta keep it quiet!
"Sure, Bubba, how ya want em?"
Born and raised in that town. Know everyone in that story but the minister.They are desroyed beyond fixing this time. I built the blast freezers at one of the largest shrimp processers there. They have been in real bad trouble for the last three years.
Darn, you beat me to it!
Just think of all the help your friends could have gotten had they only rioted and shot at helicopters!
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
Exact words I told my wife today. They are putting tarps between two flooded out houses and lighting smoke fires at each end to help with mosquitoes. I talked to some of my family today and they said I would not know whats left.
You just can't make up this stuff ...
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