Crippled Seafood Industry

SPENCER MICHELS:

In Liberty Bayou, just off Lake Pontchartrain, Gerald Brining agreed to fire up his shrimp boat, the "Tou Fou," and show us the devastation suffered by the Louisiana fishing industry, an industry that brings in $2.7 billion a year. But in the harbor, where boats lay tossed every which way from the storm, Brining's boat, a Katrina survivor, started smoking as debris from the filthy water got sucked into the engine. So, we returned to port.

How serious for your friends and the people you see is all of this?

GERALD BRINING, Shrimper:

Very serious. They're devastated. This is how most of them all make a living on. And most of them lost all their boats from the hurricane.

SPENCER MICHELS:

So, you've been talking to some of these people, what are they going to do, what are you going to do?

GERALD BRINING:

They don't know. Right now, they're trying to find their boats and they lost their homes and everything. Me, I'm going to lease my boat out to start pulling boats out of the water and make it that way.

SUSAN GIROIR, House Boat Owner:

We're still fueling. And I've got a couple of ropes to cut and we will be ready.

SPENCER MICHELS:

Boat owners try to help each other out, so house boat captain and ballroom dancing teacher Susan Giroir tried to take us into the bayous to inspect the damage.

SUSAN GIROIR:

I got no gear, I got no friggin' gear.

SPENCER MICHELS:

But she couldn't get her boat to shift gears.

SUSAN GIROIR:

There's so much debris and animals and trash in the water that it gets up into the propellers and up into the gears, and there's nothing you can do about it.

SPENCER MICHELS:

The dirty water has been crippling the whole fishing industry near New Orleans, which supplies one-quarter of all U.S. seafood and had been a source of culinary pride for the state.

SPOKESPERSON:

Well, you have feces in the water. You have just raw sewage.

SPENCER MICHELS:

So, you don't want to eat shrimp from these waters?

SPOKESPERSON:

I don't want to eat seafood from these waters for a very long time, and nobody will. And that's sad because Louisiana has the best seafood in the world.

SPENCER MICHELS:

Since the boats wouldn't work, Brining decided to drive us through the damaged streets of Slidell to the narrow lanes along salt bayou. On the way, a sign of what lay ahead: A seafood store closed. The hurricane losses in shrimp sales alone are estimated at $81 million. This is where many of the shrimpers lived and kept their boats. Crab traps littered the shore, wrecked and empty, along with shrimp nets and parts of boats. A few former shrimpers gathered near the site of a seafood processing plant to attempt some cleanup. Frank Sauter and Ray Stewart were commercial shrimpers and now both are without jobs and without homes.

RAY STEWART:

They had freezers on both sides of the crab plant there. There's nothing but piles of debris left.

FRANK SAUTER:

They would bring them to this place right here, which is now just scrap metal now. They would process and steam them, I mean this guy had about eight to one hundred people working for him here around the clock.

SPENCER MICHELS:

The shrimp industry is essentially wiped out for at least a year, maybe more. Butch Joffrion has been shrimping for 42 years. He says the local industry was on the way out anyway, unable to compete with cheap Asian shrimp, and that the hurricane may have just pushed it over the edge. Employment had dropped 50 percent in the last 15 years.

BUTCH JOFFRION:

There's no future for shrimping in the state of Louisiana with the federal regulations, with the imports and with the high fuel prices. Anybody raising a family, buying an automobile, paying a mortgage and sending kids to school, they ain't going to make it.

SPENCER MICHELS:

His sister-in-law, Irene Roach, whose father was a fisherman, disagrees.

IRENE ROACH:

There's a big difference in taking seafood here and then importing it. I mean, the freshness. It's not treated with chemicals, you know — to preserve it, to get it over here. There's a world of difference in taste.

SPOKESPERSON:

This is the American Red Cross. We have food, drinks and water.

SPENCER MICHELS:

In the nearby countryside, Red Cross volunteers were visiting encampments of poor, sometimes bewildered residents who rode out the storm or came back to former homes. Just across the bayou, residents lead us to a pile of sticks and cars and mud. It was Apple Pie Ridge, a cheery name for a community that has been wiped off the face of the earth. Slidell, a community of 90,000, formerly within commuting distance of New Orleans — but no longer since a bridge was wrecked — has lost many of its homes, its crucial fishing industry and the rural charm that attracted people to this unique corner of the country.