FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010
KLMNO
S Leeville’s future: Disappearing land and polluted water leeville from C1
smack into a “ROAD CLOSED” sign just before pavement halts at the marsh. That was Leeville. About a mile
long, hugged by bayou, full-time home to a handful of people. No more than 60. Maybe not even 30. No one knows. Right now there should be hundreds of visiting fishermen leasing their own heav- enly corner of the town’s bayou front, but with waters closed by the Deepwater Horizon leak, there’s no reason to come, no rea- son to stay. For decades, storm surges have swallowed 14 square miles every year in the basins of Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes. Last year the state redirected Highway 1 around Leeville to elevate the hurricane evacuation route. The town’s only thoroughfare became a dead end. Now residents worry that a hurricane will drench the area with oil this summer, killing the root structure that keeps the very earth together. Leeville will be gone. “To me, Leeville was gone 20 years ago,” says Windell Curole, general manager of the South La- fourche Levee District, who says the town was 90 percent marsh in the ’60s and is now 90 percent un- derwater. “When we did not take the action to protect the marshes around Leeville, that was the be- ginning of the end. The communi- ties in southern Louisiana remain here despite floodwaters because this place produces tremendous amounts of biomass. A 7-year-old can go fish in back and catch enough food to feed his family.” Not now.
Hardly anyone’s home. Maybe a half-dozen of 200 RV and camper spots remain occupied. Rusted carnage from Katrina, Rita, Ike and Gustav litters the roadside. Trailers are tacked with cheeky decals saying things like: “If You Don’t Fish Then Why Am I Talk- ing to You?” The heat comes from every di-
rection, even the ground. It’s qui- et.
Bobby Bryan sits in his motor- ized wheelchair in his home at the southern tip of town. Lace cur- tains checker the late-afternoon sunlight. There is nothing to do. Bryan can’t operate his fishing guide business. There are no ten- ants in his 26-slot RV park. He has time to think. Every Saturday 70 years ago,
Bryan’s mother would bake bis- cuits, load her 10 children into the family wagon upstate, get to the bayou and catch fish for lunch. They’d spend the day on the wa- ter. The water was life. Fifty-seven years ago, when Bobby married his wife, Juanita, their marriage vows were: (1) He would always make sure she could go to church; and (2) She’d always leave him alone while he was fishing. They moved to Leeville in 1990 to open the RV park and Marsh Masters Guide Service. Their son and grandson followed. The Bry- ans are still paying off the land. Katrina flooded their home, Rita ripped the roof off. A second mortgage was in order. BP cut them a check for June. They’re grateful, even though it’s not enough to cover insurance, lost revenue, repairs and what they assume is the plummeting value of their property. “We’re too old to start over,”
Juanita says, sitting under a por- trait of a smiling Jesus holding a fishing net. “I’d compare it to prison,” says
Bobby, 76. “All you can do is put your faith
in God,” Juanita says. God, right now, is an oil com-
pany.
BP “said they’re gonna make me whole,” Bobby says. “I’m wait- ing to see what that means.” Their 24-year-old grandson,
Matthew, pulls into the RV park around 6 p.m. in a pickup truck. “I’m more of a realist,” says
Matthew, who works construc- tion on a new Highway 1 bridge while his father, an out-of-work guide for Marsh Masters, does contract cleanup for BP. “I see this as the beginning of another de- pression if the rigs and waters don’t reopen. We’ll lose every- thing that goes with it: the money, the culture, the traditions that weren’t even mine yet.”
In 1893 a hurricane blew its
French-speaking survivors 12 miles inland from the coastal set- tlement of Cheniere Caminada, near modern-day Grand Isle. They bought tracts for $12.50 each and founded Leeville. They farmed, fished, trapped. Oranges hung heavy in verdant groves sur- rounded by rice fields. The land was three to four feet higher back then. In 1915 a hurricane pulver- ized all but one of the 100 houses in town. The Cajun families con- tinued their generational march
1 Leevillel e le Dead end M a r s h l a n d Marshland LA. Orleans. New
Gulf of Mexico
Spill site
Leeville M a r s h l a n d Marshland
LAST CALL: “Life has changed drastically,” says Harris Ebanks, left, proprietor of Pappy’s Place, the only bar in town. Across the bar are residents Geraldine Busey, Wayne Thomas and William Busey.
inland, leaving Leeville to lan- guish until 1930, when a forest of derricks sprouted to pump newly discovered oil. When the shallow fields dried up, the fertile bayous continued to support fishermen, oystermen and shrimpers. For 20 years Leeville has been a bustling outpost for the oil and fishing industries. Ice whooshed from freezers to coolers on sloops and tugboats. Sausage sizzled on the griddles of mom-and-pop eat- eries. Vacationing retirees gath- ered for 4 p.m. coffee every day in the Bryans’ RV park. Then the super-hurricanes came. Then the highway was re- routed. Then the waters were closed. Griffin’s Marina and Ice has lost 90 percent of its customers and laid off five employees. The Grif- fin family, who set up shop in 1977, filed claims with BP but haven’t seen any money yet. At Leeville Seafood Restaurant, only three tables are occupied at din- nertime, when normally 75 fisher- men would be scarfing stuffed soft-shells with special “Leeville crab sauce.”
Owners Sue and Harris Chera- mie, whose fathers were both shrimpers, sip Diet Coke. The oil
0 MILES 50
Biloxi MISS.
Mobile ALA.
“These boys are a dying
breed.” — Wayne Thomas, who retired to Leeville
C7
PHOTOS BY DAN ZAK/THE WASHINGTON POST DOWN ON THE BAYOU: Tiny Leeville, with a population of no more than 60, usually hosts hundreds of fishermen during the summer. It’s a ghost town this year.
“WE’RE TOO OLD TO START OVER”: Juanita Bryan, whose husband runs one of Leeville’s RV parks, which is closed.
rigny, 57. “When everybody looks at each other, you can see it in people’s eyes. We’ve fought reces- sions, and storm after storm. We can’t fight this. . . . I don’t have no other place to live. I only went to the sixth grade. It would be hard for me to wear a tie and have a briefcase and look for a job.” Leeville is still a slice of para-
CHENIERE HURRICANE CENTENNIAL
LIVE BY THE OIL, DIE BY IT? Oil derricks dominate Leeville’s landscape in 1939. The BP spill threatens the town’s existence.
slick is sinking them, they say, but the rigs need to operate. Drilling is a gamble, but it’s a gamble that needs to be made again and again. “This country cannot run with-
out oil,” Harris says. “We need it for plastic, fiberglass, that shirt you’re wearing, that chair you’re sitting on. We’ll need oil for the rest of our lives, in some way.”
End of the road?
Residents of Leeville, who have seen the surrounding marshlands erode over the years, feel left behind now that the only major road through town has moved. The oil leak may be the last straw.
1 The renters at Leeville RV Park
have skipped town, itching to break their year-long leases. Terry Serigny, whose family helped found Leeville and who was raised here on houseboats, turned off the freezers at his bait shop when he closed last month. He hopes to receive a second $5,000 payment from BP soon. “This is tearing us up,” says Se-
dise, says Lynn LeBlanc Gros, who co-owns Bobby Lynn’s Marina. In the mornings she goes to her dock, sees white egrets flying, hears porpoises surfacing for breath. She daydreams about ev- ery Cajun picking up a shovel to build another levee to stop the oil from reaching these marshes.
At night, the only sound is the buzz of air-conditioning. The last fisherman has fled the deck at Griffin’s. It’s dark by the water, ex- cept for the blue glow of an iPhone aboard the St. Vincent, a docked shrimping boat. Vu Vo, a 24-year-old deckhand, is waiting for his cousins to call about work- ing for BP. He goes into the cabin, where a Jet Li movie dubbed in Vietnamese is paused on a TV, and wonders what he’ll do if he can’t get a cleanup gig. “This is like all I know,” Vo says of shrimping.
e 1 0 FEET SOURCES: LA 1 Coalition; 2010 satellite image provided by GeoEye 2000
Highway 1 was redirected around Leeville and elevated for hurricane evacuation purposes last year. The road transports close to 20 percent of the nation’s domestic and imported oil and gas.
1
At the outdoor washeteria up the street, security contractors shove quarters into the laundry machines. They’re working 14- hour days and staying at the mo- tels across the street. By 10 p.m. some of them wind up at the only bar in town, Pappy’s Place, where they throw back shots of South- ern Comfort. The jukebox shuffles between Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash. A strand of colored Christmas lights dangles over li- quor bottles. The owner, Harris Ebanks, immigrated from Hondu- ras in 1974, wound up in Leeville by accident and decided to stay. He looks at the rowdy young se-
THE WASHINGTON POST
curity personnel around the pool table, then at the three regulars sitting at the bar. They’re pissed
off, drinking Bud Light, narrow- ing their eyes at the out-of-town- ers. They say Leeville’s dead, that people are starting to starve, that lawlessness is coming, that de- spondency has already arrived. Townspeople cut the grass over and over to pass time. The natural order is upset. Fishermen aren’t meant to be mopping up oil in white hazmat suits. “That’s not these guys,” says
Wayne Thomas, a welder from Ba- ton Rouge who retired to Leeville with his camper. “These boys are a dying breed. I’m sad to see our culture — the culture of living off the land — is gonna die because of a screw-up that could’ve been fixed before it happened.” The town should be teeming right now, says Geraldine Busey, who works at Tyd’s tackle shop up the street. Instead it’s a ghost town. Everyone who’s left is slow- ly going crazy.
She feeds $5 bills into a poker video game by the bar, punching DEAL, DRAW and HOLD. Her in- vestment evaporates slowly. GAME OVER flashes on the screen again and again. She puts more bills in. The only thing you can do, says her husband, William, is hope and wait, here on a bar stool. Hope and wait. After a couple more rounds of
beer, Geraldine screams. “Ah! I got the four deuces!” The screen flashes WINNER, WINNER. Her pot rockets to $141.25.
Cash out, Geraldine, the men
say. Cash out. “I’m gonna keep playing,” she
says.
She slips another five into the machine. DEAL. DRAW. HOLD. GAME OVER. DEAL. DRAW. HOLD. GAME OVER.
zakd@washpost.com
MORE PHOTOS See additional images of Leeville, La., and its
residents at
washingtonpost.com/style.
M
i
s
s
1
Old Highway 1
Old Highway 1
i
a y
s
w e
N
e
w
s
w h
i
a
p
y
p
i
1 B a you L a
R
r f o u
h c
N
H
i
g
g i H
New Highway 1
New Highway 1
New Highway 1
New Highway 1
h w
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128