First came the fish. Then came the oil. And for more than half a century, these two industries have existed in a strange symbiosis, fueling the economy of the Gulf of Mexico region side by side as they provide homes, jobs, livelihoods and life histories for scores of American workers.
Six of the top ten leading shipping ports in this country are in the Gulf of Mexico, an area of 580,000 square miles. Major ports in the region bring in over 1.2 billion pounds of fresh seafood a year. Meanwhile, about 25 percent of U.S. oil production occurs in the Gulf of Mexico, and wages earned by workers in oil and gas production there total $12.7 billion annually, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
An unlikely but certain mix of oil and water, the annual Shrimp and Petroleum Festival is held every Labor Day weekend in Morgan City, La. As music plays and priests bless shrimp boats and oil rigs alike, visitors munch on fried alligator and jambalaya.
But now, with hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil a day spewing from the sunken BP rig 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana (some experts put it as high as a million gallons per day), the two industries are facing grave threats. Even as efforts intensify to address the leak, the fate of the area’s two largest industries is uncertain.
“It’s been a little less than five years since Katrina, and New Orleans has done an amazing job of rebuilding itself,” says Peter Ricchiuti, assistant dean at the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. “We’ve installed a new mayor, the economy has held up a lot better than the economy nationally, and we’ve had insurance money and FEMA money flowing in. We also saw a record number of applications at Tulane this year — 44,000 applications for 1600 freshman slots. But to have this oil spill happen now is a buzz killer. In the longer term, of course, it’s a complete unknown.”
One thing is painfully certain: Last Sunday, NOAA shut down 6,800 square miles of federal fishing areas, from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Florida Panhandle, for at least 10 days. Many of the area’s 3.2 million fishermen are panicked, while business owners fear the worst is yet to come. They say a $2 million loan program announced by the Small Business Administration isn’t going to cut it.
Captain Cade Thomas of Run Away Charters in Venice, La., frets about his economic survival. “We can’t fish,” he says. “As of Sunday, we all officially lost our jobs. The charter boat captains in the Venice Grand Isle are shut down. I had every day booked from now to the end of June. I don’t anymore because I had to call customers and cancel. I’m looking at losing probably about $35,000-$40,000. The sad thing is they can’t give us a timeline, so we can’t reschedule people.”
Henry Poynot, owner of Big Fishermen Seafood in New Orleans, a fish market specializing in Gulf Coast seafood, says, “Fishing’s my livelihood. People are saying it’s not a big deal. Well, it’s not a big deal if it doesn’t impact you. But now we’re in trouble. It’s going to be devastating.”
Meanwhile, two hearings on Capitol Hill were held yesterday to investigate both the rig explosion and offshore oil production in general. Representatives from BP America, the company that leased the rig; Transocean Ltd., the rig operator; and Halliburton, the subcontractor in charge of sealing the bottom of the well, appeared before a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing in the morning — each blaming the other for the spill.
“Over 300,000 men and women work in the oil and gas industry in Louisiana alone, and almost every state in the nation contributes in some shape or form to this effort, both onshore and offshore,” said Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., at the hearing. And even though BP has agreed to pay all necessary cleanup costs as well as claims for legitimate damages, the price tag could make for a lot of white knuckles in the BP boardroom. Still, immediate payments are being sent to those who have experienced a loss of income. “As of today, we have paid out approximately $3.5 million,” BP president Lamar McKay said in written testimony.
Even so, fishermen are taking steps to stay solvent — and those steps are going to impact America’s summer food favorites. Says Henry Poynot, “Everybody who has product in their freezers just upped prices because they know they’re going to need to pay more to replenish their stock in the coming days and weeks.”
Last Friday, Congressman Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana drafted legislation calling for his state to take part in accelerated oil revenue-sharing with the federal government. “I believe that if we were to speed up the timetable on which royalties can be sent to Louisiana, we will have the money we need to address our eroding coast as well as the cleanup of the oil spill,” he said.
He added, “I am environmentally conscious and I acknowledge that we have to wean the country from our dependency on oil. But at the same time, I am concerned about the local economy as well as the economic needs of the people here who are dependent on the jobs and on the tax revenues that the state generates from offshore drilling. So even though this is a terrible tragedy, and I’m not a very big fan of offshore drilling, I believe that to totally shut it down would just devastate the economy of Louisiana.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, added, “We all agree we need to steadily minimize our percentage of oil in our overall energy mix, but under anyone’s most optimistic scenario, our nation will need a lot of oil for a long time to come.”
Meanwhile, Joachim Singelmann, a sociology professor at Louisiana State University who has studied how oil exploration has affected Gulf communities, worries about the threats hovering over the fishing and oil industries. “It’s much easier to clean a beach than a marsh,” he says. “There really hasn’t been much opposition to offshore drilling, and this particular [oil drilling] platform was 50 miles off the coast. I think everyone here has downplayed the danger.”
Additional reporting by Blaire Briody and Michelle Hirsch
